Skeptic Agrees with Climate Change

Take the sunspot numbers and do an 11-year average.
You see peaks at 1950 and 1983.
It has been a downward trend since 1983.
The surface temperature has risen fastest since 1983.
This is fairly simple to verify.
What did he do wrong?

“The amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere/oceans produced by mankind is tiny in comparison to the amount found naturally.”
Just curious, but what are the actual numbers, there. Anyone? If 100% of the human-produced CO_2 (from burning fuel, not from breathing) were added up, just how much is that? If that CO_2 were well-mixed with the atmosphere (there’s a LOT of atmosphere) just how much would that compare to the amount that is already there? That is, you assert that it is “tiny”. What does that mean? Is 5% anthropogenic? 20%? 0.01%? And what is the basis for your number?
Granting that the oceans are an enormous CO_2 sink — not necessarily in a good way, during ice ages — granting the evidence that historically in the past CO_2 has lagged temperature and not led it, granting that warming would all by itself produce an increase in the CO_2 content of the air, all of these together do not suffice to prove that anthropogenic CO_2 is a negligible fraction of the current total atmospheric CO_2.
Numbers might. I’ve looked for them in the past, but haven’t found any that I’d be willing to believe because of the fairly large uncertainties about the sources and sinks other than humans. Does anybody have a clean, believable accounting that they’d like to share?
rgb

“Take the sunspot numbers and do an 11-year average.
You see peaks at 1950 and 1983.
It has been a downward trend since 1983.
The surface temperature has risen fastest since 1983.
This is fairly simple to verify.
What did he do wrong?”
Take the solar activity proxies for the last 10,000 years.
Look at them.
The last time the sun was as active as it was in the 20th century
Was 9000 years ago
Close to the start of the Holocene.
The ocean is large.
The climate complex, with multidecadal cycles
And many feedback loops.
Thirty years?
Looking at one hundred year trends
For immediate causes
Is like seeing the world, flat
From your window
And being content.
The ant calls the hill upon which it lives a mountain
Because it cannot see the mountain on which that hill lives
That is less than a foothill of the mighty Himalayas
Across the sea.
The temperature record of the Holocene
Reveals that the hill whose slope alarms you
Calls to its fellows, higher still,
In a past uncorrupted
By anthropogenic CO_2, unforced
By any plausible influence but the Sun
The Earth itself.
Cold was the Maunder Minimum
Cold indeed, frozen Thames
With (strange chance) a quiet Sun.
So cold that all the warming seen
From then until now
May be simply explained
By natural variation
Regression to the mean
Excursion beyond
With CO_2 the minor factor
Not the Smoking Gun
Playing second fiddle to
Earth’s variable Sun.

@ur momisugly{the first half-dozen or more responses}
Did you actually read and understand the article before accusing the writer of being a “tool” or calling him “desperate”?

Some great philosophical comments back there.
Bertrand Russell, for example, in “History of Western Philosophy” appears to divide modern philosophy into a battle between the Romantics and the Realists. He sees the Nazis as the ultimate expression of the Romantics.
I would say that Romantics have their place, particularly in art; film, music, literature and so on. A little bit in politics. None at all in science. A little in engineering; things should look stylish.

I agree with the others here who sugget that perhaps the article has the wrong end of stick. This chant is stating how data is maniplated to show AGW, but that sceptics remain true unlike the scientists concerned.

So Anthony, do you have the courage to plot the running eleven year average of the sunspot number against the running eleven year average of the SST as an update to this post. It’s easy to do, Tamino already has already made the graphs, and I’m sure he’ll let you use them with attribution.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/oh-pleeze/
Alternatively, do you prefer keeping this site a fact free zone to protect the arguments therein.
PS: If the recent rise in CO2 content in the atmosphere is due to warming oceans, why was the peak CO2 content of the atmosphere in the Medieval Warm Period 285 ppmv?

Jim D says:
December 9, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Man has already increased the atmosphere’s CO2 by 40%.
It may be 100% by about 2060.
You want to run that by me again? Possibly you meant Mann!

Very nice. Among the many home truths I find these evocative:
“They were not able to measure solar variation closer than 1%
The variation due to atmospheric water vapor was close to 2%”
Just look at the effect of “greenhouse gases” in the 0.2 to 5 micron bands!
Now looking at energy budgets that include day side and night side
radiation effects. Non of this reduce by 30% and divide by four malarky.

@ur momisugly Erinome
“Do I really have to explain to you the difference between a greenhouse and a planet?”
More to the point, try explaining to me the difference between a planet and an imperfectly controlled laboratory experiment involving tubes filled with gas, if you can.
Most people here are skeptics because they have invested a *lot* of time and effort – which could have been spent in much more enjoyable ways – actually digging into all this stuff, thinking about it, arguing about it, and in spite of their diverse minor differences of opinion, finding egregious flaws in warmist claims. They are battle-hardened experts from a variety of mathematical/scientific backgrounds,so they are far from ignorant people.
That is why willful ignorance is not well tolerated here. Nor are bland assertions of patent untruths.
CO2 heats planets? Then explain to me why it doesn’t heat greenhouses. If it did, engineers (and there are many here) would have cottoned on to this decades ago and the the world would now be luxuriating in endless, virtually free ‘green’ energy.