> The actual paper observes that cloud cover went down at the same time as temperature went up over the last few decades, and so perhaps the temperature went up because cloud cover went down rather than because of anything humans did.

It does more than that. It predicts that for every 1% decrease in low clouds, the temperature goes up 0.11 C. They also used all available data (25 years) of cloud cover.

The correlation is very high. Figure 3 shows this.

> It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are both anthropogenic.

Perhaps, but it's entirely unproven that co2 affects low cloud generation.

I get that dumping a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and hoping nothing will change seems scary. But so is converting a large portion of land into farmland and cities, drilling into tectonic plates for geothermic energy and oil (which seems to correlate with earthquakes forming nearby), etc. And keep in mind it's a trace gas. We're talking about parts-per-million here.

With 8 billion people on the planet, we are going to be making changes to the environment regardless. It's important to understand what we are doing, and not blindly try to stop co2 production, when something else could be much more problematic.