Gavin was for solar forcing of climate before he was against it

Ain’t it rich, the sun screws up our weather but doesn’t play a role in our climate.
http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=613&c=5#

Kelvin was basically a creationist and also got the age of the earth hopelessly wrong. Here’s, a quote
“But overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all round us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend on one ever-acting Creator and Ruler”

Imagine that. The magnificent star that sustains all life on our planet not a factor in the climate of our world. I think I may need some of what Gavin Schmidt is smoking.

That depends. If you look at the total Holocene interglacial the actual trend is cooling from the Holocene optimum with some up and down squiggles. We are at present in an up squiggle thank goodness.
The best graph I have come across yet is HERE.
Oooo, the best graph of the Arctic Holocene temperature variations EVER because it is the only one with one of the major peaks clearly labelled BEER. Screw copper, screw iron. Beer was the start of the cultivation of cereal crops (to make beer), the sterilizer of parasite and disease-laden water and hence the mother of civilization itself.
As always, a graph with no error bars, though. People in climate science have sadly never heard of error bars. I don’t understand it. Presumably they were science majors and/or have science Ph.D.’s, and somewhere in there they should have learned that scientists who present experimental data are supposed to accompany it with an error estimate. Consequently we do not know from this graph alone whether the “signal” being presented is large or small compared to the probable error, and we do not know if the probable error is likely to be systematic/skewed or random/normal or (most likely) a mix of the two.
Error bars are really useful. For one thing, if you include them you ensure that you don’t make egregious claims based on the points themselves that can come back and bite you in the ass when it turns out that what you thought was a signal turns out to really have been — just noise. Humans have an overwhelming tendency to find meaning in noise. We see sheep in the fluffy clouds, big dippers in the stars, stenographic projections in colorful noise, trends in chaotic but trendless data. There are good reasons for this. For most of our evolution, our ability to survive hinged on being able to resolve the shape of the leopard hidden in the dappled light and dark pattern made by sunlight filtered through leaves. It hinged out our ability to connect disease caused by “bad water” from particular watering holes surrounded by certain kinds of rocks (rocks that later proved useful when humans learned to e.g. smelt lead). The penalty for being wrong was small — there are plenty of safe watering holes, and avoiding a tree that really isn’t hiding a leopard has little effect when there are many other safer trees around.
That’s not so much the case when the watering hole in question is the one that waters civilization itself, and no, I don’t mean beer this time. I mean energy. If we abandon carbon based energy sources, there are not a lot of economically viable alternatives and the cost/penalty of a mistake is absolutely enormous. It is so great that human civilization might well deliberately choose to continue using carbon based fuels anyway (as in fact we are so choosing) because leaping in a panic away from carbon could easily kill billions of people not in a hundred years but in the next thirty or forty. Poverty is the great reaper, and energy is the fundamental wealth. Several million people die every year right now because of energy poverty and things like particulate inhalation as they use “biofuels” (animal dung, charcoal, wood) to cook or provide light and heat in poorly ventilated huts, a poverty that is exacerbated and maintained by the high prices established worldwide for the use of carbon based fuels and the diversion of our considerable socioeconomic energies into saving the planet from the most benign climate of the last 1000 years instead of tackling the problem of global poverty head on.
If I were a conspiracy theorist (I don’t need to be, of course — plenty of them on WUWT already:-) I would be tempted to infer the existence of a global conspiracy to maintain global poverty, to maintain the gap between the haves and the have nots. I’d be tempted to accuse the energy producers themselves as being the primary funders of this conspiracy, as they are the ones who most obviously benefit from the entire “carbon is evil” shtick. Raise the price of gasoline (to “discourage driving”) and who benefits the most? Oil companies. Pressure coal mining companies to produce less coal in an inelastic market and all you do is drive up the price — and margins — of the coal miners, making the same profit with fewer employees and prolonging the lifetime of their investment. These are not bad times for energy companies, these are boom times! Energy has gone from being a comparatively minor expense to being a significant chunk of the cost of every product or service being purchased, a significant chunk of every household budget. Every penny spent on it pays its sliver of profit to who, exactly? Not Michael Mann, that’s for sure.
Of course, never attribute to human malice that which can be adequately explained by mere human stupidity. Such as the sort of stupidity that can arise simply because one discipline making egregious claims for a future anthropogenic disaster based those claims on a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that is invariably presented without any error bars (and often without the perspective obtained by looking at the full geological climate record, pretending that “climate” begins in 1850 or so and that the warming observed since that date is “unprecedented”. Sure it is — unprecedented since 1850, and even back to that date, most of the “observed” warming is lost in the noise of measurement error. Go back and look over thousands of years (and ignore error) and you find many instances where the current warming is in fact precedented and indeed rather normal and expected.
