I hate those graphs... I'm colourblind and showing me three lines of almost-identical colour and then saying 'look, they don't match' is pretty irritating ;)
However, with only two lines I can see the point hehe. I played around with the graphing options there and yeah, there's no correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature I can see...which is interesting but a little irrelevant as obviously solar activity is a forcing, is agreed on by everyone to be a forcing (again, the extent is debated by the various camps) and as you yourself pointed out above, is expected to play a role in setting global temperatures. So obviously just using the raw sunspot activity to match against global temps doesn't mean much. I persist in being interested to see what happens during the low cycle ;)

Also, it is a chaotic system. You can't expect it to produce nice clean correlation graphs showing how the variance in one parameter influences the result in another graph. Chaotic systems don't work like that. Unfortunately political systems do, so there's a lot of effort and political capital that's gone into producing graphs that show increasing CO2 to correlate cleanly with increasing global temperature.

A couple there that I haven't read, thanks for the references :) I've avoided the creationist nutters before, as they're clearly just anti-science rather than trying to get at the truth.

Yeah, mostly they seem to be saying the warming has stopped or paused, not that we're going to freeze. Watts generally reports on other's predictions rather than making his own.

But if you take some of the nuts predictions from the political AGW movement they're no saner than some of the nuts predictions in the sceptic movement. And to be honest, some of the predictions in the IPCC publications are verging on nuts, but then a lot of that body is increasingly political rather than scientific.

And I thought solar was declining? There's all sorts of excitement on the sceptic sites about the solar minimum we're heading into which will finally prove that solar forcings > emissions forcings. Which will be interesting to see.

My prediction? The political disaster campaign will fail over the next five years. The scientists will increasingly distance themselves from the political green campaigners, there'll be a modest backlash against green politics and towards libertarian politics, until the next crunch hits and the demand for government welfare funds increases again. The climate will continue to get warmer and colder, probably warmer than it has been at any time since the MWP, maybe even significantly warmer than that, but certainly never warm enough to threaten human civilisation.
The seas will continue to rise at a very modest rate, threatening a few low-lying pacific islands. Some parts of Siberia will warm enough to enable prairie farming, which will contribute to the global food supply. The increase in CO2 and water vapour will reduce desertification and in some place push back the deserts marginally (we may even get the North African coast back as it was in Roman times).

But then, I'm an optimist ;)

My understanding of the IPCC position is that water vapour (and other feedbacks) will be doing the heavy lifting of any warming. CO2 by itself is 'only' capable of around 1-2 degrees C warming, for example (methane is capable of more but is in less abundance, and there are other emissions that have different signatures, the net result is around 1-3 degrees C). However these forcings are enough to trigger the natural feedbacks which will take over and drive the temperature up much further. So human emissions are directly responsible for at least some of the warming, which as far as I'm aware is agreed by everyone.

However, you cite human influence, which is different (human emissions could be responsible for only part of the warming, but because they trigger the feedbacks, all of the warming is influenced by humans)
I'd agree that your characterisation of the debate is correct, with the caveat that the sceptics haven't actually predicted anything except 'the scientists are wrong, it's not going to get that warm'. The current flavour of the month is that the coming solar minimum will give us 30 years of cooling, but there's too many competing theories to actually get a consistent prediction of anything from the movement. To be fair, the anti-AGW movement doesn't see its job as providing an alternative explanation, just trying to poke holes in the political AGW movement and keep the science honest.

This. This is the problem I have.

There are a lot of reasons to not drive an SUV in cities, so don't get me wrong I'm all for things that make people behave less stupidly.

But you're using a cudgel to attempt to beat sense into their heads instead of educating them as to why their behaviour is harming everyone around them. So it's not surprising they're taking it as an attack and stubbornly resisting every step.

Let's just follow the chain of logic you're using:
- Global Warming is caused by human CO2 emissions
- Cars emit CO2, and bigger cars emit more CO2
- Therefore people should stop driving cars, or drive smaller cars if they must drive cars

It's perfectly logical, but completely wrong.
If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars.
But if we assume that the second step is true, then we just need to switch fuels to something that doesn't emit CO2, or clean the CO2 from the exhaust fumes, and we're still good to drive massive overcompensating cars again.

Trying to drive people to more ethical sensible behaviour by screaming at them 'the world will burn unless you do this' is just going to backfire sooo badly.

Maybe because we do value science so highly and we utterly detest the politicisation of science that is such a huge feature of the climate debate.

If you actually listen to both sides, then the scientists are debating one very small thing: how sensitive the climate is to the small forcing from human gaseous emissions.

Both sides agree there is some warming. The extent of the current warming and whether it has paused/stopped for the last ten years is disputed (for a variety of reasons, but there are credible peer-reviewed climate scientists discussing the pause). The political AGW movement denies there has been any pause ("9 of the hottest 10 years on record have been since 2000", for example, which is shrill cry to keep believing the warming, but is also completely consistent with a pause in warming). The anti-AGW movement says that we have had some warming, but it's not a pause and we're due for another cooling period.

Both sides agree that at least some of the warming is due to human emissions. Again, the dispute is over how much. The political AGW movement says all the warming is human-induced. The climatologists say some of it is. The anti-AGW movement say very little of it is, and there are a variety of other more important causes.

