EXACTLY. ……because the CO2 effect is indisputably real and, perhaps most pertinently of all,…….

Not what I said, by the way. We’ve had (or have) a similar decadal warming trend (~0.16 deg) to that in the 1915-1945 period (~0.14 deg).

If it is real doesn’t it have to explain the cooling trend for the last eight or ten years?

Never judge a duck by its cover.

Never judge a crock by its cover.

It is a well known truism that 90% of everything is BS. (The IPCC AR4 is 90% certain about CO2-caused AGW.)

I agree wholeheartedly that skeptics don’t have to PROVE the negative. You have that spot on. Apologies for calling it a rant, by the way, you’re right, it probably doesn’t qualify. But I’ll get to the meat of the issue and your points again a bit later when I have another break.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for some folks to get their heads around that concept, which is a basis of the Scientific Method. Those promoting a new hypothesis have the burden of showing that it explains reality better than the theory they’re trying to displace it with, in this case natural climate variability around a gradually rising trend line.

There is no empirical proof that CO2 has any discernible, measurable, real world effect. I understand the assumed forcing, although I disagree with the IPCC’s inflated guesstimate; CO2 is clearly a weak sister compared with other climate effects. If CO2 forcing weren’t so weak, the climate would be getting warmer as CO2 rises. In fact, show us some real world proof that CO2 is not a negative forcing along with water vapor.

When someone says: “None of this is going anywhere, at least as far as disproving that CO2 is currently driving climate…”, they just don’t get the Scientific Method. No one has falsified the theory of natural climate variability, and no one has been able to point to a chart and say, “That part of the [very minor] temperature rise over the past century is due to CO2,” and not simply to natural climate fluctuations above and below trend — which it has been doing naturally, for thousands of years, and within the same historical parameters.

The planet has been gradually warming in fits and starts since the last great Ice Age, and although CO2 has risen, the current climate is well within the parameters of natural fluctuations, which have taken place many times, and in the same way, since well before the first SUV appeared on the scene. The current climate is entirely normal.

“Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything” — William of Ockham (1285-1349) Natural climate variability explains the climate, and there is no need to add CO2 to the explanation.

Finally, the assumption that CO2 is driving the climate has been shown to be false by the planet itself: as CO2 steadily rises, the climate steadily cools.

Of course the believers in the failed CO2=AGW hypothesis are now saying that global warming causes global cooling. They can believe that nonsense if they want, I’ll listen to what planet Earth is telling us.

“I would suggest that GIGO is one of the main underpinnings of AGW.”

And you would be wrong because to even begin to think that the reality of the major disturbance caused to climate by CO2 relies solely on computer models is to already fool yourself with the comfort offered by a lovely straw-man pillow. Be my guest, but physics, thermodynamics and real world observation tell us otherwise.

“no one is disputing that CO2 has an effect”

You wouldn’t surmise that from Smokey’s ranting post above. It shows he has no idea how much work across multiple disciplines by thousands of scientists has gone into showing just exactly how wrong he is. But I guess he’s smarter’n all them ivory tower guys (who actually apply science correctly and are all too aware of the error bars and limitations in their own work) I’d recommend he actually reads some reputable journals.

And finally, my point stands that we are talking about a temp record of less than 5% of the earth’s surface. Like MWP proponents, they just take one part of the globe that suits their cause and extrapolate. Hardly good science. As I said, if you want to convince yourselves of the reality of AGW, I know it’s dry and not always delivered in sound bites, but look to the scientific papers themselves, not some hack’s interpretation of them.

UHI at local, state and federal facilities has clearly increased
in the past few decades. The key factor has been the ADA,
the Americans with Disabilities Act. Try, just try, and find
government office that does not have an excellent AC system.
All that heat and humidity is pumped outside, where the
temperature equipment is. The ADA has also forced just
about everything to be paved and re-graded.

An excellent example is the Cogswell Station here in SoCal.
It is WAY out on a closed road, 7 miles from a main road.
The station has been around since the 1930s, but now the
pavement of the parking lot extends to a few feet from the
temperature sensor.

40 years ago there was almost no chance a small government
outpost would have a large AC system. Today it is required.

From 1950 to 1980, when stations were moved from urban areas to airports, the airports were cooler. (“Adjustments were made.”) Since then airports have warmed at a considerably faster rate than the original locations, for obvious reasons. (Adjustments were not made.)

Like, I don’t know, maybe set up some test stations which match conditions of the actual stations to verify that things work the way you think they do and that your fixes really do correct for problems.

That would do for a start.

It would be pretty much pointless. The site histories are wrong. There are station moves on record where no moves occurred. There are station moves that are not on record. Coordinates for stations are imprecise to the point of uselessness, and gets (much) worse the further back one goes.

Even if one reconstructed all of the site histories from the B-91 forms, there would be many gaps and no record whatever of changes in local environment.

The sensor height is an interesting issue when trying to deal with fractions of degrees.