The general state of the Earth's climate is a function of the amount of energy stored by the climate system. More specifically it can be stated that the Earth’s climate is regulated by the balance between the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun, in the form of light and ultraviolet radiation, and the amount of energy the Earth releases back to space, in the form of infrared heat energy. The basic causes of climate change involve any process that can alter this global energy balance. Scientists call this "climate forcing.” Climate forcing "forces" or induces the climate to change, although the acceleration or pace of the process is highly variable.

There are many climate forcing processes, but broadly speaking, they can be classified into internal and external types. External processes operate outside the planet Earth, and include changes in the global energy balance due to extraterrestrial factors like variations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and changes in the amount of energy received from the Sun. Internal processes operate from within the Earth's climate system, and include changes in the global energy balance due to changes in ocean circulation or changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Other climate forcing processes include the impacts of large volcanic eruptions, collisions with comets or meteorites etc. Luckily, the Earth is not hit by large comets or meteorites very often, perhaps every 20 to 30 million years or so, and therefore their associated climate changes occur rarely throughout Earth History. However, other causes of climate change influence the Earth on much shorter time scales, with changes sometimes occurring within a single generation. Indeed, our present oscillation of the composition of atmosphere due to emission of greenhouse gases may be causing the global climate to change with an increased trend of atmospheric temperature.

Many things affect the climate, including variable solar intensity, variable dust and cloud cover, long-term variations in the earth's orbital path and declination, land use factors, and apparent effects rooted in instrumentation errors or bias, etc. In the early days of climate change, it was hard to sort out GHGs from these other factors, and the scientific literature, including the UN IGPCC reports and as opposed to the popular literature and political statements, acknowledged this difficulty. However, the effects of GHGs are now quite clearly separable from the other effects and, again, the scientific literature generally does a good job of presenting that while the popular literature and politicians frequently show strong bias and lack of sophisticated understanding on both sides of the issue.

There remains a question as to whether GHG emissions are causing climate change or whether they are simply correlated. For example, people's height and weight show a general correlation, but gaining weight does not make you grow taller. There are two ways to demonstrate GHG is a major cause of climate change and not just correlated to it. One is to develop fundamental models with error bars and compare them to data. The second is to explore every other option and demonstrate that there are no alternative explanations. Both have been done quite convincingly in the last 7 years or so.

Consider:

1. Climate models do not limit forcing to anthropogenic effects. Instead they consider all known forcing, and in reference to the question, they include solar forcing because it is well known that this is important. Claiming that models are "blind" to solar forcing is a misrepresentation.

2. Climate models do not limit forecasts to anthropogenic climate change, but to all change whether it arises from natural or from anthropogenic forcing. The natural forcing is among the better known parts of the system because of the contribution from palaeoscience (the ice age cycle for example, which is strongly linked to solar forcing).

3. The climate system is exactly that: a system. When looking for climate change evidence it is inappropriate to look at individual indicators, and instead it is important to look at this at a system level. That is where models integrate evidence across a scope that anecdotal evidence cannot.

4. Where anecdotal evidence it chosen to argue for or against climate change, then it must be representative of the changes in the system, and an important part of this is the time frame. Climate change deals with the long term trends.

5. There is a wider community that is testing climate models by looking at the model skill in the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP). To claim that models cannot reconstruct past climate is a misrepresentation.

Climate models have made a big contribution in partitioning the main forces of climate change. Anthropogenic forcing trumps solar forcing right now, but improved understanding of any part of the system is obviously valuable, so better understanding of solar forcing is welcome. If this were to yield a better explanation to climate change then the new insight would immediately be incorporated in to climate models.

During the last few decades, rapidly increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have caused global warming, especially during 1906–2005, with an average increase in the global surface temperature of 0.74 °C ± 0.18 °C (IPCC, 2013). This increased temperature can substantially alter the hydrologic cycle, leading to increased extreme events (e.g., flood and droughts) and uncertainty in water availability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/346713a0.pdf

Everyone remembers hearing that "last year was the warmest year ever" or the "second warmest year ever" and the like.

This has been happening for the last 20 - 40 years. It simply can't be due to natural causes.

Everyone also is hearing that the amount of CO2 in the air is increasing at an alarming rate.

I can also add from my location that in this winter and last winter our sky is covered about 50 % of the time with fog. We never had so much fog before. This fog comes from the evaporation of the oceans, therefore, the oceans are warmer than normal. In our summers, the water vapour has increased a lot as well.

Therefore, we have warm oceans, more evaporation and more power in the air giving us powerful storms, hurricanes, wind, etc

Where is the problem?