180 billion, or however much the number actually turns out to be, is a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed to reinforce worldwide coastlines from even a moderate rise in sea level

That's $180 billion a year for Kyoto (with everybody participating). We are talking resources equivalent to the entire decade of the Apollo program, including all lunar missions, every single year.

Just to get some possible numbers on the table, here is a study, not final by any means, of costs to protect the coastlines for various sea-level rise scenarios over the next century:

Impacts and responses to sea-level rise (Nicholls and Tol)

Figures 7 and 10 and the discussion on pages 1088-1089 show that it might be possible for most countries to lose very little land for an annual investment of below 0.1% of their GDP. (Worldwide GDP today is around $50 trillion).

There's no evidence a Kyoto-like plan will have have "only a marginal effect."

I don't think it is online, but there is a paper commonly referenced by Tom Wigley, The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4 and Climate Implications published in Geophysical Research Letters that shows that by 2100, Kyoto will have shaved off 0.3 degrees F from a possible temperature rise of 4.5 degrees.

Another way of putting it is that with all countries ratifying and living up to their emission cuts, Kyoto would postpone the expected temperature rise just five years, that is, from 2100 to 2105.

This page has quotes from the paper:

http://www.ucar.edu/news/record/#grl

There is no evidence that sea levels will only rise a few feet. There are, at present, nothing but vague guesses.

I'm simply working off the IPCC and related reports. You folks keep saying to look at the science. I am trying my best to do that. It doesn't help that when I look at what seems to me to be the leading science on the subject, it is immediately dismissed as vague guesses.

Be careful not to foster uncertainty to make room for your beliefs. If things are uncertain, then they are unknown and we have no basis to worry about them.

So it's not a case of either-or, tastes great/less filling, but a combination of gathering further information, improving economy and infrastructure, reducing poverty, and reducing CO2 emissions by both making more efficient use of existing energy sources and transferring to more renewable sources.

And we don't need Kyoto to accomplish any of that. We will be better off addressing the problem areas directly because there is nothing practical we can do in the near term to significantly lower CO2 over the next century. (The primary reason, keep in mind, is because of the rapid increase of emissions from developing countries.) Kyoto will only make people poorer. The better off nations are, the better they can adapt to global warming. In the meantime, we can wean ourselves from fossil fuels at a more cost-effective pace.