Settled science?: If Gavin Schmidt denies that we have global climate reconstructions going even 2,000 years back, how did Al Gore show us 650,000 years of "data"?

A Lively Debate on Climate Change - Green Blog - NYTimes.com

Lord Monckton also delved into the climate record, asserting that climate reconstructions from distant eras proved that the warming being experienced now was hardly unique, and thus no cause for concern.

“It is getting warmer, but it is not warmer than it was in the Middle Ages, or in the Roman period, or in the Minoan warm period, or in the Holocene warm period, 8,500 years ago,” he said.

But Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that knowledge of the world climate during these eras remains sketchy at best.

“There’s no global reconstruction that goes back to the Roman period. There’s no reconstruction that goes back to the Minoan warm period,” Mr. Schmidt said. “These things only exist in the fevered imaginings of the skeptics.”

650,000 years of CO2 and Temperature on Flickr - Photo Sharing!