Quote: Originally Posted by
Chris 
There are always temperature fluctuations from year to year, but the running mean is continuously upward. And the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere grows and grows. We have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere 39% in the last 200 years.
Running mean? You're kidding, right?
Temperature by year is a time-series: the measured data is the
real, actual data. When running a time-series analysis, any lay statistician knows that you never, under any circumstance, smooth the series through averaging. I mean surely, you must know that smoothing the data in a time-series can induce spurious signals—signals that look real to other analytical methods.
Statistical shortcomings aside, I am not questioning the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. I'm questioning the relevance of those increases, when other factors in the climate system have much more explanatory power in predicting temperatures.
Case-in-point: the North Pole was
never ice-free this year. As it turns out, we didn't "melt the pole in 50 short years" as a result of atmospheric CO2.