[RightWhale]

It gets complicated right away when material conditions change at the surface, insulation, and in the rock, thermal conductivity. You are reduced to using machine solutions to the heat equation, and then to say that climate change seeps into the rock at 3 feet per year is probably an upper limit if there is any vegetative cover since summer/winter gets only 1 foot or less into the soil around here. Some places there is permafrost starting 20 feet down and going deeper and you have to think it got cold for a long time to freeze it that deep and deeper, and then think it has been a long time of climate evolution to thaw down only 20 feet so far. A real long time. Whatever effect we are having on all this is seems like would be undetectable.

[cogitator]

You bring up legitimate questions with regard to the
data; however, I expect that these are questions that
the scientists performing the analyses have had to answer,
as well. Perhaps holes that are drilled through
permafrost can't be used; not all of the Arctic is
covered with permafrost. To make an analogy with ice
cores, at the bottom of a glacier core the record gets
pretty distorted; it seems logical that the top of
a borehole log is pretty flaky, but that it smooths out
further down.