Hm. Looking back at this thread, from Oct 2009, I see that I made a couple of predictions – that 2010 would set a new temperature record, and that this would cause the “skeptics” to shut up about cooling trends. Well, one out of two ain’t bad

Colin’s working on a revised version, using up-to-date numbers for global and NZ temps. Not sure when it will arrive, but when it does, I plan to give it its own permanent page.

He’s a fundamentalist Christian with deeply right-wing economic views. Anything inconvenient to those things gets hands over the ears and “Nya Nya, I can’t hear you!” All of which are his perfect right.

But it’s lying to pretend you are doing or understanding science when you’re doing apologetics.

So once more with feeling… A climate model is a PHYSICAL MODEL. It is not a forecast based on historical data. You run the inputs of the climate system through the equations of known physics. Source code is public; there are numerous articles for non-expert readers at likes of Realclimate explaining them and extensive published literature on them available at likes of GISS.

As to relative forcing, (is 300 enough to stop an ice age etc), what you want is area of attribution studies. I am not aware of one single paper that can deal with this but the IPCC report summaries the science and the bibliography associated with this is a good start to the science.

All this supposing you are actually interested in learning the truth and not just looking for things that correspond to you preconceived prejudices.

As to “its all the sun”. Explain stratospheric cooling and arctic amplification with solar forcing then. Both key predictions from AGW.

And once more with feeling…. You could look at what models actually predict. No model produces monotonic warming. The current pattern is completely consistent with the internal variability of the climate system. Are you going to suddenly change your tune when natural cycles go positive and then back to denier when go negative again?

Except, of course, there has been no significant change in the sun’s activity over the last 50 years, during which time the earth has warmed significantly. Whereas there has been a significant change in atmospheric CO2,

So you are saying, let’s ignore all the scientific evidence that points to CO2 being the cause of the recent warming, and pretend that there is some scientific evidence that it is the sun?

Why stop there? Why not pretend that there is some scientific evidence that it is Godzilla that is causing the warming? That might actually be more credible than “it’s the Sun, stupid”.

Ah, so we’re getting somewhere. Indeed, there is no obvious temperature trend, positive or negative in the last ten years, because ten years is not enough to cancel out the natural variability in the temperature record. That was the whole point of the original post. Glad to see you have finally recognised it.

Looking at 20+ year trends, however, it’s all positive.

And Wishart most certainly does claim that there is a recent cooling trend – see his latest post, where cherries are being picked all over the place. He is just as wrong about that as you are about saying there is an absence of a warming trend.

By all indications, 2010 is highly likely to set a new temperature record. I predict that by the end of next year, you and the rest of the denialists will have forgotten all about cooling trends and predictions of ice ages, and will have found some other way to convince yourselves that nothing is happening and we can go on burning coal and oil to our hearts content.