Ian C -
No one has ever disputed that glaciers melt, and have always melted.
If you wish to deliberaly miss the point, then I'll leave you to do so with Frank and Daveman.
It's you who are being intellectually dishonest here. Ian has presented evidence of worldwide glacier retreat long before CO2 was ever an "issue". How does that HISTORICAL (I know, you guys don't like anything over 30 years old) data affect your interpretation of the AGW "theory".
I hate to bring up things over and over again (unlike Old Rocks) but there are some things that really strike a chord with me. Lonnie Thompson is a member of The Team who has done much of the ice core drilling in the last few decades. his group did an ice core in Alaska at the beginning of the new millenia and found to their dismay that the glacier was only about 2000 years old. other than one initial report to satisfy funding requirements, they have not published any findings and have blocked all efforts to have the data released. this is the sort of thing that really pisses me off. they were given large amounts of money to do a job and expand mankind's store of knowledge. when it didnt give the results that they wanted it just disappeared. who is to say that that data set doesnt hold the key to a new understanding of climate workings if only it was available for other scientists to use?
this is a common occurence. many of the tree ring data sets have been expanded in the last 20 or 30 years but if the new data set shows inconvenient results they just disappear. it is not only infuriating but also anti-science. the scientific method states that you should show all of your results, not just the ones that agree with your hypothesis. if medical researchers tried to get away with the bullshit that climate scientists consider standard practise tha medical researchers would be highly censured if not actually jailed for fraud.