re: #987 keloyd

If you loosen up on the standards for accuracy, you can go back much further with (our word of the day!) proxies like how often certain prominent rivers froze. The Danube never freezes today. In Roman times, we know when it did because Germanic hordes would run across it and kill people and break stuff. Same for the Thames*, same for lots of civilized places. Result? - Roman times were cooler than today. the 1000s to 1300’s were very warm, then something like the 16th to 18th C were unusually cool, and THOSE swings were bigger than the slow and steady warming trend today, iirc.

*ah, just looked up on Wiki, they straightened, deepened, and narrowed the Thames in London, making it harder to freeze mid 19th C, but the records before that are good - impossible to misinterpret, skew, or spin.

Yes, that is what the science is all about. The phony part is when they claim to be able to reconstruct to a resolution of 1/10th of a degree based upon rough proxies, or extrapolate regional events to a global temperature.

Notice that when the result was warm, such as the medieval warming period, it is dismissed as a regional phenomena. But when the result supports the AGW meme, it is suddenly a global proxy to look at ice cores from one area or tree rings from one peninsular. That is where it all falls apart.