miles, you write regarding butcherbirds post "It is a bit hard to have any faith in anything on the actual subject of global warming you have posted being factual and accurate and not just more wild baseless accusation on your part."
that is exactly how a lot of people feel about the whole justification for AGW. There are two aspects to the AGW claims, one being actual levels of CO2 or temperature, and the other being the rate of change. The "hockey stick" graph is the most dramatic argument and the one that gets peoples attention, with it pointing to imminent disaster. However for the hockey stick to be true it has to ignore the warming and cooling periods since the last ice age as the hockey stick is supposed to represent a reasonably constant temperature for the previous 900 years before starting to heat about 100 years ago. It can't be any other way, either the hockey stick is wrong or there was no medieval warming period followed by a cooling period. If you pick ANY graph that has plotted reconstructed temperatures over the last 2000 years, it is clear that there are numerous points on any of those graphs where other "hockey sticks" can be depicted. The rate of change that is supposedly happening now is represented many times, both up and down. In short, scientists at many points of time in the last 2000 years could have put together an almost identical case that the rate of change was pointing to imminent disaster. Don't take my word for it, do your own research, and with an open mind try and count how many times scientist in the past could have made exactly the same projections if they were looking at changes over decades or even a century, as what they are making now.
