Natural temperature measurements also confirm the general accuracy of the instrumental temperature record.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If it is that proxies and thermometers agree then you are wrong. The temperature reconstructed from tree rings did not agree with (was lower than) the thermometers in the 20th century and so "Mike's Nature trick" was used to splice on the thermometer data the help create the hockey stick.
That link won't load so I don't know what data you are trying to supply. I have seen studies saying that there is a large difference.
Given the strong causal link between CO2 and warming
No, there is no significant causal link between CO2 & recent global warming. There is a relatively weak correlation, and there is the fact that CO2 can delay the release of heat to space. This does not mean that atmospheric CO2 is a significant cause of recent warming.
The globe has been warming for several hundred years, since the Little Ice Age, well before there was a significant amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere.
what are we to make of periods where CO2 does not correlate with temperature? The most commonly cited example is the recent years since 2002.
IME the most commonly quoted period is the 17 years from 1997 to 2016, see
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2016/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2016/trend
when not only was there no correlation but the trend was flat. That is longer than any of the models predicted
beforehand and longer than the 15 years that experts said could be expected when that pause started.
Subsequently models have been changed so that they can hindcast this sort of pause, essentially admitting that they were wrong before this.
However, this is a short period as far as climate trends are concerned.
Yes, but all of the good data is for a short period. Anything longer than 30-40 years is either poor quality of not global. All of the really long-term 'data' is inferred from things that are not just measuring temperature, e.g. tree rings.
There have been 7 major studies of consensus on ACC.
4 studies gave 97% consensus, 1 gave 100% and other 2 vary between 91 and 93%.
There is a very strong correlation between climate science expertise and consensus.
The original figure came from Doran & Zimmerman and people have tried to confirm that rather than looking for an answer from scratch. AFAIUI all of these studies have been flawed. For example, Cook et all got a hand picked group of amateurs to review paper abstracts and when half the reviewers quit and the the others could not pick up the slack they let them look up the the paper's authors (totally against the published protocols) to help them decide what the authors thought.
That study came up with a 97% figure but when the data was independently reviewed it was found the true number was 1.6%. The rest were papers that had 'implicitly supported' the idea. Basically if the paper did not say NO then it was counted as a yes, even though most papers actually did not comment.
And, as I said before, science is not a popularity contest. All of the experts have been wrong before and they can be wrong in this case.
Also, at the moment the only way to get funding in this area is to promote the CAGW line. Anyone who does not want to do that will not do research in that field.