It was cold in the 1930s, really it was (compared to now)

There's little if any quality control at WUWT. Blog-owner Anthony Watts doesn't have what it takes to do the job, according to his friend Willis Eschenbach. And I'm inclined to agree with Willis, which makes a change, since I don't often agree with him.

Today there's an unsophisticated article that Anthony's posted (archived here). It's by someone I've not come across before to my knowledge, Sheldon Walker. Sheldon is wanting to tell WUWT readers about the change in trends in global mean surface temperature since records began.

ICYMI - there's no stopping the rise in surface temperature!

In case you missed it (ICYMI), a couple of new papers have been published recently, demonstrating that there has not been any "pause" or "hiatus" in surface temperature in recent years. Yes, the rate of increase wasn't as high as it has been in some other periods. However these papers demonstrate that there was nothing different from what can be expected from a warming trend with interannual variability imposed on it.

Change points of global temperature: Cahill, Rahmstorf and Parnell

If you're a fan of realclimate.org (the benchmark of world best practice in climate blogs), then you might remember the change point analysis written up there last December, by Stefan Rahmstorf. The article was called "Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?" This new work looks to be on the same topic written as a peer-reviewed paper in IOP Science: "Change points of global temperature". It's open access so you can read it at your leisure.

Change points in global surface temperature: and by what magic is earth warming?

Quite often you'll read deniers claiming that the earth is warming by magic, or supernatural forces. No denier will ever use the words "magic" or "supernatural". They'll pick a euphemism, like "Little Ice Age" - though how an ice age caused warming I've yet to see anyone explain.

An ice age won't cause cooling or warming. An ice age is a state not a force. Sometimes a fake sceptic will add that it's because of a recovery from an ice age, as if warm was a natural state and cold an unnatural state. Yet that would require an explanation of how earth got into the unnatural state and what forced it out of that unnatural state. A lot of deniers think of climate as a bouncing ball minus the forcing that causes the ball to bounce. And they don't seem to mind that the bounce up in the global surface temperature is showing no sign of bouncing back down, although some of them swear that we're heading for an ice age - any day now.

Occasionally there'll be a vague explanation for the unnatural state, usually something to do with the sun - but with little enthusiasm.  (The sun may have played a minor role during the Little Ice Age, recent research points to the cause of it being heightened volcanic activity, which is thought to have driven changes in the ocean which caused more cooling. See papers below.) And when one asks, well what about the decline in solar forcing recently - why hasn't it cooled down? You'll be lucky to get a response.