This doesn’t mean that post hoc ergo propter hoc is wrong, or that their assertion is incorrect. It simply emphasizes that the curves alone are seriously insufficient evidence that there is anything unusual about the current climate, or anything “unusually” catastrophic waiting humankind in the wings. Because the climate is always catastrophic. It is a poster child for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory — filled with fold bifurcations and cusp catastrophes in absurdly high dimensional spaces. It is dynamically multistable, and clearly exhibits Hurst-Kolmogorov puncuated equilibrium at multiple timescales in various projections of its dynamical behavior. Absolutely anything could happen in the Earth’s climate system, with or without variation of CO_2.
In this sense, the advice of the climate catastrophists is sound. The Earth’s climate is an enormously complex, unpredictable system. We cannot explain its past. We cannot predict its future. We can imagine that some of the things we do as a civilization affect it — both in the past (goatherding contributed to the creation of the Sahara Desert, which in turn very likely had a profound effect on the Holocene) and in the present and sure, in the future. Because it is a chaotic system and has the visible potential for (mathematical) catastrophes, the shift from one locally stable dynamical equilibrium to another that might have very different properties, it is best not to kick it too hard simply because we are currently living in very nearly the best of times, climate wise and any change at all is likely to be less good. On the other had, it is not going to be stable no matter what we do, and there is a very real possibility that we have been approaching the catastrophic bifurcation fold associated with a drop into glacial conditions, which have dominated some 500 of the last 600 years.
Personally, I see little evidence in the historical record for a likely return to a still-warmer locally stable phase, e.g. pre-Pliestocene conditions, whatever the models say. I’m also not at all certain that such a return wouldn’t on the whole be beneficial if it should occur, certainly if the “natural” alternative would have been triggering the next 90,000 year stretch of glaciation. And obviously I do not place a lot of faith in the numerical models given that they cannot explain precisely the graph you present, with or without the beer. Over the unbelievably short period for which we have adequate but not spectacular data for comparison (most of which is used to initialize and tune the models themselves) they have shown remarkably little predictive skill. They do not agree with the actual (new) data and they do not agree with each other and their run-to-run noise within each model in general is far greater than the average warming each model predicts and in all cases deviates systematically from the observed lack of warming over the last 15+ years, at a time that CO_2-driven warming “should” have been cranking up to a full-tilt catastrophic boogie.
I do think it would be wiser, all things being equal, to burn less carbon for fuel to the extent that we can economically do so. There are better uses for oil and coal, if it comes to that. Radical measures are not, however, called for on the sole basis of the predictions of manifestly unsuccessful models, especially when in 20-30 years, sheer technological advance and economics are going to force a paradigm shift in our energy production mechanisms.
I think this may well be the real force driving CAGW. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were “driven” by the economics of fossil fuel recovery. Great fortunes were made — historic fortunes that created names we still recognize as defining “wealth”. Great power accrued to the wealthy individuals that controlled and continue to control the fossil fuel based delivery of energy.
However, this era is ending. It is ending whether or not the world does anything about “CAGW” or “CACC”. The only question is: just how much money the owners of these finite resources are going to make in the comparatively brief remaining period before they are either exhausted or so expensive to recover that they make cheaper alternatives economically viable. Could it be that they decided to create the CAGW issue out of whole cloth to maximize their sundown profits? It wouldn’t even take a conspiracy — just acting in self-interest would do it without coordination.
Note well, there are “catastrophes” in economic theory as well. One very predictable catastrophe is the crossover catastrophe where solar or thorium or (perhaps) thermonuclear fusion power can be produced, stored, and delivered as cheaply as carbon based fuels. In order, solar is happening (but in an uneven manner, as there are still technological challenges that are being overcome and as it will never work well outside of the tropics through temperate zone). The “gold rush” to solar is still decades away. Thorium is maybe happening, but again there are technical difficulties and any gold rush to thorium is decades away. Fusion is a crap shoot — not just technical difficulties but some serious physics to overcome there. Still, it could “pop” in a year, ten years, or a hundred years. Or even “never”, although I think that unlikely.
One thing is very likely indeed. We will not be burning mined carbon for fuel worldwide in 100 years. The main question is, when and where and how we will cross over from doing so now to alternative resources as they mature without causing the crash of civilization in the meantime due to panic and premature action.
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