[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

More complex answer - any warming, cooling or steady state depends on the start and end points selected, as the UK Met office recently pointed out.

Sure, one "side" (see below) takes a reasonable pre-industrial temperature value, the other picks the warmest recent value out of a noisy data set.

Simple bottom line - we still don't know any measured temperatures are outside what has been experienced on the earth before.

Obviously, because the Earth has a long history, including periods like the Permian/Triassic, when (as best we can tell from scanty data) elevated CO2 came pretty close to wiping out all multicellular life.

[QUOTE[One amusing incident involved the chief scientist being snowed in at Heathrow on her way to the Rio conference to deliver a report on how warm the UK was getting - my how we all laughed.[/QUOTE]

And what exactly was the cause for laughter? Because "you all" are so stone ignorant that you don't know the difference between weather and climate?

This also makes a basic experiment - say a glass sphere filled with CO2 warmed by a light bulb Arragonis Junior was asked to perform at school recently - valid from a "basic physics" point of view but invalid when it comes to predicting what is or may be happening to the planet.

Wrong. It is perfectly valid. All that stuff you claim as problems? They're just short-term variations: no more than bumps and curves in the road that may change the ride, but don't affect the destination.

I would support more research into this, not a head in the sand stance is it ?

Yes, it is, because however interesting & potentially valuable such research might be, it doesn't change the basic science. Thus calling for "more research" is really nothing more than a way to convince people to put off dealing with the problem, which is just that same old head in the sand trick. Ignore it, and it won't happen.

Yep they are reconstructions. You take two periods of known temps and "thing you observe" (TYO). Using one period you create a mathematical model of one to the other - so you can determine temp from TYO.

Just as all temperatures are measured by a TYO. It's fundamentally the same as measuring it by the expansion of mercury in a glass tube, or the changing resistance in a bit of silicon. Only difference is that some TYOs become fixed, and can be read back later on.

Some are more accurate than others, some are more contraversial than others. The Hockey Stick, which seems to have disappeared recently, was one very complex reconstruction using all sorts of data - tree rings, sediments, ice cores. However some evidence seems to suggest it can't be reconstructed due to dodgy maths and some rather strange data handling - such as using one data set upside down.

Again, this is just plain horse manure. The so-called "Hockey Stick" has been tested over and over again. The only people who claim to find basic problems is - surprise! - those emotionally/financially wedded to the idea that increasing CO2 won't cause climate change. And (perhaps no surprise) it's their analyses that seem to be full of holes.

I would love to see this resolved with a debate from both sides, but I suspect its not going to happen.

There are no "sides". There are people who observe the science, and those who have a motive to deny the science, or who haven't examined it. Oddly enough, whenever honest skeptics actually examine some of the science, they wind up not being skeptics any more. See for instance the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.