Stan,
The "CO2 causes global warming" argument - in a nutshell - came from ice core reasearch which showed essentially flat levels of CO2 in the "recent" past (for the last, say, 10,000 years); combined with dendro-climatology (tree rings) which showed a rapid rise in temperature (the hockey stick) and "recent" (200 years) of industrial revolution CO2 output (going up...), and - Q.E.D. carbon dioxide = global warming....
Except it doesn't. There's the whole solar thing to take into account. There's the fact that, it transpires, the whole hockey stick graph ends up having been magicked out of a single stand of bristle-cone pines somewhere in California (see
www.climateaudit.org; there's loads of posts on there about the bristle cones). The hockey-stick was the core of Al Gore's film, even though it's since proven wrong. It keeps re-appearing in IPCC reports, despite the proven bad science behind it (there was some political wrangling behind the scenes that got the graph back into the 2007 report, despite the fact it shouldn't have been there. It won't be in the next one).
I don't "deny" climate change is happening (the one constant thing about the climate is, it's forever changing!), what I do question, is just how much impact man & his activities is having on it.... and in particular, how paying more tax (for fuel, for building materials, for electricity, for everything) is somehow going to magically fix that, as the politicians grow fat and happy on their "green" taxes.
Anyway... must rush, I have a diesel powered boat to catch