Not to beat a dead horse with a hockey stick, but I found this comment by Mr. Gettings to be especially important: "In practice, we use boreholes that are deep enough to get the last 200-500 years, and we use an analysis method that looks for a pre-instrumental mean temperature. For the northern hemisphere, this indicates roughly 1C of warming in the last 200 years. Our more recent work (such as the paper referenced above) has been on reconciling the difference between the proxy results, which often show 0.5-0.6 C of warming, with our results." So there has been 1 C of warming in the last 200 years -- except that with their more recent research, that has dropped to 0.5 to 0.6 degrees. I repeat: How can such a tiny shift in 200 years result in all these supposedly catastrophic changes, even assuming humans are responsible? Is our ecosystem so finely balanced that it can't stand a change of half a degree over 200 years. Since the average temperature of the Arctic is -- who knows? But it must be really cold. How do you get from there (a degree or half a degree in 200 years) to here (man caused serious global warming that is melting the world's ice caps)? It seems ludicrous, yet everybody seems to subscribe to the theory and dump on anyone with doubts. Sorry to make anyone mad -- Joe