Yes, clouds and cosmic rays are back, via the indefatiguable Svensmark, at arXiv. But excitingly there is an Antarctic twist, in that the clouds connection explains the “Antarctic climate anomaly, ie why Antarctic and rest-of-work are out of sync. Errrm, but are they? Its a common idea during glacial periods, but Svensmark wants it to be true on shorter timescales so that it can’t be ocean forcing. See his fig 1. So (ignoring the fact that it clearly doesn break down in the most recent past, which I don’t see him noting) there is a nice anti-correlation on longer scales. Which I was unaware of. But: if you plot d-o-18 (a temperature proxy instead) between NGRIP (greenland) and Epica Done C (antarctica) you get:
[Update: Axes are time in years (x) and delta-o-18 (y) in per mille - thanks to LL]
Which doesn’t show the same thing at all. Which may be why his paper is in arXiv rather than a journal?
Oh, and fig 4a, which claims to plot Antarctic temperatures over the last 100 years, is a great nonsense: there is not enough data available to do this. You can’t even pretend to do it before the IPY.
(NGRIP data from http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/NGRIP_d18O_50yrs.txt, EDC from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc_dd.txt; nb NGRIP offset by 45 per mille)
[Fairly similar stuff at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-4004.2007.48118.x?journalCode=aag . The dodgy Antarctic figure becomes fig 6]