A few points:
1. The data now apparently shows that the world has actually been in a slight cooling trend for the past 18 years.
No, they do not. That canard is solely based on the fact that 1998 remains the warmest year on record, disregarding that it was an El Nino year (which causes extra heating). Nine of the ten hottest recorded years have happened since 2000, and the total heat balance of the world (which includes the atmosphere and ocean) has increased.
2. My own hunch is that the climate is largely affected by the sun-spots. Even Eric Holder can't do much about that.
The Sun has a large effect on climate, as without it we wouldn't have one. The Sun, however, has gone through no significant changes (in total output or due to sunspots) that relate to the changes we have seen over the past 50 years. There are plenty of scientific papers about this, so we already know your hunch is incorrect.
3. The CT Dept of Environmental Protection published a study years ago showing that during the last Ice Age, the Ocean adjacent to Connecticut was 450 feet lower than it is today. The weight of the ice (over a mile thick) pushed the CT shore area down over 100 feet.
I'm not going to address this, except to point out that taking one cherry picked data point is a poor way to discuss this topic.
4. The NOAA graph goes back but 300 years. The CO2 has increased only 50% in that time. There was a time 500 million years ago (can't remember the name of the Age, but you can ask the Dept of Interior) when the concentration of carbon dioxide was over 100 times it's current concentration. Yet Nature has survived nicely.
So NOAA is not part of the fraud; just those who insist that the data in their graph proves that man is responsible for global warming.
The argument that "the climate always changes, therefore we have nothing to do with the current heating" is spurious. The Earth was undergoing a long cooling cycle, which has rapidly reversed in the past 100 years; the only change in the atmosphere that wasn't a "natural" occurrence is our dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. The Sun has nothing to do with this. The only large source of heating left is human.
And, the idea that it's a fraud is ludicrous. Thousands of scientists would have to be in on it, from nations all around the world (including US enemies). It's just not a credible argument, but it's made in an attempt to undercut the science data that opponents don't want to look at in totality.
Also, scientists aren't in this for the money, the resources they get to do research are just enough to do the research; very few of us make enough to become wealthy. A vast amount of money is involved in the oil economy, and keeping that dominant is a much more lucrative endeavor, which means a very large monetary incentive to undercut anything that would challenge that. That's why we see states like Oklahoma trying to stop solar power, because the oil lobby got them to pass laws. Somehow, people think that scientists have a larger financial interest in this than the oil industry, which is just flat wrong.
In the end, physics doesn't care what you think, it will do what it will do, and if you ignore it you will end up paying. Any kid who does something stupid and falls down knows this. Ignoring the heating, or pretending it's not happening, or attacking the messengers, won't matter when the ocean rises and Niku ends up underwater.
Reed