The great majority of paleoclimatology is tied to the instrumental record as best as can be done, although some use nearby stations, some use climatological data, etc.--the uncomfortable truth is that no matter how hard one blogs, you cannot make long, well-calibrated instrumental records appear at the sites where you decide to collect an ice core or lake core or
tree ring, and the long instrumental records are almost never collected in places suitable for ice-coring or lake-coring or tree-ring coring, so some long-distance or otherwise relations must be sought. Really, a textbook on the subject would be a good place to start (check Paleoclimatology in the college library), or even better, see the free, online, authoritative report from the National Academies at
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676McIntyre is obviously an interested and dedicated individual, but does not sit in the mainstream of research on this topic, has not done too much refereed original research on it(primarily but not exclusively blogging), and is often (rightly or not) associated with one end of the political spectrum. If you are getting much information from such a source before checking
with, say, the National Academies, you are well off course for a
dispassionate consideration of the issues.
