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If we act against climate change without needing to - then what are the ongoing implications of that?
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At the moment - it means quickly increasing the expense of all energy, leading to more poverty, and the third-world is likely to be unable to get the "leg up" that countries with early access to carbon were able to get, leaving them permanently behind. (Poorer nations always argue to be kept out of things like Kyoto for that reason.)
Because nations disagree on how to manage the problem, and "rogue" nations are likely to take advantage of the economic imbalance, a treaty system will not be enough to guarantee success. Entire nations will be made poor or rich by following or not following the protocol. Many people will survive or starve on this basis. Governments will fail or be voted out, and will be replaced with governments that are willing to burn fuels. For example, most of Arabia would immediately become poor, and their societies would fail.
So there will have to be a global enforcement agency - let's just call it "World Police" - with authority to override local Constitutions. It will monitor emissions and, if necessary, use violence and even wage war on those nations that do not follow policy.
There will have to be a very rapid increase in fracking for natural gas, which doesn't generate as much carbon. Although many people feel fracking itself leads to too much methane emissions, because that's also a greenhouse gas. I understand that some scientists believe that methane is not a big concern when CO2 is present in large amounts because they filter similar frequencies. There is no consensus.
At this time it is felt by some scientists that all this action would not be enough to prevent a snowballing effect of geometric trends, things like loss of ice decreasing reflectivity leading to more heat leading to less ice etc, and that warming would continue anyway if we stopped today, as there is enough CO2 already present to keep the trend going for decades. But on that there is no consensus.