What happens if you regress annual global temperature 1880-2011 on CO2, linear
trend, and other stuff trending positively or negative over this era?  The list of regressors should ideally include not just other climatological variables, but placebo variables like church attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per capita, etc. 

Key question: Does CO2 really dominate in such a regression?

Nothing good popped up on Google Scholar.  If you know anywhere such regressions are published, or if you can easily run them yourself, please share.