I got distracted. The post is badly edited as I got timed out when I went back to it. An observation I would make is that the non-scientific public is completely unaware of the controversy that is continuing in the primary literature. I would say that the atmospheric physicists are are now aligned by slight majority against the Hansen hypothesis, while the climatologists and meteorologists are by moderate majority aligned with the hypothesis the extent of agreement is no where near as one sided as the media would have us believe.
A big problem is semantics. I don't know what political genius decided to start referring to AGW as climate change, but that completely muddies the water. We have to decide several different issues ; none are as yet resolved in the opinion of at least a sizable minority of the scientific world.
These are some unresolved issues:
a. Is the temperature changing beyond its expected rate of change globally? Not just in the Northern Hemisphere but globally. Surface measurement says yes; satellite remote sensing says no. This discrepancy must be resolved.
b. If positive feedback is needed for CO2 to cause the catastrophic temperature excursions Hansen predicted would have arrived by now, and the feedback is positive, and hasn't just recently become positive, why didn't the Earth long ago become too hot? (If feedback is positive, any little warming by CO2 will cause a disastrous temperature excursion.) Logic, biosphere stability, and observation requires that the feedback response to a rise in CO2 be negative if CO2 significantly affects surface temperature.
c. CO2 is rising everywhere on the planet, and several regions are very demonstrably getting warmer. Why are a few regions getting demonstrably cooler.
d. CO2 concentration on a long-time scale rises with temperature, there is good correlation which is a necessary condition for CO2 to be the cause of the temperature rise. Looked at in some detail we see a slow long-time rise in CO2 consistent with the industrial revolution and increasing use of fossil fuels, and the correlation with the surface temperature data available in the 1980s is good! This is a good indication that CO2 rise might be causing temperature rise via the greenhouse effect. But when better, time-resolved temperature and CO2 data became available, the temperature record was resolvable into two components: a long, slow monotonic rise in temperature, and riding on top of this was a cyclical temperature variation with a regular and much shorter period that appears to correspond to oceanic surface temperature. The slow monotonic rise is consistent with deeper, oceanic water temperature. Also found, is the same pattern in CO2 atmospheric concentration. If CO2 concentration is driving temperature increase than CO2 concentration must be either in phase with or lead the the temperature cycle, but in fact the phase relationship is the opposite. This data is strongly supportive of Salby's earlier finding that temperature was in fact driving CO2 concentration; not the other way around. These observations taken together are consistent with the earlier, but poorly resolved, correlation of temperature with CO2 rise, and also consistent with both temperature rise being the driver of rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, or alternatively anthropomorphic CO2 being the driver of rising CO2. Although the time resolved temperature and CO2 data is consistent with much of the rise in CO2 concentration being from Anthropomorphic sources, it is inconsistent with anthropomorphic CO2 being the driver of temperature increase. This is a great conundrum that must be resolved.
The battle continues in the primary literature, a battle of which the public and our politicians seem totally unaware. I blame Hansen's unacceptable, and unprofessional behavior for this. He has stooped so low as to write papers and submit them directly to the media as though they were legitimate scientific papers without bothering to go through the peer review process.
I have no problem with a push toward development of alternative energy sources. I do not view the effort directed at lowering CO2 emissions as being particularly bad or wasteful, as it seems good will come out of it in the end. But I hate to see bad science championed in the media.