But the messages [such as "– if the greatest uncertainties are in the >100 year band, then that is where the greatest uncertainties will be in the forcing experiments", or "...but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all)." etc.], do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

But then again how do you UNDERMINE a scientific case, if the scientific case didnt exist in the first place?

I wrote a comment on this but seriously doubt Nature will publish it. Olive is likely to censor comments almost as much as RealClimate. Here is the comment I posted:

Nature is doing itself a tremendous disservice by publishing any comment by Michael Mann. Your readers have read the emails for themselves.

If you did not read Mann’s editorial in Washington Post, you should. You should also read the comments of readers. The comments are running about 50-1 against Mann. The readers are quoting Mann’s emails and calling for him to be criminally prosecuted. And the readers are highly critical of Nature for Nature’s role in promoting Mann, Jones and the CRU team.

In my physicist opinion, all thermometers are proxies of the true defined scale: 0 is the freezing point of water at 1 atmosphere pressure and 100 is the boiling point of water at 1 atmosphere pressure. Then one draws the lines assuming that the proxy material is linearly representing temperature from 0 to 100.

Once you have an accurate thermometer, you calibrate others against it.

Now somebody came up with the idea that the tree ring width changes represent temperature changes. Before that tree rings were used for archeology and paleontology for chronology and to guess at wetness and nutrients etc ( sat through and archeometry lecture recently, you would be surprised how they extend backwards the time scales with tree rings, but that is another story). Where is the calibration of this brilliant idea to use tree ring widths as a thermometer?

Given this problem as a physicist, I would take trees with ages from when thermometers existed, and temperatures taken where the tree cores came from, reasonably close, and calibrate against the thermometer readings. Certainly the years 1960 to 2000 should be included, because we also have the satelite record of thermometry.

Instead we see that the best instrumental thermometer years are rejected, instead of used for calibration, and that is where the “fraud” accusation can be based, imo.

I would also draw your attention to the Nature publication of Helliker and Richter that says that:

“We show a remarkably constant leaf temperature of 21.4 plusminus 2.2 °C across 50° of latitude, from subtropical to boreal biomes. ”

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7203/full/nature07031.html

It is behind a paywall but there are several google articles out there on this.

This would mean that trees, particularly evergreens in forests would create an ambient temperature optimal for growth/life within a few degrees , the same as the human organism keeps a body temperature around 38 degrees. So even isotope ratios, another way of getting temperatures, would be useless as thermometers.

This would explain why tree ring “temperatures” are flat within errors, unless they pick a Yamal tree for hiding the decline.

There are bone relics from very ancient times but nobody has suggested to use them as proxy thermometers !.