Cumgeon, The role of Co2 in the atmosphere is minimal? Let me give you a endlessly repeatable scientific example.
[Repeatable tests being the very corner stone of best practise science!]
Collect several samples of air, around a cubic metre ea should suffice. Test the ambient temperatures, then remove all the Co2.
Remeasure the ambient temps, and you will notice the temp drops only 0,03C each time. However, removing all the atmospheric moisture and the temp drops regularly by 30C.
The greenhouse effect is caused by the fact that increased Co2, a super fertilizer, results in increased plant growth, which in turn results in more water vapour finding its way into the atmosphere, which in turn traps more radiant heat.
All borne out by the above endlessly repeatable scientific test.
Moreover, ice reflects radiant heat, while water, or melted ice absorbs it.
We see significant ice melts in recent years, proven by irrefutable photographic evidence, collected by satellites, over the last forty-fifty years, even as, we seem to be seeing a sun going through a slight cooling phase.
Something is causing the exponentially expanding ice melt and it can't be the sun, given it is currently going through a cooling phase.
My house is not likely to burn down during my lifetime. Yet I continue to pay my annual insurance premium, because the precautionary principle deems I should.
Whether just part of some as yet unexplained cyclical change, climate change is real!
Therefore, it behoves us to do something about it, but particularly, if that something presents us with endlessly sustainable energy at much lower costs than we currently shell out!
Who could be hurt by that?
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Poirot, your reeducation is going to be long and arduous; you say that Ball is 'only' a Professor of Geography; Geography is where the science of climatology began:

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/98017416.pdf

Storch and Zwiers note:

"Climatology was originally a sub-discipline of Geography, and was therefore mainly descriptive (see, e.g., Bruckner [70], Hann [155], or Hann and Knoch [156]). Description of the climate consisted primarily of estimates of its mean state and estimates of its variability about that state, such as its standard deviations and other simple measures of variability. Much of climatology is still focused on these concerns today."

JohnBennetts
You may declare it to be your last post, but you should not be allowed to get away with so grossly misconstruing what was said. I never said CO2 had no influence on climate. What I said was that there had been no confirmation of its role, and that forecasts using that basis had been unsuccessful.

As for what temperatures have been doing in the past 13 years, go look at the main temperature tracking series compiled by the Hadley centre.. its in graphical form. In any case, the notable lack of any increase has been acknowledged even by the die hard global warmists. Its time you caught up.

Rhosty - decarbonising of the energy industry is simply impossible. Sorry, nothing to do with me. It just isn't going to happen. Is a slight reduction possible? I doubt it, but it may be possible at vast expense.

I also agree with JohnBennetts. It is a truly vile article and shame, OLO, shame for publishing it. While denialists may not like to hear what climate scientist Michael Mann has to say, nevertheless, they should note what he wrote yesterday, namely, that we ignore Hansen's latest warning at our peril. Hansen's paper appeared in the August 6 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS). Mann wrote:
"... Hansen and two colleagues argue convincingly that climate change is now not only upon us, but in fact we are fully immersed in it. Much of the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years almost certainly contains a human-induced component. Hansen...shows that the increase in probability of hot summers due to global warming is such that what was once considered an unusually hot summer has now become typical, and what was once considered typical will soon become a thing of the past - a summer too improbably cool to anymore expect.
The time for debate about the reality of human-caused climate change has now passed."
Tim Ball, please take note and don't waste our time with such unconscionably dishonest and unscientific articles.

popnperish, the Michael Mann you refer to is infamous for his dodgy hockeystick temperature, constructed using a statistical method that would produce a hockeystick from random data. He, like James Hansen, are full of glib assertions but rather empty of evidence. Hansen certainly has abused his position and become a publicly funded climate activist, which as Ball notes, is in breach of his employment by the US government.

Hansen has a track record as a con-man (witness the manipulation at the presentation in Washington) and a purveyor of dodgy statistics (see the GISS web pages where maps of temperature anomalies are based on very little data from up to 1200km away). Both Mann and Hansen are desperate to see some warming because temperatures haven't risen since 1998 despite all the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. This absence of warming, and the warming that occurred 1977-1998 when there was less CO2 undermine the beliefs of many people and they don't like it.

Snowman
I thought someone would say something like that. You denialists have a real industry going, haven't you, that includes utter slander and libel. You resort to that because you don't have reason on your side. It must have really rattled you when the former climate science sceptic Professor Richard Muller of Berkley did his experiments and found that the results supported everything Hansen and Mann have said. And Muller was funded by the Koch brothers who have a clear vested interest in denying climate science. But no doubt you will come up with something slanderous about Muller too. Play the ball and not the man, why don't you?