Back to Basics: Reconsider the Data used by IPCC
adapted from Max Manacker at http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/4/175028/329

The Hadley Centre has a published record of "monthly globally averaged land and sea surface temperature" that goes back to 1850. Global temperatures have risen over the period, but a closer look at the record shows that this has been anything but steady.

Actual measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentration only started in 1958. IPCC estimates based on ice core readings go back to pre-industrial times. These show an estimated gradual increase from around 285 ppm in 1850 to 315 ppm in 1958, when actual measurements started. See the IPCC 2007 SPM report. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily over the entire period. The rate of increase has accelerated slightly, particularly following WWII.

There are three warming periods that contributed to the overall warming plus two periods of cooling and the most recent "plateau" showing essentially no change. And it appears that last 25 years of the 20th century provide the only observed link between CO2 and temperature. The immediately preceding period had CO2 increase with cooling. The immediately ensuing period since the end of the 20th century shows slight cooling with high increase in CO2. The late 19th century warming period showed the highest rate of temperature increase of all periods recorded, with essentially no CO2 increase whatsoever. The early 20th century warming period also showed warming, with relatively small increase in CO2.

These observed data show that there does not appear to be a very "robust" link between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature.

IPCC has used the late 20th century warming cycle to demonstrate the anthropogenic cause, stating in its AR4 WG1 report Chapter 9 (p.681): "The simulations also show that it is not possible to reproduce large 20th-century warming without anthropogenic forcing regardless of which solar or volcanic forcing reconstruction is used,... stressing the impact of human activity on the recent warming." In other words, since no other cause can be identified to explain the observed warming other than anthropogenic forcing (from greenhouse gases), this must be the cause by default.

Most damaging for this assumption is the fact that no analysis has been made of the two prior warming periods in order to support this suggestion, despite the fact that these periods together count for 70% of the warming observed over the entire record. Strangely IPCC does not even mention the late 19th century period that showed the highest decadal rate of temperature rise of all periods since their measurements started. Moreover, between 1680 and 1710 temperatures rose more, and more rapidly, than the whole twentieth century saw. Between 1690 and 1700 the mean temperature rose from 8ºC to 9ºC. As regards the warming period of the early 20th century, IPCC states (p.691): "Detection and attribution as well as modelling studies indicate more uncertainty regarding the causes of early 20th-century warming than the recent warming."

There are apparently "unexplained" causes resulting in "uncertainty", but [*] no studies have been made to clear up this uncertainty and attempt to understand how large an impact these "unexplained" causes might have had. Could these same "unexplained" causes have been the principle forcing factor for the late 20th century warming, rather than the assumed "anthropogenic forcing" from greenhouse gases? How can we be sure this is not the case? Only by making these analyses and clearly identifying that there were no major "unexplained" factors in the two earlier warming periods can one make the claim that AGW is the predominant forcing factor for late 20th century warming.

To simply assert that this is so "by default" since no other explanation can be found is no argument at all. Is this the "fatal flaw" in the AGW theory?

[*] No studies... well, no consensus-sanctioned studies ... but there are good scientists who challenge Al Gore and IPCC. Svensmark's work [The Chilling Stars] explains the cooling trend the world experienced from the 1940s to the mid 1970s. This period also saw one of the greatest outputs of GHG in history and man made global warming theorists have a great deal of trouble dismissing it. Peter Taylor, in Climate Science Review includes these words about the mid-20th-century cooling period:

Examining critically the work of such as Lockwood, Solanki, Usoskin, and Svensmark/Friis-Christensen, Taylor goes on to show in detail that there is a strong and continuing correlation with the cosmic ray factor if we look carefully...

Back to Basics: data from the past + telling fragments
Here are telling but strictly unverified "anecdotal" evidence I picked up from sceptics' discussion blogs. This is always the way in which alerting evidence appears: very seldom can it leap straight into the heavily-protected peer reviews - and rightly so - but this early evidence is still crucial to hear.

The glaciers have been shortening for 200 years. They started shortening a century before significant amounts of CO2 were produced by human activity. Notice also that the shortening is linear. Hydrocarbon use increased six-fold and the glacier melting rate did not change at all. The glaciers started shortening long before we were using significant amounts of hydrocarbons, and, when we increased our use by six-fold, the shortening rate did not change. Therefore, human hydrocarbon use is evidently not the cause of glacier shortening or the mild natural temperature increase that is causing that shortening. From http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/7009
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TNA: What about Gore’s demonstration in his movie, with those very large graphs, that CO2 tracks right along with temperature and is, therefore, the cause of that warming?

Dr. Robinson: In those curves, the temperature goes up before the CO2 and goes down before the CO2. The CO2 lags the temperature. And the reason it does is that the CO2 rise is caused by the temperature rise rather than vice versa. As temperatures rise, carbon dioxide is released from the oceans, just as the carbon dioxide is released from soft drinks when their temperature rises. [Recent ice studies show the temperatures changed about 800 years before the CO2 levels.] Gore shows the curves with poor resolution, so that this cannot be seen by the viewer.
From http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/7009
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Ice cores go back a million years or more. However, the vital factor... is the records for measuring ice core lengths and the conclusions drawn on those samples are what is important, and these records are fairly recent. Various ice cores of varying depths have been drilled only since 1956, and the first ice core to reach bedrock was drilled in 1966...