Both sides agree that the majority influence on the climate are the various feedbacks involved in this chaotic system. The climate papers and models are very firmly saying that the current warming will increase water vapour in the atmosphere which will cause further warming. The political AGW movement says there is a 'tipping point' imminent beyond which all feedbacks become runaway positive feedbacks and the planet burns (I exaggerate only very slightly). The anti-AGW movement says that the feedbacks are unknown, there's no evidence that the models are right on this, and the water vapour feedbacks could be as strongly negative as positive.

Both sides agree that the outcome of continued warming is unknown. The climatologists get quiet on this point, but there are a number of other disciplines, notably the biosciences, that have published papers showing that any climate change is bad (which makes sense from a worldview where any changes to an ecosystem are seen as 'damage' and the current state of the ecosystem is the ideal state of that ecosystem, which is the prevailing view). The political AGW movement insist that the outcome will be catastrophic. The anti-AGW movement tend towards the view that a little warming would actually be quite nice, but accept that some places would have a negative outcome.

There are ancillary debates about, for instance, ocean level rises, ocean acidification, the causes and consequences of sea-ice and glacier retreats and other stuff, but basically it for the most part seems to be pretty good, open, honest debate. The anti-AGW movement has a core of competent scientists, mathematicians and amateur/retired climatologists who do know their stuff and can talk reasonably about it. For example, the original scepticism was sparked by McIntyre who is a statistician and had some legitimate questions about the statistics used in the climate science papers, those questions were subsequently borne out by the UK enquiries (no-one did anything 'wrong' but the enquiry did conclude that there were valid questions about the statistics methodologies used).

However, this is all surrounded by a haze of politics, so that professional climatologists have to be careful about what they publish in case it can be seen as supporting the 'other side', there are calls to censor publications on the subject to maintain a united front on the subject, the image of a 97% 'consensus' must be maintained at all times. The only place there can be a sensible debate about it is on the blogs, because they're not censored (though there are some people who would love to). And all the time there's a constant drumbeat of 'DENIALIST' whenever someone questions the political "truths".

This is bad. The use of the word Denialist is bad. Attempting to censor scientific debate is bad. Attempting to justify a political cause using incomplete science and then prevent the science from being completed is bad.

For the record, all the above is my reading into the situation from my pro-science, anti-politics point of view. I'm pretty neutral on whether the world is warming or not and whether it's human-induced or not (I don't think there's enough evidence either way yet). But I'm really really anti the political interference in the science. Your opinion may differ, in fact I hope it does, we need a diversity of opinions to make the debate work.

I was going to include references to all my points, but I figure by this time you've either been reading the same things I have, or you're not interested in it. Either way the references aren't going to help.

His media empire has peddled enough fear and confusion that we'd actually accept strangers seeing us naked because it might in some way fool us into believing that we're not immediately going to get raped/blown up/mugged/shot/knifed/run over/whatever in our homes by the rampaging teenagers/immigrants/aboriginals/bikies that infest our cities.

Of course when I say 'us' I mean the general population of Australia, and not "us" the geeks/nerds/intellectuals/speccy gits who are capable of analysing statistics and realise that this is one of the safest countries in the world to live in .

The exchange rate has already seen to most of that. Australia is ridiculously expensive in US Dollars.

So spend more than you earn so you don't have to life in a mud hut, is that it? Max out the credit cards, take another mortgage to afford the holiday you deserve, after all you work hard, you're earning a decent wage, you should be able to afford a new car every few years, right?

And when you get old and sick, start whining at the government that it wasn't your fault, you *deserved* to spend all that money, now you *deserve* a pension and medical care over and above what you can afford, because you paid all those taxes right?

Yeah. So. Fuck You. If you can't live within your means then you're the fucking problem.

We're about to hit the baby boomers doing exactly this (well, technically it started two years ago when the people born in 1945 hit 65, but that's only the leading edge of the bell curve). A huge bulge of population has completely failed to save enough money to pay for their retirement, and are going to ask you to pay more taxes to keep them afloat in their old age. And possibly alive in their old age, as there are a lot of very expensive treatments for age-related illnesses that are available now.
They feel entitled because they worked hard their whole lives, and paid taxes their whole lives, and they've never been refused anything they want because they're such a big block of voters. This is going to be a brutal shock to either them, or the rest of us, because there isn't enough money to keep everyone happy here.
Crunch time will be when your Mum asks you to pay for the surgery she needs to keep walking, and you realise that you'll have to sell your house to cover it. Not a pleasant choice, or a pleasant conversation to have with her.

do you want to live in a desert, or near the beach?

If they'd stop fly-in-fly-out and force the miners to live locally we might have a chance, but that would mean revoking the Fringe Benefits Tax, and convincing pollies to rescind a tax is really hard

And that's a really really good thing.

We don't all have the same set of morals, but we do all have to have the same set of laws.
Forcing other people to live by your morals is as bad as other people forcing you to live by theirs.

I like my laws as minimal and amoral as possible. As few laws as possible, as cleanly and clearly enunciated as possible, and parliaments focused on making better law not more law.