Not so fast. Although were are entering a solar minimum J-lean has found that there is overall increasing solar activity during this century. She has reported that TSI during recent solar maximums has been higher than at any time in the past 4 centuries.

G-Kopp at SORCE notes that an estimated increase of 0.04% would induce appreciable climate change if it persists for a sufficient number of solar cycles.

Also keep in mind that since the Maunder Minimum solar energy has slowly increased over each subsiquent 11-year solar cycle.

Furthermore, J-lean finds that solar forcing is greater than previously expected:

The Sun Approaches Its 11 Year Minimum and Activity Cycle 24

“Climate response to decadal solar forcing has previously been expected to be too small to be detected. (Scientists reasoned that the amount of change caused by solar forcing would be too small to change the ocean temperatures significantly—i.e., any change would be dampened by the ocean’s thermal inertia.) However, recent empirical results associating decadal solar variability and climate contradict this expectation, and recent studies are beginning to shed light on how this may take place.”

Take a breath Joe. Many solar researchers believe solar activity accounts for half of the recent warming. I wouldn’t ignore the role solar activity has on the climate.

The most popular fallacious arguments are listed, by popularity, each with a pointer to a good description, with charts, and pointers to peer-reviewed research papers.

This is, more-or-less:
1 sun
45 hotsun
46 solarcycle

(cue 25 or 6 to 4)

“Many” isn’t “most”.

Best,

D

Today:
Arctic summers ice free ‘by 2013′
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ science/ nature/ 7139797.stm

1st or 2nd would be the one that matters — global temperature.

Bob.

We’ve all seen the stories from the Washington Post, MSNBC, USA Today, CBS News, and of course, the New York Times telling us “(2004) was the fourth warmest (year) since systematic temperature measurements began around the world,” “The year 2005 was the warmest year in over a century,” and “1998, 2002 and 2003 and 2004 followed as the next four warmest.” Man Made Global Warming has become big news. I mean hells bells — We’re at the tipping point!

It turns out that those news stories, based on press releases from our friend, Dr. James Hansen at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were wrong.

Dr. Hansen, the scientific advisor for Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” has gotten a lot of ink over the past few years complaining that his ideas on climate change are being suppressed by the Bush Administration. “On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed,” said Dr. Hansen in a 2006 interview with the New York Times. “The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That’s the big issue here.”

I agree. That is a big issue. For those who are unaware, GISS doesn’t just pass along raw temperature readings from which average global temperature is then drawn. There are problems with equipment siting and quite a few sites used to gather temperature records do not meet even minimal compliance standards. To overcome this problem, Dr. Hansen and the climate professionals at GISS have developed software to “fix” the flawed data from the surface sites. A number of researchers including Roger Pielke Sr have published peer reviewed papers documenting these station siting issues and noting insufficient adjustments in the official temperature records. More than a few have referred to NASA’s mean temperature data as “faith-based” climate science, because, well, the honestly informed public just has to take it on faith that the rocket scientists at NASA know what they’re doing.

Intriguingly, in the interest of keeping the public not only informed but honestly informed, Dr. Hansen and the climatologists at GISS have refused to allow other independent scientists access to their temperature adjustment software. They refuse to allow their data to be independently verified. High-sounding rhetoric aside, the climate researchers at NASA don’t believe they’re obliged to provide us anything other than a cursory description of the adjustment softwarethey use.

Despite their unwillingness to follow commonly accepted scientific practice, in August 2007 NASA had to quietly change it’s mean temperature numbers after Hansen’s algorithm for “fixing” the raw data was found to have caused inaccurate readings for every year since 2000. An interview with the blogger who discovered the fraud has been published online, and it’s quite an interesting read. I hope you get the opportunity to check it out.

To quantify the error, the actual temperature numbers for the last 6 years have been over reported by .15 deg C (.27 deg F.) After the fraud was exposed, Hansen quickly sent out a longwinded diatribe slamming the few news agencies that reported his error. Various sockpuppet sites have tried to downplay NASA’s boo boo as “insignificant,” but when the entire increase in temperature in the United States had been previously reported to be only about .6 deg C over the last century, this is not a small number. It turns out, 5 of the hottest years were before 1940, and the average temperature since 1998 has actually dropped. Watching this little drama unfold, a disinterested observer might reasonably conclude that the esteemed head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is not only a liar, but a damned liar. In the interest of an honestly informed public, Hansen and his cronies at GISS should be fired.

The issue of siting problems and the accuracy of temperature data adjustments for the rest of the globe has yet to be established. One thing is for certain: The claims that 2007 is the hottest year in the past century, or that 6 of the hottest years have occurred in the last decade are most certainly false. Anyone who continues to parrot “the last decade has seen the warmest temperatures since Pontius Pilate” without including a disclaimer about known errors in the method of gathering temperatures and adjusting for urban heat islands should be chastised for misinforming the public.

Let’s pretend for a moment that global warming has nothing to do with mankind.
Should we still not be doing everything we can to counter the trend?

When the Arctic summer turns from reflecting sunlight (-80% via ice/snow)
to absorbing it (+95% via sea water) some time within the next 10 years,
what is going to happen to the rate of global warming?

Some people here would deny an increase in heat if their socks went on fire.

Also to your question
“Let’s pretend for a moment that global warming has nothing to do with mankind.
Should we still not be doing everything we can to counter the trend?” My answer is no. We should help the starving people of the world and take care of the real problems which are not theories but fact. Perhaps when we get better data that is not full of anomalies that your group will get more believers.

Until then us Dumb illiterate flat worlders will keep pumping MTBE and ethonol into our cars, hoping there are a couple of spotted owls around (they are extinct by now right?) and hoping we are not going into global cooling like the science of 1976 thought.

When the batting average of environmental science gets a little better I’ll start drinking the Kool-Aid. Until then, enjoy

you global wariming people are such idiots