Do you have a link for the NASA report? The focus on CO2 made the models simpler. Considering that they don't model weather, it's hard for them to judge the effects of solar and terrestrial factors on climate. Specifically, if water vapor is evenly distributed (fewer storms and/or weaker storms, stronger polar jet, less meridional flow, etc) then there will be global warming. Conversely having more and stronger storms (worldwide), weak jet with blocking (e.g. causing heat waves or flooding) produces global cooling. None of that can be modeled without modeling the small scale convective processes, and the climate models do not do that (even weather models suck at that). Thus they basically do a large scale energy balance model so things like CO2 get undo emphasis and water vapor is ignored (i.e. they keep constant RH without any justification).
The recent NASA report was based on an analysis of satellite data. It showed up about a month ago and then seemed to get deep sixed since it was obviously fatal to the “CO2 as sure death argument” mongers. I’ll look for it later.