If you want to tell me what “H” stands for, I’ll happily return the favour and report the results.

The main thrust of Quiggin’s opening post isn’t even anywhere near an ad hominem. Quiggin is simply saying that the “latest story casting doubt on the reality of anthropogenic global warming” is, in fact, an old and discredited one.

“Skeptic” in this case is just a euphemism for “person who responds to evidence with ‘nyah nyah nyah!’”… that is, “denialist”.

I wonder how many of those currently signed up for “AGW is definitely happening, definitely a threat, and definitely requires strong central planning” also signed on to the “Premature Ice Age is coming”, “England won’t exist in 2000”, “mass starvation in 1980”, “saccharin causes cancer”, “plastics are causing a drop in our ability to procreate”, “silicon breast implants cause disease”, and “Y2K means the end of civilization” scares? My take is that the skeptics have been far more data-driven than the enthusiasts, with people like Lomborg and Bailey showing more intellectual honesty than people who were ready to believe it the first day they heard of it.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but it’s no justification for that clock’s hubris.

The STEFAN RAHMSTORF reply adresses the certainty of Shaviv’s conclusions, he determines that it is not conclusive, but the data still suggests that it is likely. Also, if you read the reply, he reaffirms that greenhouse gases have not been drivers of climate change historically.

Ignoring that Realclimate is not a credible source, the article also does nothing to confirm CO2 as a climate driver or address the fact that there are more stong climate driver that we simply don’t understand. The argument is simply that CO2 reinforces warming. No disagreement there. But it does nothing to tell us the extent to which it does.

Now, how much does the historical data consistantly suggest that CO2 increases forcing. What is the least amount of warming we get from high concentrations of GHGs? No where near .6C in 30 years.

I fail to see how Stott et al’s paper helps your case, much less how it was “wrongly dismissed”, but hey—if you want to bring up Peter Stott’s modeling work, including more recent publications, be my guest.
That’s OK. Dust yourself off and try again. I’m sure Shaviv and Veizer will hold the football for you. Ouch.
One more try. Get a running start. This time that ol’ football is going right through the CO2 - temperature phase lag goalposts.
Well, you get points for persistence, anyway.

And of course, you can always take a quick look at temperature and GHG concentrations to see that there are large fluctuations in temperature that don’t correspond to GHGs. Especially going back over 1000 years.

more recent analysis, which includes: (a) Corrections to the temperature reconstruction due to ocean pH variations, and (b) more empirical comparisons between actual temperature variations and changes in the radiative budget further constrain the global sensitivity to about 1-1.5°C change for CO2 doubling (as compared with the 1.5-4.5°C with the “commonly accepted range” of the IPCC, obtained from global circulation models).

Nir Shaviv

I am honest to a fault.

Way [too] much science that casts doubt on how much of GW we cause is wrongly dismissed.