(click on charts to enlarge)
The extremist green movement is the principal driver behind the story that recent climate change is the result of humans - more specifically, the result of consumer/industrial fossil fuel emissions.
Indeed, the fringe greens claim that modern global warming is solely caused by CO2 from coal, oil and gas combustion. Plus, they claim that natural climate change has had almost zero influence on temperature changes over the past 30 years.
Yet, the empirical evidence from NOAA does not support those claims. In fact, one could surmise that the greens' claims are refuted in many instances.
Using the U.S. temperature dataset from NOAA, which represents evidence from the most comprehensive climate reporting system in the world, a reality-based version of past and present temperature change emerges.
[Ed: The US dataset is considered by experts to be the best instrumental northern hemisphere proxy of climate change available. The longest instrumental northern hemisphere proxy is the CET dataset from the UK, which represents a much narrower band of geography.]
Most recently, we know that the super El Nino produced a 3-month winter period (Dec-Feb) that reached its highest winter average ever by the end of Feb. 2016. And amazingly, using a larger subset of the same dataset, the 5-year temperature trend ending Feb. 2015 is actually negative, cooling at -3.5°F/century rate for 12-month periods.
Now, the 3-month warming event and 5-year trends are absolutely worthless as predictive tools, but for comparison purposes they can be instructive. For example, the 5-year trend ending in February 1935 was an extreme +28.6°F/century versus that recent -3.5°F/century trend.
Those 5-year periods are the first instructive clue that the early 20th century climate change was extremely powerful, without any influence from large CO2 emissions. The significantly higher early climate warming rates versus modern warming are not only unexplained by experts, but also by the computer climate models that have become known for being utter flops.
This has resulted in a lot of embarrassing hand-waving distractions and "don't look behind that curtain" responses.
Expanding on the comparison of natural versus modern warming rates, the chart on the left plots various per-century trends for US temperatures ending February 1935 (red curve) versus those periods ending February 2016 (aqua curve).
Note that in all cases (5yr, 10yr, 15yr, 20yr, 25yr and 30yr) the warming trends of the early 20th century natural climate change ending on Feb. 1935 exceed (sometimes by a lot) the modern warming trends ending Feb. 2016.
How can this be one might ask?
Well, in a nutshell, the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, which is at the center of modern climate-doomsday scenarios, cannot explain the powerful warming of the past. The AGW hypothesis essentially ignores the relevance, the strength and the significance of all natural climate change resulting from internal and external forces.
Thus, as previously mentioned, "experts" and computer simulated predictions have egregiously failed.
The AGW hypothesis is driven by the assumption that atmospheric CO2 levels produce the rapid accelerating warming trends that are so feared. However, if CO2 was the sole cause of global warming, then the chart on the right would be the supporting evidence, except it isn't.
The chart on the right plots changes in CO2 atmospheric levels for the the two comparison periods. Visually, the periods ending on Feb. 1935 and Feb. 2016, reveal the huge disconnect between the AGW hypothesis of CO2 climate warming and the actual evidence.
Over the last 30 years, the modern change in CO2 ppm levels is over 5 times greater than that experienced spanning the 30 years ending in Feb. 1935. Yet, as noted before, major period warming rates for the early 20th century easily exceed those of the modern CO2 "doomsday" era.
This past U.S. climate experience of extreme warming provides unequivocal evidence that natural climate change is variable and strong enough to easily explain the milder modern warming trends over the last 30 years.
In addition, this NOAA dataset also makes it perfectly clear that global climate change is not some simple linear function of human greenhouse gases, as proposed by low-information elites and media. On top of that, it is apparent that the greens' global warming is not really "global" for huge chunks of geography and populace at given times. (related: recent NOAA global dataset analysis)
As an aside, the press is constantly spreading the meme of the 'warmest', be it warmest day, month, quarter, year, decade and etc. Many times what they report is true in one sense but they forget to mention that it has been warming since the Little Ice Age. And today's reporters conveniently fail to mention that reporters of the 1930s' were saying the same for their period of extreme climate change.
Finally, NOAA reports that there exists a minor U.S. cooling trend of -0.7°F per century since 1999 - based on the past eighteen 12-month periods (18 non-calendar years) ending February.
Additional regional and global temperature charts.
Note: Source of U.S. NOAA temperature dataset (12-month periods ending February: choose 12-month time scale); modern CO2 dataset and pre-1958 CO2 dataset. Excel used to plot charts and to calculate temp trends and CO2 changes.