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I think it is pretty obvious that we can calculate the average height of an Australian male and also determine how that is changing over time, but that doesn't help me much if i want to know the height of the next person to walk through my door. The analysis doesn't offer that sort of predictive power. Similarly, this latest climate analysis won't tell us much about tomorrow but is better at predicting the annual averages in 10 or 20 years time.
Interestingly this analysis eschews climate models and simply compares the climate record to other established records such as solar output, volcanoes, ocean oscillations, CO2 concentration and CH4 concentration. They look for similarity in changes - correlation. They see cooling dips associated with explosive volcanism, the effect of the southern oscillation (el nino, la nina), Indian Ocean dipole and other ocean circulations but no variation associated with changes in solar output. However most of the change correlates to the increase in atmospheric CO2. That is, the CO2 curve and the temperature curve are the best match to each other. Of course correlation alone doesn't prove causation but when there is a powerful, robust explanation as to why one should cause the other the case is very strong.
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