http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html

(And nope, I'm not a denialist; I just think your snide, dismissive tone toward the earlier poster is amusing. I suspect you will take the same tone with me. Go right ahead.)

I apologize if my tone was offensive to you. See below regarding the controversy over the emails.

Anonymous @ 6:28 PM, I apologize to you as well, if my tone was too snide.

Mark @ 10:30 PM has summarized well both the significance of the Medieval Warming Period and the confusion over how climate scientists use the word *contain* in discussing the data from around this period. The meanings of *trick* and *decline* were similarly misunderstood and taken as smoking guns. These critiques and the responses to them are recorded more completely elsewhere. This controversy over the stolen emails does not invalidate the data from Mann and/or Jones, nor is theirs the only data used to assess global temperature over time.

In particular:

The politician Al Gore has gotten very little wrong, because, unlike you Teabagger kitchen scientists, he always defers to the work of tens of thousands of scientists over decades of discovery, disputation and refinement.

Penn State's Michael Mann has been entirely vindicated of all the false charges you character assassins promulgate in your dittohead poison pen comments.

Phil Jones was not mired in Climategate – the scandal there, just as in the original Watergate, was that your chosen crowd committed break-ins for political dirty tricks. He is a crime victim, and you are the ones defending and supporting the criminals. Since East Anglia spends all its money on data and research, they have none to fight public relations wars against a despicable McCarthyite campaign waged on the fossil fuel industry's dime.

We are still in the Season of the Witches – as much as we were under the despotic George Bush regime – but the McCarthyites have simply spread out and attack by sniping from the roofs now that there is no longer a regime to supply them with tanks.

Mann (I think) was specifically quoted as wanting to *contain* the MWP, which is not the same thing at all. Any scientist in this or related fields would understand that what he meant was to put temporal bounds on it, in this case to find out when it began. The Mediaeval Warm Period has been discussed in paper after paper, several by Michael Mann. It's there in the data. Yet Mann is routinely accused of trying to eliminate or hide it.

What relevance does this have to the current subject? I'm not sure, except that you can blog all you want, but some people don't want to know and will be trying to misunderstand.

I am not a denialist either by the way. I just happen to have done some work on climate change, as a historian rather than a scientist.

It is evident to me that climate change is an extremely complex subject, and it is difficult to be sure that you have identified all the factors.

Again, any detailed data on the climate is very recent, not more than a century and a half old in the Middle East. But the available data does tend to confirm the existence of the Little Ice Age.

There may be methods coming up which will allow further back projection of the data, but they are not fully available yet.

In particular stalagmite deposit analysis is looking very promising for the Middle East. The initial results appear to show that precisely what we thought happened, did in fact.

Computer modelling is not an adequate substitute. Though I haven't yet had time to read the whole Jones and Mann article.

Of course, Jones and Mann, the authors of the paper you cite, are mired in controversy following the climategate scandal, but OK.

(And nope, I'm not a denialist; I just think your snide, dismissive tone toward the earlier poster is amusing. I suspect you will take the same tone with me. Go right ahead.)