You can always find looney skeptics. But serious skeptics recognize the CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that the earth has warmed over the last 150 years (and last 400 or so).

I wouldn’t go so far as to say they accept that human generated CO2 is proven to have caused warming, but I think most of us expect that it has (the evidence is simply underwhelming, but the physics is strongly suggestive).

As for what’s next… it’s the deflation of the true believers’ position, which is only held together today by sociological, not scientific forcing factors. Furthermore, as more of the public start to understand their personal consequences of the policy proposals of the true believers, they will look more closely at the overall hype, and become more skeptical.

It is one thing to have an intellectual debate about the issue. It is another when the economy suffers and individuals start to directly suffer in a nation with enormous reserves of hydrocarbons that we don’t use due to environmentalism (primarily coal).

Then they claimed that CO2 doesn’t cause warming.

Now they admit that the Earth is warming and that CO2 causes warming. But it doesn’t warm things all that much.

I wonder what’s next?

Once this is established, in conjunction with a calm, rational style, you can often get to talking about what really matters, climate sensitivity. Then you can move on to establishing that a climate sensitivity of 3.0 C +/- 1.5 C is NOT “settled science”. The whole “Climate Change” topic consists of many different issues and they really need to be seperated somehow.