“My version of peer review” is that of my peers, GrahamY – not religious nutters, politically motivated ideologues or close minded bloggers.

Scientific “issues are debated” in scientific fora, not on ‘opinion’ sites like yours. Besides, there’s just too much technical nuance to appreciate and it gets deliberately distorted in places like this, as your and cohenite’s last post typify.

As far as “spitting arguments out” to the public so they can adjudicate; they are “spat out” in AR5. Just because you don’t feel the inclination to go there or prefer to ‘debate science’ on your opinion site is not my problem – it is yours. Indeed, why would I or any other real scientist want to “debate” you when you and your cohorts impugn the very integrity that all scientists stand by.

I’ve seen how you ‘moderate’ and I’ve seen how cohenite bullies and abuses those (you and) he disagrees with - here and elsewhere. Pathetic.

You raise the ‘elitism, authoritarian and fascism’ canard. What is becoming more and more demonstrable is that ‘conservative’ governments are becoming more fascist – censoring and gagging scientific discourse, cutting back funds and closing departments that are critical to the advancement of society and the dissemination of scientific research. Harper’s Canada does it, George W’s USA did it, and most recently Abbott’s ‘Tea Partyesque’ government is doing it.

“Condemning resources because I don't like the sites they come from…”
You have made it abundantly clear you condemn sites you don’t like, Graham Young. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If not then again you show your true colours: close mindedness and rank hypocrisy.

Lucifer, you say: ”The long-term coupling between CO2/CH4 levels and global average surface air temperature is incontrovertible. That there is not perfect coherence over short intervals is explained sufficiently, for me, by ocean and land involvement in carbon cycling, as well as exiting ice ages, but it does not avert us from self-correction in the maintenance of coupling.”

This is problematic. At BEST, CO2 follows temp movements but at any time scale there is often NO correlation between CO2 and temp. Geologic times over 600 million years as Berner and Scotese’s famous graph shows:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1644060/posts

Over 20thC:

http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Bastardi-CO2Temp.gif

Last 23 years:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.33/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend/plot/rss/from:1997/trend/plot/wti/from:2000.9/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000.8/trend/plot/uah/from:2008.5/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997/normalise:0.5/scale:0.5/offset:0.34
But what about this, over the period of maximum AGW, since 1960:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1959/mean:12/offset:300

The so-called connection between CO2 and temp was first raised by Gore with his ‘famous’ graph; Lansner deconstructs this graph and shows that most times during the period Gore used CO2 and temp are going in opposite directions! Gore’s graph is the first one:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2,Temperaturesandiceages-f.pdf

2 You say: “Air temperature has wavered naturally and slowly enough between 2 degrees above and 5 degrees below today's for life to cope."

That is wrong. The GMT during the last ice age, 25000 years ago, was much colder than today, over 10C colder as Gore’s graph shows. Over geologic history the temp range on the planet has varied by 12C:

http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/8615/allpaleotemp.png

The most active periods in terms of variety of species and life on the planet have always been warmer and arguably the best was the Eocene Optimum where temps were as high as the PETM, about 7C warmer than today.

Even if AGW is right, and the weight of evidence is AGAINST it alarmists ignore the fact that life thrives in warmth not cold.

3 You say: “The variation in CO2 concentration has never been as sharply upwards as now”. That is highly problematic given the manifest problems with historical measurement of CO2 and the defects in using ice-cores. A comparison between ice core measurements and stomata records is here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/03/why-william-d-nordhaus-is-wrong-about-global-warming-skeptics-being-wrong

WOW!..ozdoc - says it all - parfaitement!

.........

Couple with Tony Lavis's excellent observation:

"If we're going to have people adjudicating on subjects they're woefully ignorant about, why don't we let the IPCC judge rhythmic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics judges choose the Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences replace the bench of the High Court, the former High Court Justices judge the Country Women's League sponge-making competition and the CWL release the first Country Women's League report on climate change?"

Covers it well.....

Re: "What's more you neglect to mention that in the ice core data CO2 increases are a result of temperature rise, not the cause of them. CO2 increases after the temperature starts to increase, not before, and even more tellingly, it continues to increase at the same time as temperature turns down before it starts to turn down itself. The lag is somewhere around 500 years....So what you have posted can't prove causation because in the correlation CO2 depends on temperature, not the other way around."

The reason I neglect to mention a half-truth is because it obscures the correct science at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html
or further analysis of it at http://www.skepticalscience.com/skakun-co2-temp-lag.html

Yes, CO2 has lagged temperature for extremely small periods (1000 years is small) in comparison to the whole ice-core record, and for good reasons, especially in the kick-start to deglaciations.

The unequivocal covariation in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is related to Earth’s carbon cycle yet its explanation remains the great unsolved problem of earth science. Do we move before this is entirely solved or do we act on what's before us on behalf of our descendants?

Ice core data is the empirical data and while it may not go back a hundred million years like like the proxy data in your link, I'll hang my hat on it until its message is upturned and act accordingly.

Given the pointless argument that is proceeding on this thread it may be helpful to post this excerpt from a comment by Rud Istvan on an other web site:

"Absent some mutually agreed fact basis upon which to proceed, all discourse is futile.

The problem was summed up by Stephen Cobert when he introduced the idea of truthiness: you are entitled to your own conclusions, but not to your own facts.

Hockey sticks, missing heat, pause doesn’t exist/matter, 95% certain, 97% consensus, … Are all truthiness. Of course discourse is difficult at lunch when the sun is overhead but your discussion partner swears it is night and that orb is the moon–while continuing to eat lunch.
Wrote a book about the way ‘true’ facts are distorted. Long chapter using climate change as the penultimate illustration."

What I think about man-made climate change.

1. Climate research and policies are highly politicised and biased (due to $100 billion of funding so far for climate research and policies).

2. The negative consequences of warming are probably exaggerated, and the positive consequences probably underrated and under researched.

3. The prescribed cure is worse than the disease; the mitigation policies proposed to date would deliver no measurable change to the climate or sea levels but would cost the world dearly.

4. We have a very poor understanding of ECS [e.g. AR5 WG1 SPM “Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)”]. That is, our understanding of ECS is that it is somewhere in the range 1C - 6C. The large range is an indication of our lack of understanding of what it actually is. If we could actually determine it accurately, the range would be small at any given starting conditions; e.g. +/- 0.1C.

5. We have even less understanding of the damage function (the amount of damages and benefits per degree of global warming).

6. The world can reduce global GHG emissions over the next half century if it wants to. I expect it will do so without economically crippling policies; therefore, the consequences will not be as bad as the alarmists want us to believe.

7. The probability is low that the mitigation policies advocated by the alarmists for past 20+ years would succeed.

8. It is very likely that the climate scientists’ confidence in their projections is optimistic and overstated