If you know something about the satellite systems, you know you can check the facts. Someone altered these photos. Maybe Mr. Obamas folks.

False science rules again. Did Mr. Gore change these photos?

And with all respect, the temperature changes on other planets in our solar system don’t tell us anything about what to expect on our planet. I’m not even sure where that idea got started, but for goodness’ sake, just think about it: the orbits are different (both in terms of distance from the sun and eccentricity), the planet tilts are different, and the atmospheric compositions–what the bulk argument relating to “climate change” is over, as you might recall–are completely different.

Having said all that, comparing satellite photographs between two years makes a really great visual, but it doesn’t tell us anything about long-term trends — and long-term trends are the whole point. Climate change skeptics get rightly dinged for doing things like picking two years and saying “2008 was the coolest year on record since 1999! Global warming is thus disproved!” No, it isn’t, kids. If you pick any two years and draw a straight line between them, you can make it look like we’re all going to be freezing or boiling in 30 years depending on which two years you pick. That just ain’t the way trends work. Well, y’know what? You can’t prove global warming that way, either. Bad science is bad science no matter what point it’s trotted out in favor of.

As I said, it’s not too hard to go to Google to find charts of, y’know, actual long-term trends:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/ipcc2007/fig614.png

And there’s enough there to argue about. Different scientists come up with different plots. Modeling this stuff is complicated. But even in that chart, you can see that, yeah, they really _are_ taking into account solar radiative forcing. Something that I’ve noticed skeptics of all kinds seem to have trouble believing is that scientists by and large are not stupid people, and the chances are very, very, _very_ low that you, as a layman, even a very well-informed layman, are in fact _not_ seeing something in an afternoon that dozens of scientists studying a given subject for years — the same scientists who published the very chart you think you’ve found something new in — somehow missed. (This same logic also casts serious doubt on accusations of scientific fraud and coverup.)