Sorry, but I'm going to be the cockroach in the punchbowl.
The statement above is true and also false. It depends on the wavelength of the light involved.
In the infrared, the energies involved are too small to cause electrons to move to a higher energy state. Instead, they cause vibration modes in the chemical bonds in the molecule to intensify. That's just another way of saying that the molecule gets hotter. It is true that the molecule can release that energy by a re-radiating another infrared photon, just like any hot object can give up some of its energy by radiating an infrared photon. But it is not true to say that CO2 absorbing infrared doesn't become hotter. It does.
By contrast, ultraviolet photons have enough energy to cause electrons to promote to higher energy states. This can break chemical bonds and form new ones. That's why UV light can kill bacteria and give you skin cancer.
I believe CO2 scatters just a few discrete frequencies of IR, a very small portion of the IR spectrum. The scattering is supposedly significant, as some of this IR will make its back to earth and have a atmospheric warming effect via convection. I believe what you are saying is that if an IR photon hits a CO2 atom that is not near one of the aforementioned frequencies, it will excite (warm) the atom instead of scattering the energy, which is likely true for other atmospheric gases.
It would be interesting to find out how climate models predict warming due to CO2. I’ve looked for theory behind this warming, which should lead to the specifics on how climate models account for it, but have not been able to find anything. There is at least one open source climate model, but haven’t had time yet to dive into it.