Warmist astronomer Phil Plait: Our temperature hasn't leveled off; we know global warming is not due to the Sun

Big Picture Science: climate change denial on Fox News | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

[Warmist Phil Plait] Bastardi’s claim about this is truly weird; he claims Le Chatelier’s Principle is why Earth’s temperature has leveled off recently. That’s wrong because of the reason I just stated above, but also because of the small fact that our temperature hasn’t leveled off. This is a relatively new denier claim that’s been making the rounds, and it’s flatly (haha) wrong. The Earth’s temperature has been increasing steadily for quite some time, including the past few decades (2010 tied the year 2005 as the hottest year on record so far; note that both years are in the period where Bastardi claims the temperatures have leveled off).

And don’t even get me started on Bastardi’s claim that global warming is due to sunspots. That’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start! For starters, there is no correlation between the rise in temperatures and the solar cycle, sunspots can only barely affect our temperature, and our temperature has been rising despite the Sun’s recent unusually long period with no sunspots (sunspots actually increase the Sun’s energy output by a fraction of a percent). Basically, and simply put, we know global warming is not due to the Sun.

It doesn’t really matter what flavor of science you invoke: the Earth is warming, CO2 is behind it, and we’re the ones pumping it into the air at the rate of 30 billion tons per year, faster than our environment can absorb it.

Flashback: SunspotGate: Warmist Kevin Trenberth admits in an email that sunspots are an external forcing of our climate system; Romm publishes this admission, then deletes it

[Trenberth] The external radiative forcing of the climate system is mostly well known and comes from the changes in atmospheric composition (greenhouse gases) and the sun spot cycle etc.

Kevin Trenberth’s REAL travesty « Climate Sanity

[Trenberth, Oct '09] The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Flashback: UN IPCC Chair Unaware of Warming Absence

When asked about the fact that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 15 years, Pachauri became evasive. Even Phil Jones, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia and a prominent global warming alarmist, admitted this fact in the wake of Climategate.