Nicely put Matt!
The article was total junk with many errors.
Just like the US "intelligence" community consumed it's own misinformation, so too the denialist junk science is doing the rounds.
It is hard for the layman to tell real from junk as this is now so politicised

Agreed ozandy,

"Oh, you just believe in climate science because you're left wing, I don't buy all that junk". Blaaarrgh! Chemistry and physics are not political. ;-)

How sad that climate change debate is now down to a bulverism!

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

"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Pattern

The form of the Bulverism fallacy can be expressed as follows:

* You claim that A is true.
* Because of B, you personally desire that A should be true.
* Therefore, A is false.

or

* You claim that A is false.
* Because of B, you personally desire that A should be false.
* Therefore, A is true."

Obviously the responses to this are falling along ideological lines. Let me introduce some relatively new evidence: evidence on the extent of sea-ice.

Arctic: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

Antarctic: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png

It can be seen that the Arctic cover is below the pre-2000 20-year average but considerably above last year's figures. The Antarctic figures, meanwhile, are hitting a new high.

Claims that the Northern Hemisphere is warmer than average can therefore be viewed with some sympathy, though the trend appears to have petered out. The Southern Hemisphere is equally clearly cooling. So global warming credulists are still half right. Sort of.

Matt Andrews
From an article in Time, July 21 2009 which is a fair summary of the debate to date..
Dr. Svensmark and his colleagues found a correlation between the rate of incoming cosmic rays and the coverage of low-level clouds between 1984 and 2002. They have also found that cosmic ray levels, reflected in concentrations of various isotopes, correlate well with climate extending back thousands of years.

But other scientists found no such pattern with higher clouds, and some other observations seem inconsistent with the hypothesis.

Terry Sloan, a cosmic ray expert at the University of Lancaster in England, said if the idea were true, one would expect the cloud-generation effect to be greatest in the polar regions where the Earth’s magnetic field tends to funnel cosmic rays.

the big argument is that they are taking on Slone about cosmic rays in the polar region ect.
In any case I am not wedded to the cosmic ray suggestion. Its known that the sun and the earth's climate are linked but if you knock out cosmic rays then you have to look for another link.
From your graphs it is also clearly a better link than carbon dioxide. It certainly passes more tests.
As for temperatures sorry but there has most definitely been cooling. Your links clearly show temperatures dipping in the last few years. but in any case it uses GISS. GISS methodology and results have been called very seriously into question of late. There are four sites that track global temperatues Hadley, GISS, NOAA, UAH and RSS .. GISS is the odd one out in showing the peak in 2005 rather than 1998, although it also shows cooling since then. Hadley is the authority, and it shows cooling since about 2000-01 - albeit not a great deal. In any case this point has now been conceeded. The greenhouse proponents have now switched to arguing that the heat is going into the top metre of the oceans.. see the reply to the skeptics in the debate started by Senator Fielding

Matt Andrews your supercilious attitude does not endear you to anyone, learn some manners.
We have two opinions here that the Earth is either warming or cooling. Now my spin on this is that the people saying it's warming want me to pay a lot more tax and the people who say it is cooling do not want me to pay anymore tax. Hmmmm who do think is the opinion I trust here? Is it the pick pocket gypo's or people who believe I should be left alone? Correct I will trust the one who is not going to try and take my money.
Now lets hear from Matt Andrews about why I should have my hard earned thieved.

The usual toxic cocktail of hostility and strangling self-pity from Brain Eclipse, so nothing new to see there.

Congratulations on your article John. I note that as a substitute for intelligent response, Braino has paid you the respect of googling your name in order to assess your vulnerability to assault, launched an attack, and gone on to cast aspersions on High School Maths teachers. Perhaps he didn't do so well in the subject. I have the utmost respect for them on the whole.

I applaud OLO for maintaining what seems to be a democratic agenda of balance, something Total Eclipse obviously finds intolerable. As Matt Andrews says, nothing is proven in natural sciences. So I wonder why the hostile intolerance of those who remain skeptical of supposed certainties and curious about the uncertainties. And to echo my reading of Q&A, even if it was black and white, A + B in science does not = C when it comes to sensible policy. So let free and open debate flourish in the face of those like Brain Eclipsed who want it silenced.