Examining Climate Change Data for Yourself

Like a lot of people I have felt like I haven't really seen for myself what the facts are concerning the claim of human made climate change (ACC or anthropogenic climate change), only what others want me to see. Within the context of the corporate controlled media system, those points of view are heavily biased by pro-ACC and anti-ACC business influences. There is a lot of money being spent by oil companies such as Koch Oil Industries and their owners on persuading the public that ACC is a liberal hoax, and likewise 'green' businesses do very nicely out of public fear of ACC. I figure the only way to make in-roads to the truth of the matter is to look at available data for myself.

Now, I'm no scientist, though I am fairly scientifically literate, so sifting through research papers and trying to figure out the reality from studies of bacteria in cloud formations complete with complex calculus was too time consuming for me as a start point, so I thought I would look for the kind of data from which the reality ought to climb out of the screen waving a reality flag at me. Given the central proposition that humanity is causing global temperature rises I thought I would compare global population data with global temperature data, and yes I am aware of the phenomenon of 'heat islands' i.e. the distribution of temperature sensors being biased towards more densely populated areas, though I understand that studies have been done that exclude these 'heat islands' and that the average data is much the same. In fairness to critics, I haven't yet looked at that data for myself, but I thought the exercise I did which is laid out below was valid nonetheless, not withstanding discovering that the 'exclusion' studies are in fact being lied about.

A few years back I discovered an cool online tool called Wolfram-Alpha (free) which is a sort of information systems/science project to make easy use of avail science data. With the tool you can do all sorts of cool English based calcs like 'Norway GDP compared to UK GDP'. The following vid gives you a good idea of what I'm talking about:

 

I called up global temperature data using the terms 'Global Temperatures since 1850' since it covers most of the human population growth through the industrial revolution. The results include the following science datasets: 

Study	Description	Date
HadCRUT3vGL	Instrumental HadCRUT3v data from the Hadley Center and the Climate Research Unit	2006
Mann2003a	Historical records, ice cores, lake sediments, shells, tree rings; global mean surface reconstruction based on multi-proxy data	2003
Mann2008f	Corals, historical records, ice cores, lake sediments, speleothem, tree rings; 2000 year hemispheric and global surface temperature reconstructions	2008
NCDCGL	Instrumental global surface temperature anomalies from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Climatic Data Center	2006

Whether you regard these datasets as factual is down to you to determine, but I don't know of better sources of data so please write me if you do.

The combined graph looks like this:

As you can see the datasets roughly track each other so I picked the Mann2008f dataset as the temperature reconstruction from natural data implicitly smooths the data since those sources provide average temperatures, that had a smooth curve to simplify matters (though if you zoom in using Wolfram-Alpha you'll see it's not quite as smooth as it looks here). The advantage of the Mann data is that it doesn't suffer from the phenomenon of heat islands :

Interestingly you can see the 11 year solar cycle (I have drawn on the image for you to see) which we will just have to normalise (iron out) in our heads to see the trend without the solar influence.

In addition to this we need the global population data since 1850:

Overlaying the datasets (I had to stretch the population graph because of the different times scales) we get the following:

To me this paints a clear picture. Assuming the data is correct, this is not just correlation, as the correlation is too good. There is an obvious link between the two curves and it tracks the industrialisation of humanity extremely well. 

If you have better data please let me know.