When sceptics look at statistical data, whether it is recent ice melt, deep sea temperatures, current trend in global surface temperatures, troposphere temperatures,
ice core records etc. they look at the data as it is without any pre-conceptions and describe what it says.
Not exact matches
Global cooling after volcanic eruptions has been
recorded in
ice core data and thermometers,: 1809, 1815, 1883, 1980
etc. and others.
There are also a number of paleoclimatic recorders of oxygen isotopes, including lake / ocean
records, speleothems (in caves), corals,
ice cores,
etc..
Now, no - one thinks that tree ring
records have millennial scale non-climatic trends (their problem is precisely the opposite, that the multi-century scale climate trends might be damped), the same is true for
ice cores etc..
Now the locations of avaialble proxy data (tree rings,
ice cores, ocean sediment
records, corals
etc.) are not necessarily optimally spread out, but the spatial sampling error is actually quite easy to calculate, and goes into the error bars shown on most reconstructions.
There are also a number of paleoclimatic recorders of oxygen isotopes, including lake / ocean
records, speleothems (in caves), corals,
ice cores,
etc..
Figure 1: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic
records (tree rings, corals,
ice cores, lake sediments,
etc.), along with historical and long instrumental
records (WMO 2000).
I recall more than one guest lecture at our physics department's Centre for Global Change Studies displaying a graph of spectral analysis of temperature histories, with data from multiple time scale sources including thermometer
records,
ice core data,
etc..