Tarnsman said:

“The sun remains free of sunspots and most solar scientists are now predicting a very quiet sun for the near term. If the trend continues the AGW crowd is going to have some serious explaning to do as global temperatures behind to fall.”

Actually this is something that I find a bit disturbing. Take a look at the following (particularly note the lower plot):

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif

The Sun has not been behaving uniformly over the last century. The Sun was covered with sun spots in the 1960s (cycle #19) but relatively spot free in the 1910s (cycle #14). Notice that the integrated area of sun spots has been tending upwards over the last century. Also notice that the geometry of the top “butterfly chart” has changed significantly over the last century. Obviously the Sun drives the Earth’s weather. Has anyone really bothered to do a proper correlation between the Earth’s average surface temperature and solar activity? I did an Internet search on this topic and most sources were dismissive. Why does it make sense to simply dismiss this argument that global warming is solar driven when there has been this trend with sun spots? Likewise there are Milankovitch cycles, i.e. global warming and cooling due to variations in Earth’s orbital parameters like the precession of the equinox, orbital eccentricity and the angle of the Earth’s axis of rotation with its orbital plane (obliquity). Milankovitch cycles are known to cause changes in the Earth’s climate (one can actually measure it in rock strata). I just noticed that someone has deleted all reference to Milankovitch cycles from the Wikipedia article on “Global Warming”. If someone naively studies Global Warming on the Internet, they’ll probably only see the anthropogenic explanations.