Also the ways to reduce global warming are extremely costly to your civ, and benefit every civ not just your own. There's no reason to hurt yourself to help everyone, so the dynamic isn't interesting. Unless you're roleplaying a utopian world, the right choice is to ignore GW totally.
In terms of gameplay, a key aspect of global warming in K-Mod is the unhappiness that comes with it. The
from GW is much higher for civs with a high "relative contribution". Reducing your civ's pollution will reduce "Save the planet!"
in your cities, and it will increase it your opponents cities (because their relative contribution will go up if yours goes down).
I'm not sure what you have in mind that's "extremely costly". Generally the best ways to reduce GW in K-Mod are to use Environmentalism, and to use hydro or nuclear power instead of coal power. I wouldn't describe those things as extremely expensive - and often the extra healthiness makes them worthwhile even without GW.
But as others have said in this thread, GW rarely has a large effect on the game anyway. So often it's fine to just ignore entirely. That's part of the design as well. I don't want GW to be a big part
every game - I just want it to be something that you can notice, and for it
sometimes be a significant factor. (The issue is that there's a fine balance between having no effect, and have a huge effect.)
If GW is too strong too soon in your games, I'd be interested to know what settings you're using. As outlined in the first post, the key settings are difficulty level, game speed, map size, and map type.
I'm a bit surprised that you'd suggest that the previous global warming system made more sense.
Nuclear winter has nothing to do with global warming, and in-game it would not be represented by turning plots to desert anyway. The other environmental effects of nukes are represented by fallout. From a gameplay point of view, you've complained that the K-Mod system is strategically uninteresting; but I'd like to point out that the previous system was worse in that it didn't have any individualised effects at all. In the previous system, the effects of global warming were more harsh, more random, and ... ... Well let me put it this way, if you think that old system was better, I can only conclude that you and I have incompatible views on what good gameplay looks like.
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@Zholef I didn't say anything about the forests stuff because I just don't feel like I've got much to add to that discussion at the moment. I generally agree that chopping is generally strongest opinion with forests, and often there aren't many forest left in the late game. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I've considered changing the prerequisite tech of lumber-mills to Guilds, and I haven't made up my mind on that. (Which means I probably won't change it in the near future.)
too (unrealistic; makes difference between them and coal minimal, unless you disconnect coal; also not shown in civiliopedia) - 4 
