I don't see how the bolded assertion refutes anything. The causal relationship of each event on the other is implied as the explanation describes a feedback loop between temperature and CO2 levels. It doesn't really matter which cause has more of an effect on the other, as the loop keeps feeding on itself.

I'm puzzled by your assertion that manmade CO2 emmissions are miniscule. I guess this chart would be why:

Do you have different data on global CO2 levels which contradicts this? 

Actually are we not due for another ice age based on core sample data?

Forget it i'm going to bed. This will take as long as a ice age coming to pass to get anywhere near a conlusion! ;)

About the topic, global warming is happening without any doubt and mankind has effect to it, but what is debatable, is how much effect mankind has.
Kitler and Gameboy both had good suggestions about how to cut CO2 emissions, but both suggestions have problems. The only problem with fusion is, that the technology doesn't exist and it propably takes around 40 years before it's commecially used in energy production.
Although solar power already commercially excists, it doesn't fit for large scale electricity production, because of its unstable output (although clouds do not eat away effectivity on todays solar power plants) and every time output goes under the required output, you have to use coal power plants to prevent brownouts (because of their fast startup time). Also the amount of daylight varies a lot between seasons, for example where i live, has around 3 hours of daylight on my birthday and the temperature may be below -30C, so it's easy to understand that solar power wouldn't be the most effective source of power.
Solar power and would be great for producing hydrogen from sea water, but the lack of infrastructure for transporting and storing it is a problem, or should i say that lack of technology is a problem.
So, solar, wind, bio, or any other reneweable source of energy (actually solar power isn't reneweable) is good if used in a right way in a right place, since if something works somewhere, it doesn't mean that it would work somewhere else. For example solar power is optimal to locally power up air conditioning and it's very cheap way (in a long term) to used for heating your house, even in the short hours of daylight.

About the lag between CO2 level and temperature rise, the lag varies a lot and ice lets air thru to a certain extent, so the air inside the ice is much younger than the ice itself and the amount of snow rained in certain time period has a lot to do with the age of the air. And another reason for the lag is, that the sea water binds CO2, more colder the water is, more CO2 it's capable of binding. When the sea waters temperature rises, it gives away CO2. At the moment, seawater binds around 40% of the "extra" CO2, that the mankind produces, so when the waters capacity is full, the CO2 levels will go up even more. And the temperature data beyond 150 years are just estimates (it does tell that when the temperature has gone up or down).

@Stof: The reason why some people see it as a political issue is because a lot of politicans have made it to be one. Which is bad and don't serve any purpose.

@Happy Squrriel: I believe you're familiar with global dimming? Meaning that basically the microparticles (or nano) and smog have caused dimming in the big cities and they reflect the sunlight and cause dimming. It may not have directly anything to do with warming, but they do twist the numbers in one way or another, depending where do you measure the temperature or sunlight.
And as smart guy like you, you propably know about risk management and how do you can give a value to risk (didn't know a better way to put it in english). In the way of "likeliness to happen times consicuenses".

@Leo-j: If you are becoming a meteorologist, then you propably know, that the lack of ozone layer actually cools earth, not warm it.

In the past global warming through natural means such as solar activity has caused melting ice and warming seas to release stores of CO2 which then accentuate the effects of the global warming, this causes the lag between temperatures and CO2 levels in past instances.

However this time around the CO2 levels are rising before the global temperatures as the CO2 is being released by an entirely different mechanism - the burning of fuels. Climate change models, run by people a lot smarter than me on very expensive super computers, all show that the effect of the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause and is currently causing another instance of rising global temperatures.

The best way to combat this is to lower the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere and the best way to do that is to find alternate fuel sources. There are many plausible fuel sources; wind, wave, tide, solar, nuclear, geothermal, biofuel. Of these there are a few which are unable to generate a significant enough amount of energy. Geothermal is limited to geothermal areas and biofuels cause food shortages. However the rest are renewable (except nuclear but a near unlimited resource can be considered renewable) and able to supply the human race without CO2 emissions.

