Sam, that sort of blog post really scares me because a lot of people find them convincing. For such a long post, there's not a single logically valid claim made. I think the fact that this sort of argument is convincing to the general public really says a lot about the state of scientific literacy. I really don't know where to start in pointing out the errors.
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“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson... The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC 'consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz...
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Statements like this from "scientists" should immediately set off the BS alarm. Anthropogenic warming is a scientific theory, not a hypothesis. By definition it cannot "bit the dust" or "overturned in one fell swoop." At most, theories are revised with new evidence. They're only overturned extremely rarely and doing so requires disproving all of supporting evidence. Simply showing that one or two pieces of evidence are imperfect doesn't do that.
Furthermore, science is all about replication. A single paper saying that everyone else missed something does not mean that everyone else was wrong. It simply means that the new information needs to be investigated more to confirm who is right.
Beyond the fact that the rules of science haven't changed, it should raise a red flag when every paper that differs from the IPCC report (even if the differences are statistically insignificant) is touted as the one what will overturn everything.
On to the actual content:
The thing that really irks me the most about these blog posts is the blatant misrepresentation of what the authors state and what can be concluded from that.
This "revolutionary" paper by Schwartz is a great example of the disconnect between what the author says and what bloggers say. The paper makes no claim that the IPCC data is wrong or that the data produced is better. It's simply an experiment to see if a simpler climate modeling process can be used to get similar results. It's extremely ironic that skeptics are constantly complaining that existing models are too simple in how they model clouds and ocean currents, yet they cite this paper which treats the entire planet, land, sea, and sky, as if they have homogeneous properties and assumes a linear relationship between CO2 and temp. This method also can't reproduce real world data like more complex models can, which suggest that it's far from accurate. The author also even states that the upper edge of the predicted range would result in catastrophic warming, which is contrary to the bloggers' statements that it predicts insignificant warming.
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Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (LINK), noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped.
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He can claim this all he wants, but that doesn't make it true. The truth is in the data. I've already addressed this two or three times and even plotted out the data myself and I still haven't seen a statistically valid explanation for how to arrive at either a decreasing or static trend over land or water.
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...if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979...
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They are factored in and it doesn't erase the warming. Playing by those rules also throws the "no warming since 1998" argument out the window.