Im wondering if those that claim that the world is now cooling and has been since 1998 have actually looked at the data points. You can easily find them - google 'global average temperatures'.

The global avereage temperature has significant year to year variability, this noise needs to be taken into account when looking for trends. There are statistical methods to do this precisely.

A less precise way to discern a trend is just to look at a graph. It is patently obvious when you look at the data over the last 20, 50 or 100 years that the trend is upwards.

A good analogy is a set of monthly sales figures. Some months are high and others are low. If last month was a great month and this month was only slightly above average a naive interpretation would be that sales have started falling. To discern the trend you need to smooth out the spikes and look at a bigger data set.

However, a simple visual analysis is never good enough - even when the trends appear obvious. To be certain you have to do the mathematics.

No one has produced any mathematics that shows a cooling trend. If you can do this and are posting your result in here I suggest you are using the wrong forum - you should be sending your results to the science journals. If you have already published such data, or know of soemone that has, please indicate where it is.

Until the skeptics can show some real evidence to support their opinion that we are in a cooling trend they do not have a leg to stand on.

Bazz,

I'll wager no one will answer your question. The odds any who can with authority (ie a climate scientist, or someone who spent the man months required to make sense of the science) isn't going to bother as they have answered the same question several times before and have tired of playing the game. Their answers are probably on the web somewhere.

As for someone like me who is just a pleb but nonetheless thinks on the balance of probabilities you are wrong - not this time. I would actually like to know the answer myself, but to get the answer would take me hours upon hours of effort on the web, with breaks in between to absorb and ponder what I had seen. I'd probably even enjoy doing it, but I simply don't have the time.

I am left with the rather unsatisfying position to just accepting the scientific consensus on the subject. Unsatisfying perhaps, but not unreasonable - I am just putting my faith in the experts. If I see someone like you say all the experts are wrong my reaction is "remarkable claims require remarkable evidence". You of course aren't offering much in the way of evidence, so I loose interest very quickly.

Yes CO2 effect on GW is logarithmic. This is well known and obviously has been taken account of in the climate models. To make the simplistic claim they haven't is just absurd. But to give you a pointer, the to your question lies in those models. Look at them, understand them, and you will find what you are looking for. There is a list of the more popular ones on Wikipedia, as always.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_model

"Im wondering if those that claim that the world is now cooling and has been since 1998 have actually looked at the data points. You can easily find them - google 'global average temperatures'."

You can also find useful graphs here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

along with NASA's analysis:

"'Global warming stopped in 1998,' has become a recent mantra of those who wish to deny the reality of human-caused global warming. The continued rapid increase of the five-year running mean temperature exposes this assertion as nonsense. In reality, global temperature jumped two standard deviations above the trend line in 1998 because the "El Niño of the century" coincided with the calendar year, but there has been no lessening of the underlying warming trend.

You can't start a graph in the 1880s and pretend that it proves global warming. It's like leaving out either side of a bell curve and pointing to it as proof of...well, anything.

No human-induced GW skeptic is claiming that temperatures haven't increased since the late 1800s, it's obvious they have. The burden of proof is on the IPCC and others who are pushing the AGW barrow to prove that this rise is anything other than part of a natural cycle and in particular that it is caused by humans.

Look at the 2 graphs pictured in this article:
http://climate.blog.co.uk/2006/11/11/lying_made_easy~1318827
they are both from IPCC reports. The first one is from their 1996 report, but it was very bad at indicating any unusual warming trend, so in their 2001 report they dumped it and used the second graph pictured. It certainly goes much further in helping their cause, but it is also the product of extremely inventive 'science'. When a body fractures and obfuscates data this much in an effort to back up their conclusions it makes me seriously question their motives.

hadz wrote: "Look at the 2 graphs pictured in this article"

No, go to the real peer-reviewed climate science journals and stop reading junk science, distortions and lies.

hadz wrote: "their conclusions it makes me seriously question their motives."

Kooky blogs that deliberately misrepresent the facts makes me seriously question their motives. For example writing this: "tucking it away in a folder marked ‘censored data’" without explaining that 'censored' data has a specific meaning in statistics that has nothing to do with the grand conspiracy theories put about by the flat-Earthers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censoring_(statistics)

So sams are you saying those 2 graphs aren't from the respective IPCC reports that I was referring to?

You can't debunk my argument based on the fact that the 2 graphs are in a blog that you don't like. I linked to the blog because it had both graphs pictured in an easily linked to format. (I found that blog with a quick google search for the images actually; I was aware of the data-mangling hockey-stick chart replacing the more cyclic graph that doesn't help IPCC's cause long before I found this article/blog)