The first half of 2007 is the warmest Jan-June period on record, +0.79°C above the long-term average (from NASA GISS data, via QuarkSoup.net).

For those who question the consensus on climate change, see the collection of proconsensus statements at Logical Science (hat tip: Michael Tobis). Just recently, my department (the Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University) unanimously adopted a statement endorsing the primary conclusions of the IPCC reports. See the statement here.

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In the scientific community, virtually no one believes that solar variations are the dominant driver of climate over the last few decades. However, among skeptics, this has been one of the last remaining shreds of hope for a non-human cause of climate change. New research, however, validates the doubt of the scientific community:

Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, a journal of Britain’s de-facto academy of sciences, the team said that the Sun had been less active since 1985, even though global temperatures have continued to rise.

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“Over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures,” they write.