The best technique in my opinion would be either fusion reactors or mirror fields in the Sahara desert.

Edit: @post above me. Solar power can be used if you either use certain types of liquid in the towers which retain heat or if you store the energy. An interesting way of storing energy is to use the energy to pump air into certain types of rock and when you need the energy again to use the stored pressure to drive generators. Not entirely efficient but it would probably work. 

I've just got to say that the United States government's behaviour on this subject has been unforgivable. At last months climate change conference an extra day had to be added because the US refused to agree to any unilateral carbon emission reduction despite the EU watering them down to the point of insignificance. After a final completely pointless agreement, the bbc interviewed a US representative at the conference where he accused the EU of behaving akin to communist russia because of theiir wish to impose targets for emission reductions. I know that many US citizens have actively campained for more care for the environment and many americans do care for their environment but the arrogance and disregard of the current administration is disgraceful. It's no wonder Bush is reviled around the world

@Rath: I think i'm pretty famiar with the process, it has basically the same idea as a storing heating system. But with solar power, efficiency have a lot to do with the required size of the collectors and the collectors are preferred to put to various locations due differend weather and different times the sun goes down/rises.

Just a few things to say here,

1 Almost all science is debatable. Unless somethign is a principle there is still debate over the theories and especially hypothesises.
A. Because something is debatable does not not mean it is unproven or wrong. It just means there are elements to the theory which are not fully proven. Quantum Mechanics have brought many advancements and yet is a theory.

2 There are many problems with our current lifestyle. Many factors that are increasing CO2 into the atmosphere like.
A. Deforestation
B. Overpopulation
C. Methane output from agriculture
D. Burning of Fossil Fuels(look at Satetilite maps of China and look at the smog from coal power plants. Hell just goto China and look at the sky in Cheng Du or Shanghai.
E. Declining Algae population(phosphoreus run off) in the oceans kills a major Carbon Dioxide to Oxygen Cycle.

There are also major sources from nature like Volcanoes, Animal life in general.

Also some pollutions like sulfur and nitrogen compounds have a cooling effect. However these also increase the amount of acid rain.

 I wasn't only speaking about CO2, but while it is higher than ever before that doesn't prove that the majority of the contributions areman-made.

http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html  seems a bit outdated, as some of its sources have been updated, but it points to ~5% of greenhouse gases being man-made, and only ~.3% once you include water vapor which is by FAR the biggest greenhouse gas.

Water Vapor is a funny thing. It is true that it retains more het than CO2 or Methane however it doesn't reach a critical level until the temperture has increased enough to allow the air to carry it. The other funny thing about Water Vapor is that when it reaches a certain amount it condenses and forms clouds these clouds have a cooling effect where as CO2 and Methane do not reach such a level and will always react with Infrared light realesing it as heat. Methane is a far worse Greenhouse gas than CO2 by the way. Water Vapor tends to eb more self regulating than the others which makes it the least serious of the atmospheric offenders over the long term.

POST TRANSPLANT!  (All the content of this post is drawn from my posts in thread 14218)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

"These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the IPCC position that "An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities" "

15 out of 17 on that list agree and the other two (including "American Association of Petroleum Geologists") don't disagree. 

"...no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate."
(emphasis added)

I'm not going to bother putting pages and pages of data up here but I am going to say that the huge number of renowned scientific organizations supporting one side of the "controversy" and utter lack of them on the other side may not make it a fact, but it's damn well close enough to fact for me to take their word on it.  Certainly it's enough for me to take their word on it over the media or politicians or whatnot. 

There is no dispute in the mainstream scientific community that humans are affecting global climate and that the effect is higher temperature.

The only question is what the amount of warming will be, and how fast it will occur.

The current majority opinion is that the increase will be a small number of degrees in this century but that even a small change in average global climate will have large, possibly severe, and regionally devastating consequences.