Well, technically you can easily get the majority of the world without the US, but I do agree with you that this does appear to be a step backwards. A huge pro

Well, technically you can easily get the majority of the world without the US, but I do agree with you that this does appear to be a step backwards. A huge problem with climate change is that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere today doesn't have an immediate impact on the climate. It just adjust the balance between energy being added to the earth (mostly visible sunlight and UV) and the energy being radiated away (mostly heat). It takes time - decades potentially - to reach a new steady state. That's why you hear that even if we stopped ALL CO2 release today (which is obviously impossible), warming would continue for a period of time. The end result is, even let alone the difficulty in perceiving global shifts in average temperature amidst the significant noise, we shouldn't even expect to see the majority of the shift immediately. But it appears that isn't fully understood, so many people take the lack of an obvious difference year to year as evidence against climate change.