A mildly funny, but completely idiotic article; showing nothing, denying everything. Shame on you.

Where does On Line Opinion keep dredging up these fruitcakes from? It seems like every day recently we get an article on climate change that contains a succession of blatantly false claims, drawn apparently at random from the pool of endlessly recycled memes that circulate around the denialosphere. Each of these has been thoroughly rebutted many times; not one of them represents a challenge of any substance to mainstream climate science; and yet, zombie-like, they continue to live on and treated by many as if they were true.

This article is no exception. I started counting the number of errors in it (utterly false claims, or misleading statements that ignore the broader context or subsequent events) and found 18 on the first page.

The author neglects to mention the fundamental flaw in the theory that cosmic rays are driving global warming: <strong>cosmic radiation has shown no correlation with global temperatures since around 1970</strong>.

Matt Andrews accuses the author of many errors but mentions only one - that cosmic rays have not been tracking temperatures over the past few decades. Is there a link on that? Another aspect of the cosmic rays business is at the centre of a major scientific debate at the moment, but there's no hint of their failure or otherwise to track temperatures. Interested.
The articles on climate change keep on bobbing up because the science is still obviously open to question. The problem with the hypothesis that CO2 concentrations is linked to temperatures, is that it just doesn't stand up to any real scrutiny. Those who push this line are usually forced to argue that alright the earth's climate has changed substantially in past eons and up to 1940 (the agreed IPCC case is that the variations up to 1940 are natural), but the variations beyond that are artificial.
Then why haven't we seen any real change since the turn of the century, and why is it possible to say from the Hadley temperatue record that global temperatues have been declining over the past few years? The answer given to that one is that natural variations are masking the artificial signal. Well what's causing these natural variations? How can we seperate out that natural from the artifical changes?
The answer to that one is that we can use the models. But the only validation or test we have for the models is what is called back testing. (Matching against already known data.) The only time they have tried to forecast future developments they have failed miserably - temperatues are supposed to have increased over the past decade, not declined. The writer points to other failures.
Time to scratch carbon from the race.

Curmudgeon: all science is "open to question", that's what makes it science, as opposed, say, to religion which purports absolute truth. the rest of your comment just rehashes the usual silly bleatings.

"John Ridd is a retired secondary schoolteacher. For many years he was a member of the Moderation Committee of the Qld Board of Senior Secondary School Studies. John is co-author (with Santo Russo) of a series of Maths textbooks for Years 8/9/10."

Wow, Online Opinion's really scraping the bottom of the barrel to look for anti-science dogma these days! What's up OLO? Plimer's thread not enough for you? Got to go get a High School teacher to "debunk climate science"? I'd love to know what the agenda was here at OLO!

Nothing to "See or Tool" over here, move along, move along.

Curmudgeon, the big-picture situation with cosmic rays is nicely summarised here:

http://skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming.htm

This has a bit more detail:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/cosmic-rays-don%E2%80%99t-die-so-easily/

There's a lot more to the topic, and there's still some uncertainty about the role of cosmic rays with respect to low level clouds, but it's quite clear that cosmic rays cannot explain the current warming.

Re your questions "what's causing these natural variations? How can we seperate out that natural from the artifical changes?"

This area of climate science is described in terms of "forcings". A "forcing" is a particular influence on the climate; there are many, many forcings at play.

The major short term influences on temperature are ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), aerosol levels, solar variation (changes in the Sun's output), volcanoes (though their effect is very short term - usually only a few years at a time), and some others.

For a handy visual overview of the relative effect of forcings over the last century, see here:

http://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation-over-the-20th-Century.html

Re "why haven't we seen any real change since the turn of the century":

In fact, the climate has continued to warm over the last decade. This is an easy mistake to make, and it's not helped by the fact that most global temperature data (graphs) are presented in terms of annual averages. One-year averages are strongly dominated by short term variability such as El Nino. Step back a moment: what does the word "climate" mean? It actually means the long-term average of the weather, and this is generally defined in terms of periods of 30 years or more. Take a look at a graph of 30-year averages in global temperature (instead of annual averages) and you'll see that it has continued to rise steadily throughout this decade:

http://tbp.mattandrews.id.au/2009/07/16/the-graph-the-senator-and-the-weather-watchers/

Hope that helps.