Around 1750, the human "Industrial Revolution" began, boosting the economic growth of Nations that used coal powered engines to mine even more coal, and iron ore, and build more coal powered engines.  This permitted access to mining many other non-renewable resources. We have been addicted to economic growth and energy from fossil fuels ever since.

Technology of mining energy, and raw materials spread and grew. Engineering sciences and scale of mass production multiplied our abilities and efficiency, global resources became accessible, and human populations grew exponentially, with a promise of more growth and prosperity for all.

Global transport was revolutionized with the discovery of oil, with its high energy density, technology for refining it, and the use of engines to exploit it. Our entire planet became open to the exploitation by our energy-mechanized civilization. The demand for goods and services, trade and resources grew. Now the ecology systems of nature are threatened across the planet, if the haven't already been destroyed.

For the most part, while competition for resource access has caused various international conflicts, growth has followed simple exponential laws, and become the expected, normal goal of national politics. As might be expected from the use of the fossil fuel energy to produce economic growth, the relationship between human population size and global CO2 emissions is very direct.

The inset graph shows global population size is directly enabled by its yearly carbon emissions in millions of Megatonnes of Carbon (MMTC).

So far, the energy demands of population growth have multiplied global CO2 emissions.

Professor Tim Garrett linked global wealth measured in GDP to our global power generation, as a constant ratio. Every dollar, inflation adjusted to year 2005, requires about 320 kilojoules to sustain its value. Each addition to fossil fuel burning infrastructure adds to the total rate of energy consumption.

The result is accumulation of gases in our atmosphere that are not in balance with nature's long term natural equilibrium and its normal rates of removal, by "sinks".

Present growth in atmosphere greenhouse gases is due to growth in human industrial and agricultural activity, burning fossil fuels, manufacturing cement, change in land use, and industrial fertilizer excess. Additional carbon dioxide has also been taken up by the oceans, making them more acid.

How did we imbalance natures's cycle of carbon emissions? Production figures show coal began the industrial revolution, oil and natural gas have lately accelerated the global growth party, with a sharp increase in emissions growth since WWII, as the "great acceleration"

The Skeptical Science website clearly shows that the cumulative amounts of annual human CO2 emissions,  accounts for all the observed trend of atmosphere CO2 almost exactly, using the simplest assumption that 40% remains in the atmosphere. This match-up is so accurate that any other explanation offered for past 2 centuries rise in atmosphere CO2 is beggared. Alternate explanations, such as volcanic eruptions, or ocean out-gassing, fail a "basic empirical evidence" credulity test.

The radiation balance of earth depends equal amounts entering and leaving over time. From the sun we get high energy, short frequency light, centred in the visible light spectum. Some of this is reflected back into space as it is, by snow, or cloud tops.  What gets to earth's surface warms everything, depending on latitude and season. From the earth, the warmed features radiate energy in low frequencies that centre in the invisible, infrared part of the light spectrum.

Greenhouse gases are transparent to visible light, but absorb and scatter light in the infra-red spectrum, leading to heat energy being sent back to the earth's surface. If this was not so, the earth would always be a ball of ice.

Many components of the radiation/light energy balance have been altered by human interference. The spiky "Stratospheric Aerosols" negative forcing represent volcanic eruption effects. Well mixed greenhouse gases are CO2, CH4, N202 and halocarbons.

On top of forcing effects from long-lived greenhouse gases, there are dynamic effects from the earth's hydrology. Water vapor and clouds are temperature dependent, and water vapor is also a powerful greenhouse gas, and changes in the types of clouds alter earths radiation reflectivity (albedo) and so a net positive feed back is thought to occur from Earth's complicated interactions of atmosphere water.

Extra humidity makes warmer temperatures more intolerable by making evaporative cooling less effective. Warmer temperatures also tend to increase relative humidity. Water vapor traps additional wavelength ranges of infra-red energy. Cloud changes alter albedo. The net effects vary over place, season and weather patterns, and a wide range of feedback estimates exist. The net result is likely to be enhancing the radiation imbalance from greenhouse gases.

The net effects of human changes to greenhouse gases, and feedbacks, explain the global average temperature anomaly measured over the last century. When all of these human changes and their expected effects on global temperature are calculated using known physics in computer models, they account for the global trends of actual temperature records.

Like Gavin Schmidt says, we have have a skillful, accurate model of the causation of global warming.

The increase in rate of warming, from around 1970, occurs very soon after expansion of economic growth and population powered with oil and gas from 1950 onwards, with the exponential growth of consumer society, suburbia, and the mass production of automobiles and roads, and the good times for the "baby-boomers".