There's a lot in what you say, and I agree that the media - including some TV documentaries - haven't really helped understanding of the situation. But weather and atmosphere are among the most complex subjects of the physical sciences, if only because - as yet - we don't possess the mathematical models necessary to really comprehend what's happening.
What we do know is that CO2 levels have been rising inexorably for thousands of years, and that most of the rise has taken place in the last 200. We also know that - as carbon dioxide becomes a greater part of the atmospheric mix, more heat will be retained by the atmosphere, and that heat will eventually change the nature of our environment.
However, it's also known that there are more factors influencing our climate than just CO2 levels, the most significant of which is the Sun. Sunspots have an 11 year cycle, but the last cycle went low in 2006 and hasn't recovered. We know the last time there was that level for an extended period was during the Mini-Ice age, which started on about 1650 and lasted until the early 19th century.
But it doesn't stop there; the Earth's orbit is complex, and we swing around the sun coming to within 91m miles during mid-winter, and 93 million in mid-summer, while there are also long-term changes in orbits, which mean that we're actually moving away from the sun at the moment and - this might be the most interesting - under normal circumstances in the past, the trajectory we're on has led to an ice age.
All this means that being sure about the consequences of the extra CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere is a tough call and is affected by so many other factors, many of which we don't pretend to understand, that accurate short-term predications are really impossible. What the responsible climatologists are saying, however, is that does that mean we should ignore what we know we're doing to the atmosphere?
