It's not ridiculous. I was taught about the carbon cycle, greenhouse gasses, and climate change in a United States public high school in 1993. 26 years ago.
>Meanwhile let's ignore that society, globally, has advanced - technologically and socially - on the back of petroleum fuel.
Sure, but society has provided massive subsidies (both direct and indirect) to carbon-based fuels. Had we not provided those subsidies, society would be much better off.
Climate is a complex, chaotic system. Again, there was no certainty regarding warming without the decades of research, data gathering, and modeling that followed. Knowledge of the carbon cycle and greenhouse potential is not enough alone to prove that the planet is warming from human activities. And, again, 20 years ago the consensus was that of global cooling, to emphasize the degree of uncertainty in the historic consensus. You're underestimating the gravity of the notion that we are terraforming, modifying global climate, which normally changes over 10^4-10^6 years, on the scale of 10^2, 2-4 orders of magnitude difference. No time in history have humans even been able to do such a thing, let alone had they reason to believe that it were even possible.
>Sure, but society has provided massive subsidies (both direct and indirect) to carbon-based fuels. Had we not provided those subsidies, society would be much better off.
Much better off without fuel for local and global shipping and power generation and raw material for plastics?
No. That's an absurd characterization of my position. I do believe we're much better off when the market, absent direct and indirect subsidies, finds the most efficient solution. That _may_ mean less shipping, more efficient power generation (trading CapEx for OpEx), and more efficient use of plastics.