"Surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean"

Using the differences or derivative does remove any linear trend but this is just one step. Figure 5 for global TTA and Fig 6 for global TTA show unmistakable correlations with lead times for SOI. The existence of the lead times gives strong support for a causal connection. Figure 7 compares global TTA and SOI, not the derivatives,so any trend would be evident here. With the lead times identified with the differences it is now much easier to separate the trend (if any) from variations about the trend. When SOI and TTA both go up or down we know to exclude that from any estimate of a trend. For me, after doing that, the trend is very slightly down or very slightly up or not at all depending on the time interval chosen. Whatever, the trend is much less than the fluctuations. So if the underlying trend is due to ever increasing CO2, it’s a very weak trend and much less than the influence of SOI.

Re: Nick Stokes (20:12:20)
Hey Nick thanks for the 1+1 lesson.
Watch your back if you are going to engage in distortion.

Hmm, I’m surprised to not see any “Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, (…) technology, and recent news”!
Maybe you could be frank about your own bias?

Ahh yes, ONE peer reviewed study vs thousands. Sounds convincing to me! *dripping sarcasm*. Even better, it’s from the Journal of Geophysical Research which is not a well respected magazine in the scientific community.

When they are compared to the raw data, that is. Take out ENSO temperature contributions over twenty years of data, and what is left for the IPCC projections? Does it match the projected trend?

There are two problems with tamino. One is openness and attitude, the other is left to the reader to characterize.
The openness and attitude problem appears in the cycle of entrants and exits from the blog. What happens is that someone who is unconvinced will come in, read with initial interest, and then make periodic questioning postings. He or she then comes in for a tirade of personal abuse.
In my own case, to give an example, without anyone knowing either my gender or marital or parental status, aspersions were cast on my parenting skills, and I was compared to Judas Ischariot and other well known historical monsters for no other reason than questioning some of the dogma. Not particularly being a general sceptic, but simply suggesting that the jury might be out on some things, or there might be things that did not convince me, on some elements of it.
All this is done by a bunch of pseudonyms seeming to represent people who have become regulars precisely because of the ability it gives them to indulge in this content-free personal abuse. One rapidly comes to the conclusion that many (some of whom post here) are only being saved from wandering up and down Third Ave shouting incoherent abuse at passers by their ability to do the same thing every day on Tamino.
Eventually one of two things happens. Either the skeptical poster gives up and goes elsewhere. I did not. Or, he or she is not intimidated, persists, and is banned. I was banned. There seems to have been a general cleanout of skeptics recently, so now they have all gone back to their unopposed rants about the denialism, right wing, neoconservatism, oil company funding, tobacco and cancer, creationism and so on.
The problem with this stuff is exactly the problem that the mac fanatics represent for Apple. It may be that AGW is real, and is a pressing problem for humanity. If so we should know, and we should act in a responsible way. But anyone reading Tamino’s blog is going to come to the conclusion in the end that it has all the internal marks of being a sort of weird fanatical cult. Tamino’s own rants and insults of course are part of this, and encourage the coterie in its approach.
The second problem with the Tamino is graver than this, and showed itself in the discussion some time ago of Principle Component Analysis and MBH. Tamino seems to be a reasonably competent mathematician and has a talent for clear and simple explanation of at least fairly simple issues in the subject. The PCA series had three postings which were both clear and accurate. With the last we arrived at the dreadful subject of the method of PCA used by Mann, and criticized by Wegman among others.
Here Tamino defended the method, which is indefensible, and cited one of the leading authorities on PCA in a post whose obscurity was only matched by the clarity of the earlier ones. It turned out later however that the authority in question had never endorsed the method (which is hardly surprising, since it is totally improper). Tamino however never retracted, and left his naive readers with the impression that the defence of MBH’s statistical manipulations had been valid, and that the method was valid.
Anthony’s verdict on Tamino thus has some merit, though the phrasing is open to ridicule. It is not that Tamino is smart enough to argue that 2+2=5. It is rather that Tamino is capable of making the argument that to do PCA while using an operator chosen value in place of the mean that the method, correctly performed, requires, is appropriate and sound. He is willing and able to do this in such a way that the reader who does not have a sound grasp of what is involved will think, Oh, Well, it must be OK then. Smart as he is, he is evidently able to misunderstand the statements of the leading authority in the field and construe them as endorsement of the method, when it evidently was no such thing.
Finally he turned out to be able to do this in the course of mounting a defense of the methods of MBH in the guise of writing a PCA tutorial, but while applying it to some randomly generated data. The result was that the naive reader was left with the impression that the MBH method had been vindicated, but without actually examining it as applied to the MBH data, without discussing the results on this data critically, and explaining in exactly what the controversy about it consists.
As I say, the characterization of this is left to the reader. There is a problem here, but it is not lack of intelligence.

Craig Allen:
“So step one in the analysis used in the the paper removes the dominate trend. Then the authors imply that because CO2 does not correlate with the variability in what is left, it does not have a significant effect on temperature”
I don’t believe that’s what they are doing at all. They first show the high correlation between the differences (Figs 5 and 6) and in doing that establish the lead times for SOI. CO2 just not relevant here. They are looking for a relationship between SOI and TTA and they find one.
“But then wouldn’t it be better to do this using the original data rather than the detrended data”
Figure 7 is the original data so in the end we get the comparison you want.
Personally I would have tried a model like
TTA(t) = a+b*t + c*SOI(t-6) + f*VOL(t) + e
on the original data. a,b,c,f are parameters to be determined,e is the error. VOL(t) is a term to account for the cooling by volcanoes (all you would need is the shape; parameter f would account for magnitude). Maybe just leaving out the data influenced by volcanoes is better. In any case it doesn’t seem to have done any harm. To get the lead time in SOI it might be possible to put it in as a parameter in SOI(t-LAG) but I think that might cause some problems and their method seems to have worked fine.
In the end inspection of Fig 7 (not detrended) says to me that they have explained most of the variability in the data and there is not much left for other factors, including CO2.

I think that everyone here [and on the alarmist side] is missing a very important point.
These authors may have used a technique that effectively removed linear long term trend in temperature from their data but they did show that short term (sub-decadal) fluctuations in temperature (as measured by the temperature anomaly) are mainly due to ENSO events. In other words, I think almost every one agrees that El Nino’s are associated with short-term inceases in the world mean temperature, while La Nina’s are associated with short-term decreases in the world mean temperature. [I am not ruling out the the moderating influences of the PDO and AMO have on mutidecadal time scales]
The important point being made by their paper is that long-term temperature changes could be produced by a a simple change in the relative frequency of El Nino and La Nina events.
Between 1940 and 1976, La Nina’s were relatively more common than El Nino’s (a condition that exists if there is a negative PDO) , producing an overall cooling of the planet.
Between 1976 and 2006, El Nino’s were relative more common than La Nina’s (a condition that exists if there is a positive PDO), producing an overall warming of the planet.
The question is, is the warming produced by the change in relative frequency of EL Nino/La Nina events in 1976 sufficient to explain the bulk of the warming between 1976 and 2006? If it is then it leaves little room for either
solar or Anthropogenic CO2 to play a role unless it can be shown that they
directly influence the relative frequency of the ENSO events.
I have evidence that the onset of El Nino events over the last 400 years are synchronized with extreme proxygean spring tide indicating that the Solar/Lunar tides may play a [note that I am using the indefinite article here] crucial role is setting the timing of El Nino events.
Hence, it is quiet possible that it is the Lunar/Solar tides, and not Anthropogenic CO2 nor the Sun, that plays the most important role
in setting the world’s mean temperature in the long-term.