Climate researchers need the freedom to question widely accepted views but most find that theory isn't enough to inoculate them against the madness of millions shouting in unison - what they need is a simple, concrete, illustration sufficiently analogous to a child's response to the emperor's lack of clothes to free their secret doubts.
From a rational and apolitical perspective it is obvious that the global climate change hysteria is grossly overwrought. The science says that atmospheric CO2 produces warming, but at a rate an order of magnitude too small to matter and both history and common sense support the idea that warmer is better than colder anyway. Unfortunately words like "rational" and "apolitical" do not describe the environment people trying to launch or maintain careers in the sciences find themselves in. What these people face, instead, is a raging torrent of uninformed opinion fed by far left idealogues whose control of the media and major funding agencies makes questioning almost any aspect of "climate science" a career ender.
As a result many geophysical and atmospheric science faculties across North America now function in a kind of "1984" world: one in which almost everyone knows the rationale for the war on carbon to be nonsense, but everyone also understands that those willing to say so soon disappear from the more prestigious faculties, conferences, and journals while weaker colleagues loudly proclaiming the importance of research on fluorescence differentials produced in pigmented epithelials by the fifth light prosper mightily.
Part of the reason it's so difficult to get information about either the irreality of, or the likely positive consequences of, global warming into the public sphere is that atmospheric physics is inherently very complex and most of the people manning the gateway between science and the public (aka "the media") are not just emotionally, politically, and financially aligned with the mob, but also generally untrained, uninformed, and, often, so socially bigoted as to appear stupid. Just try to imagine yourself, for example, explaining something as complex as a Navier-Stokes tensor field or as simple as the absurdity of making 80 year predictions to six decimal places (see paragraph 8 of this article by Bjorn Lomborg) on data that is at best accurately recorded to the nearest whole unit, to "Morning Joe" or the ladies of "The View."
It isn't just the combination of complexity with abstraction: another big part of the problem is data corruption coupled with information hiding and refusal: explaining to almost any western reporter what the polar bear's abject failure to go extinct during the medieval warming period means in terms of today's hysteria about a hypothetical 3 degree warming by 2100 AD is no more rewarding than trying to explain to the same people that the dark ages were largely triggered by global cooling after the late Roman warming - the mental flexibility and common information they need to understand and evaluate the argument simply isn't there.
What's needed to counteract this in the short term is something that can provide a nucleus of reasonable doubt: something that, while neither definitive nor even necessarily correct, is easy to understand and explain, looks sciency enough to appeal to popularizer egos - and yet casts sufficient doubt on the entirety of the climate change charade to embolden researchers. Notice, in this, that the method or ideas leading to it can be cheerfully inadequate as science because the media won't understand anyway and those who do will see it for what it is: the equivalent of calculations scribbled on a napkin - intended and effective only as an intellectual counterweight to the self-doubt mob pressure relies on to prevent good people from investigating further.
It's obvious what this can't be: most of the public, and certainly the guardians of right think, live in the now, so pointing out that no major estuary settlements anywhere drowned during the medieval warming period will not resonate with them; showing that the surface temperature record has been wildly corrupted just invokes an ad hominem response; and asking them to think through the reality that people from Canada and the northern tier states go to Arizona and Florida, not the Arctic, for holidays simply requires too much from them.
An idea that can probably be explained to media types and may create enough doubt to free researchers to raise more complicated issues is based on simple highschool science: if you heat a gas, its volume and/or containment pressure increases. Basically, since weather occurs in the troposphere, climate change should show up as some combination of pressure and volume change in the troposphere - and, because atmospheric pressure is mainly an artifact of gravity (i.e. continuous), you'd expect almost all of the sensitivity to temperature to express as changes in volume.
Radiosonde (weather balloon) data on this exists and is made easily available in only lightly edited form by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for about 2778 locations around the world (concentrated, of course, in areas of interest to civil and military aviation) with some of it going all the back to 1905.
So the lunch napkin scribble goes like this:
The predictions, of course, are that average pressures should be nearly constant and that the altitude at which the temperature stops falling should track both seasonality and climate change - rising with warming and falling with cooling.
Although there are quite a lot of things wrong both with this approach and its implementation here, the volume of data essentially overwhelms many of these problems with respect to the simple yes or no answer on warming we're looking for - and, indeed, what we get is a picture suggesting that nothing of unusual significance is going on with respect to either pressure in, or to the expansion and contraction of, the troposphere, and thus with respect to global warming or cooling.
Note: this graph is extremely compressed. There are 25,566 data points along the X-axis and an average of about 904 observations (Y-Axis) per day.
Zooming in 
misses the point: it's the stability in the 70 year picture that matters.
Bottom line? Nothing: the climate change emperor is clothed in money and politics, but not fact: there's a bit of truth to the 60s panic about cooling and the 80s worries about warming, but overall no extended warming and no extended cooling: just Gaia going about her business as usual in complete accordance with known long and short term temperature fluctuations and what's actually known about the role of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere.
Two Notes:
What I'm doing here is admittedly simple minded: literally done first on a borrowed linux laptop while eating in the food court at SUB: sort-of-global averaging for each day using a single change for each test to produce a gross, and geographically nonsensical, but consistent, global approximation.
To do the work I wrote a quick and not excessively complete script to process the data. To reproduce my result, get the data from NOAA and the script I used from this page - and, yes, I know: sh/awking, but I'm old and can write awk, but not Perl, while eating and talking.