G'day Mike,
Just a quick comment (which knowing how I type will end up being 16 pages LOL). Anyone that studies past climate will tell you nature is not an entity. It does not "try" to do anything. There is no "balance" to climate. There are temporarily stable states that actually turn out to be not all that stable.
The really big mystery of climate studies is just why deglaciations (the switch that happens every once and a while during an Ice Age and happened a bit over 11,000 years ago) suddenly occur or why the opposite then happens a few thousand years later and the glacial period then lasts for so much longer than the interglacial period.
You want to suggest what feedback mechanisms obscure global warming in the last few years. I'm really interested in this aspect of what I call "excuse science" (rather a derogatory term but if someone comes up with a reason why their overall theory is still right despite the observed evidence no longer fitting it really starts to sound like nothing more than an excuse). To fit excuse science, the excuse has to be opinion rather than research, not corroborated with any real evidence, and not accepted by the original researchers that the excuse is aimed at demonstrating they missed some important point. It may well be a valid excuse by the way, but cannot be trusted on its own.
Satellite data can't be trusted because our models show that global warming will cause cooling. Oh, the US data shows cooling because our models show that global warming will produce regional cooling. The Antarctica obviously will get thicker ice coverage during global warming because global warming will cause more precipitation (that one really is a bit rich since the people using it generally know that there has been no change in precipitation rates in the Antarctica for 50 years). The balloons were not properly shielded so they warm up during the day in the 70s creating higher base temperatures (the shielding one really is reaching, the balloon data perfectly matches the satellite data which does not have a similar error in the 70s and the alleged shielding deficiencies were only for a short period).
Regards
Richard
