If you look at the climactic history, it's obvious that some cyclic influence drives a long term (100,000 year) cycle. It is also obvious that CO2 and temperature have a close correlation.

I believe it's more likely that temperature drives CO2 than the other way around, since there are several mechanisms, astronomical and otherwise, that could drive temperature up and down. I can't think of any natural phenomenon that would drive CO2 up and down by itself to this extent, and then have temperature follow.

We just came out of the Little Ice Age, and it's not a large stretch to assume that temperatures would tend to rise after that. It's possible that having recent years be the warmest in 100 years is the equivalent of saying about a day in July that "it's the warmest day since January."

This long ago stopped being about science, and became a war of political dogma. Where I have trouble here is convincing anyone that scientists as political and self-serving as politicians. You'd think the recent stem-cell flap would have shown that. It's less a matter of lying than it is filtering data for a result you really want to be true. Oddly, nobody has any trouble believing scientists will tilt data to benefit a corporation, but won't do it to benefit their own careers.

Too many people think something appearing in a journal makes it gospel. This isn't true.

"Peer review" is overrated:

First, how can two (reasonably) well-regarded organisations peer review the same work -- Ewen and Pusztai's research on the effects of feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats -- and yet come to such radically opposite conclusions about its validity, as did the Royal Society and The Lancet? All six Royal Society reviewers pronounced the research "flawed", while five out of six of The Lancet's reviewers judged that Ewen and Pusztai's work should be published. Peer review as a reliable technique for assessing the validity of scientific data is surely discredited.

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability -- not the validity -- of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. A recent editorial in Nature* was right to conclude that an over-reliance on peer-reviewed publication "has disadvantages that should be countered by adequate provision of time and resources for independent assessment and, in the midst of controversies, publicly funded agencies providing comprehensive, reliable and prompt complementary information".

*Dangers of over-dependence on peer-reviewed publication, Nature 401, 387 - 387 (21 Oct 1999)

Extra points if you recognize the guy who wrote that, and why he did so in this context.