Via Climate Progress, CNN's long time climate change skeptic and purveyor of every wingnut talking point on global warming in the book, Chad Myers, finally admits the truth:

Is it caused by man? Yes. Is it 100% caused by man? No. There are other things involved. We are now in the sun spot cycle. We are now in a very hot sun cycle. there are many other things going on. But, yes, a significant portion of this is caused by greenhouse gases keeping heat on the shore, on the land, in the atmosphere that could have escaped without those greenhouse gases, so, yes, it’s warmer. . ..

No doubt we're now supposed to applaud Myers for ending his long reign of misinformation and energy industry apologetic -- assuming that is what this signals -- and just forgive him. Which might still be possible, but would have been a lot easier if not for the stuff I've emphasized above. And that kind of material is all too representative of the ghost of Myers' past denial. That bold statement is not only wrong, it's not just a common, discredited climate change denier talking point, it is 100% empirically wrong. Below are the sunspot and solar irradiance cycles plotted on the same graph courtesy of NASA.



As you can see, both sunpots and solar irradiance move together and both are just barely coming out of a deep minimum. The sun has been in the coolest part of its cycle, with the least number of sunspots, for the last two years (2010 hasn't finished out yet, but record heat on top of the recent solar minimum is yet another reason to be worried). In meteorology circles, this is high school level stuff. Which means either Myers, who is CNN's purported national weather expert, has a poor understanding of the science in his field, or he intentionally lied on "America's most trusted" news network.