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The peer-review of the blogging scientific community isn't very impressed with this one.

Ah yes... Good ol' Rabid Rabett. Eli Rabett is hardly the objective voice in this discussion, and in fact is one of the most rabid pushers of global warming theory. He and Gavin and others often make hand-wave arguments against dissenters, then constantly subsequently refer to said hand-wave arguments as having conclusively debunked the claim, thereby rendering the dissenter as forever discredited.

The issue of questioning the relevancy of the term Global Mean Temperature is a very valid and valuable endeavor. It is quite true that in such a heterogenous chaotic system such as the earth's climate, that measuring changes in some global mean has little, if any, value. The truth is there is no significant global warming. There is, however, significant regional warming, particularly in some of the polar regions and higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Outside of these regions, warming, if any, has been quite minimal, and even in some locations it has cooled (AR4 SPM).

So the question has to be asked... Why has such an importance been placed upon changes in some global mean temperature, when the warming has been fairly isolated to particular regions? It's like holding your bare foot over a campfire and worrying mostly about how it affects the increase in temperature of your whole body rather than the extreme combustion of flesh that is occurring on your foot. It doesn't make much sense. Unless, of course, you have a strong desire to blame everything on CO2. We know that CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas, as are the other main GHG players. It is peculiar to me why, when CO2 and other GHG mix so well to the point of being nearly homogeneously distributed in an otherwise heterogeneous system, that temperature anomalies are so heterogeneous. I am truly interested in your take, Cog, on why well-mixed GHG's don't produce a more homogeneous anomaly pattern.

My first two thoughts would be the dissimilarity of oceanic circulation in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, and the related dissimilarity in the distribution of continental landmass in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

And the combined, global, land-sea temperature anomaly record DOES show warming. There is less in the Southern Hemisphere; partly due to the thermal inertia of the major mass of the southern Pacific Ocean, I would think.