Detection and attribution of climate change, and understanding solar influence on climate

The detection of externally-forced climate change in observations, and its attribution to specific forcings, sounds simple enough to some people, but with others it has a reputation as a complex and arcane specialism. In fact, both these impressions have some truth - in principle it is no more than regressing expected patterns of climate change (normally obtained from GCM sim-ulations forced with observed or reconstructed past forcings) against the corresponding observa-tions, with uncertainty estimates that try to be as rigorous as possible, but there are many technical complexities.