This headline illustrates the depravity of those who jumped onto the CO2 band wagon with far too little data. Naturally then don't want to admit they were hopelessly wrong. As their hypotheses became increasingly under fire from the climate science community they redefined AGW due to CO2 as "Climate Change" -- a nebulous banner no one can disagree with. Sadly, all of their models have proved to be useless, as feedback in the natural world is negative. The models, however, at least the ones predicting catastrophic warming, require positive feedback!
James Hansen and his congregation never stopped to realize that if CO2 were a significant greenhouse gas, and there were positive feedback, none of us would be here. Our progenitors would have long ago been fried to a crisp. There were times in the Earth's distant past when CO2 was many times what it is today!
Fortunately for us, CO2 is now much lower than in the past. It is a minor component of the atmosphere, but still adequate to sustain plant life. On balance, if one considers both its heat shielding and heat trapping properties, CO2 has only very weak heat trapping properties compared to that of water -- the Earth's temperature moderator. Carbon dioxide is so weak as a greenhouse gas that the affect on temperature of the increase in its mole fraction occurring since the late Nineteenth Century is too small, according to calculation, to be observed. Only when we lump CO2's heat trapping ability with that of all the other more powerful non-condenseing greenhouse gases should we be able to see, perhaps, a small temperature increase. We can calculate, ignoring any negative feedback, that the increase should be very roughly about 0.1 degree. The Earth responds to attempts to warm its surface with negative, not positive, feedback.
It may be that man is affecting climate, but in any case it is not via CO2 emissions. We are wasting our time and money trying to curtail CO2 emissions. We should instead focus on decreasing pollution of the oceans, deforestation, and thermal pollution of the atmosphere. Population control is arguably the single most important issue if our concern is preservation of the biosphere. We should transition to cleaner energy sources, but for reasons other than CO2 emission.
Intermingling scientific issues with political correctness and capitalism has resulted in a can of worms. On one side you have the fossil fuel industry that, for the wrong reason, is on the right side. On another side, you have the carbon credit traders, the politicians and the public. They are, for the wrong reasons, nearly all on the wrong side . On the other hand, the atmospheric physicists, the meteorologists, and the climate experts are, by definition, collectively on the right side, and for the right reasons. And then there is the media who will take an experimentally insignificant result and make a Gee Whiz headline out of it to sell advertising.