It describes paleoclimatic evidence that shows why the sun hasn’t been the dominant climate forcing in the recent past, or across the last 65 million years.

He falsely claims to be a Nobel laureate (and has also falsely claimed to be a member of the UK House of Lords). He “contends that he won the Falklands war for Britain by persuading the British government to use biological warfare.” He also claims to be “responsible for invention and development of a broad-spectrum cure for infectious diseases. Patents have now been filed. Patients have been cured of various infectious diseases, including Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, food poisoning, and HIV.”

Monbiot has a number of other examples of why this isn’t a man we should be taking seriously on any matter of importance, much less something as technical and important as climate change.

If someone thinks they have evidence that demonstrates how observed warming could have been induced by solar phenomena, I encourage them to submit it to an appropriate journal for peer-review.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for manmade global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to AIDS. “

But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto!—physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is “unequivocal,” which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn’t take place, I’m sure we’d have a robust debate about it right now.”

Rubbish.

No credible scientific data support this claim. When solar output is at its highest in the 11-year sunspot cycle, as it was about half a dozen years ago, the sun warms the planet’s surface about a third of a watt per square metre more than it does when solar output is at its minimum, as it is right now. This tiny shift in the solar flux is swamped by the extra three watts per square metre produced by the greenhouse gases humans have already emitted. In fact, since the late 1970s, when direct satellite measurement of solar radiation became available, these small changes in solar output have been cooling Earth at precisely the time when global warming has been accelerating.

Time-series of solar irradiance alongside the net effect of greenhouse gas emissions

I think this discussion has now reached its point of exhaustion. Dan is unwilling to explain why he made the mathematical choices he did and unwilling to submit his work for review by scientists. Peer-reviewed and published data and analysis on climate change take into account solar factors, and does not conclude that observed temperature increases can be explained by that means.

No. The incoming solar radiation has been almost constant over the past 50 years, apart from the well-known 11-year solar cycle (Figure 5). In fact it has slightly decreased over this period. In addition, over the past three years the brightness of the sun has reached an all-time low since the beginning of satellite measurements in the 1970s (Lockwood and Fröhlich 2007, 2008). But this natural cooling effect was more than a factor of ten smaller than the effect of increasing greenhouse gases, so it has not noticeably slowed down global warming. Also, winters are warming more rapidly than summers, and overnight minimum temperatures have warmed more rapidly than the daytime maxima – exactly the opposite of what would be the case if the sun were causing the warming. Other natural factors, like volcanic eruptions or El Niño events, have only caused short-term temperature variations over time spans of a few years, but cannot explain any longer-term climatic trends (e.g., Lean and Rind 2008).

Figure 5. (below) Time-series of solar irradiance alongside the net effect of greenhouse gas emissions (the latter relative to the year 1880; using Meehl et al. 2004) calculated in terms of total estimated impact on global air temperatures; observed from 1970-2008; and projected from 2009-2030 (adapted from Lean and Rind 2009).

Are you just scaling and shifting functions arbitrarily so that random data fits some sort of average temperature graph?

If so, how have you come to the conclusion that this is mathematically appropriate? What are the units of your coefficients (and what do they imply)?

What has the first law of thermodynamics got to do with anything? It’s not as though the Earth and its atmosphere are closed systems from an energy standpoint (which would nullify your argument that we should consider the first law of thermodynamics [essentially the conservation of energy]).

Finally, you keep mentioning a time-integral of sunspots. What specifically are you integrating with respect to time? Number of sunspots? What are the final units? Why would we expect sunspots to have a cumulative effect on the Earth’s atmosphere? (The effect would have to cumulative if you’re integrating over time).

This engineer thinks you don’t know what you’re on about.

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent in futile efforts to prove that added CO2 caused Global Warming while an unpaid [crackpot] engineer has discovered what really caused the temperature run-up in the 20th century.

This right here sums it up. Organizations with infinitely more resources than yourself have considered sunspots and have found no scientifically rigorous correlation. Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool with some really great graphing functions which apparently you’ve put to good [figuratively] use. It just helps to know what the heck you’re graphing with it.

A least squares line fit to the separation data reveals that this separation has been growing at an average rate of about 2% per year since 2000.

Would you like to post your data, or at least quote your sources so that I can check them? Could you please also include your standard deviation estimates?