Many respected scientists around the globe claim that until 1985, published CO2 readings were published correctly, but after 1985 certain readings disappeared from publication. That's 23 years of censorship and skewed study. Dr. Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, says, "For those scientists who value their scientific reputations, I would advise that they distance themselves from politically motivated claims of a 'scientific consensus' on the causes of global warming." Likewise, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Ph.D., chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Poland, said, "Attempts to support the global warming thesis with analyses of the carbon dioxide content in glacial ice samples are based on fudged data and ignorance of the physical processes of glacial ice formation." From http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080503/OPINION/805030360
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The Earth’s warming since 1850 totals about 0.7 degrees C. Most of this occurred before 1940. The cause: a long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle first discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1983. The cycle abruptly raises our temperature 1 to 3 degrees C above the mean for centuries at a time--as it did during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD) and Medieval Warming (950 to1300 AD). Between warmings, Earth’s temperatures shift abruptly lower by 1 to 3 degrees C--as they did during the 550 years of the Little Ice Age, which ended in 1850. The ice cores and seabed fossils show 600 of these 1,500-year cycles, extending back at least 1 million years.

The atmosphere is approaching CO2 saturation--after which more CO2 will have no added climate forcing power.
From http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5164
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From Dan Pangburn
From the Vostok ice core data, during glacial periods, often a rising temperature trend with a rising carbon dioxide level suddenly changed direction and became a falling temperature trend in spite of the carbon dioxide level being higher than when the temperature was increasing. This could not be if carbon dioxide causes a positive feedback. The Andean-Saharan Ice Age occurred when the carbon dioxide level was over ten times its current level. What is different now that could lead to runaway temperature increase? The determination that non-condensing greenhouse gases have no significant influence on average global temperature is not refuted by any climate history.

The assertion ‘it’s the sun’ appears to be too simplistic. Of course the sun is part of it but several other things affect the temperatures at the measuring sites. These other things may include solar wind, cosmic rays, UV, magnetic strength, relative humidity (propensity to form clouds), ocean turn-over, and possibly other factors. Apparently, no one has sorted all this out yet. Graphs of NOAA and other data (all referenced) are presented here. One observation from these graphs is that the recent (last 130 years or so) average global temperature data has not been unusual...

I have, so far, only determined that CO2 does not cause Global Warming and that there is no such thing as ‘water vapor feedback’. To my knowledge the combination of factors that contribute to climate has still not been sorted out. The reason why increased greenhouse gas level has no influence on average global temperature is proven here
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There was never much threat of Greenland becoming ice-free - it did not do that 100,000 years ago when the global average was 2C warmer than this inter-glacial. Peter Taylor, in a note to me
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Back to Basics: Data from the Cosmos, Sun and Earth
Some telling and graphic evidence from Solar Changes and the Climate from ICECAP website

Download the pdf file with this little gem and more... with such clear visual evidence we believe the correlation has to be there somewhere, even if the maths needs refining...

Read about Cosmic Rays and Climate - the story of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen. Read here about The Chilling Stars: the new theory of global warming that refers to the effects of solar magnetic flux and cosmic rays on cloud cover: Svensmark and Friis-Christensen are the scientists who deserve the Nobel Prize, in the opinion of a growing number of people, for both courage and good science. Read here their recent reply to Lockwood's criticisms

Read here about the diminishing solar activity and the possibility of another Maunder minimum and "Little Ice Age"

Read Peter Taylor's Climate Science Review, downloadable from his website here

Read here about the 1500-year-long Unstopabble Global Warming cycle

Look how the solar irradiance, from 1600 to the present, fits the known global temperature patterns

Is The "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming a Myth?
from Amazon Books: The Deniers

Yes, says internationally renowned environmentalist author Lawrence Solomon who highlights the brave scientists--all leaders in their fields-- who dispute the conventional wisdom of climate change alarmists (despite the threat to their careers)

Al Gore and his media allies claim the only scientists who dispute the alarmist view on global warming are corrupt crackpots and "deniers", comparable to neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust.

These men who expose Gore's claims as absurd hold top positions at the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world. Their work is cited and acclaimed throughout the scientific community... Al Gore says any scientist who disagrees with him on Global Warming is a kook, or a crook.

Guess he never met these guys:

Dr. Edward Wegman--former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences--demolishes the famous "hockey stick" graph that launched the global warming panic.

Dr. David Bromwich--president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology--says "it's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

Prof. Paul Reiter--Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed Pasteur Institute--says "no major scientist with any long record in this field" accepts Al Gore's claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne diseases.

Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute--states "there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies" used for global warming forecasts.

Dr. Christopher Landsea--past chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones--says "there are no known scientific studies that show a conclusive physical link between global warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity."

Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society, who discovered nuclear antimatter--calls global warming models "incoherent and invalid."

Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski--world-renowned expert on the ancient ice cores used in climate research--says the U.N. "based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo--says "most leading geologists" know the U.N.'s views "of Earth processes are implausible."

Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research Center, twice named one of the "1,000 Most Cited Scientists," says much "Arctic warming during the last half of the last century is due to natural change."

Dr. Claude Allegre--member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, he was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers of global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."

Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., member, the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria project says "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

Dr. Richard Tol--Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the most influential global warming report of all time "preposterous . . . alarmist and incompetent."

Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who argues that changes in the Sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming: "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."

Prof. Freeman Dyson--one of the world's most eminent physicists says the models used to justify global warming alarmism are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."

Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, who argues that changes in the Sun's behavior could account for most of the warming attributed by the UN to man-made CO2.

And many more, all in Lawrence Solomon's devastating new book, The Deniers