I don’t think NASA is saying CO2 isn’t contributing (certainly I’m not). What I see in this report and others is that the climate is more complicated than one line headlines can convey. And I don’t think anyone filing the report thought they were introducing something completely novel: rather, it is more evidence to confirm the relationship.

Reducing CO2 emissions is an obvious necessity. But some of the more extreme plans like carbon sequestering could, in the absence of understanding, result in much bigger problems than we already have. Reducing particulates in the atmosphere might, for example, make global warming much worse than it already is. My position is basically that knee-jerk reactions aren’t necessarily very smart when dealing with a system as complex as the climate. It is the old “butterfly syndrome”: changing one thing can have a surprising effect on something else.

But in the end, it is all pretty irrelevant since we are all going to die in 2012 anyway 🙂