That climate changes and will continue to change is obvious. That this is primarily due to solar effects via the oceans also seems obvious to me. It seems the height of arrogance when – like Canute attempting to hold back the tides – climate-politicians attempt to hold back the sun and its effects. The sun cannot be carbon-taxed into submission.
That CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has little impact on climate is the reality that climate-politicians continue to deny. That the effects of man-made carbon dioxide emissions are of even less significance is becoming increasingly obvious.
Over the last 16 years global temperatures have been pretty flat (actually the trend is very slightly downwards). During this same time the atmospheric mean CO2 concentration has continued its increasing trend of between 1.5 and 2.5 ppm /year.
The data show no causality between CO2 concentration and global mean temperature. How much or how little man-made emissions of CO2 contribute to the global mean concentration is still open to much question.
Global mean temperatures from woodfortrees.org
Global temperature anomaly hardcrut3vgl (via http://www.woodfortrees.org)
The following plot of mean annual atmospheric CO2 concentrations is from NOAA data
(ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt)
NOAA ESRL data
Tags: carbon dioxide, Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, climate, climate change, National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration
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