You say:

Another problem with appealing to a natural recovery from the LIA is that temperature has now risen to levels higher than the assumed baseline climate. So even if some recovery were to be expected, why have we now exceeded it?

A climate skeptic might reply that it's like a pendulum swing.  After the drastic downward tip of the Little Ice Age, the climate is now overcorrecting,  How would you respond to that?

Thanks,

Ivriniel

Hi Ivriniel,

Sorry for the late reply.  I think I would just go back to the initial argument, there is just no evidence that the climate behaves like a pendulum.

A true sceptic does not abandon a comprehensive and well supported theory like those in modern climate science in favor of idle speculations.

"The problem with people who have no vices is that they tend to have some pretty annoying virtues." -- [paraphrased] Elizabeth Taylor

Because skeptics are people who question accepted beliefs.  I do believe in global warming, but I also like to be well informed.  Saying a statement like "there is just no evidence that the climate behaves like a pendulum" is simply ridiculous.  Have you ever looked at a graph of temperature over a long period of time... see how it goes back and forth.

Oh... thats what a pendulum does.

I don't really know either way. But neither do you.  The science behind the matter is too complex for people to compute in any reasonable amount of time so people saying the science defends their theory is like the claims of people with tremendous scientific, mathmatic or technological breakthroughs that other people just don't understand.  
Like the proof of Fermat's last theorem (I believe it was 100 pages of dense complex mathematics).  It was accepted, peer reviewed, and still accepted, and then later oops... no it wasn't right, but there is a correction paper that took over a year to write.  Which everybody now trusts.  There are numerous examples I could site of researches scientists and the like making claims that they truly believe in, which have later been revealed to be spurious.  

I say don't support what you don't truly understand.  You self admittedly do not have a firm grasp on the concepts (or at least the math) behind most of the claims.  

Which is why I argue against both sides on the issue and say we need to have better data before we "know" anything.  Because that is the only fact in the entire issue of global warming that is universally agreed upon.  

The Fermat proof was not peer reviewed prior to publication, it was only privately discussed with a collegue. The error was found during peer review.  

As to the pendulum point, looking at temperature over the last 420,000 years, although there is a large scale pattern, the intervening times are far from regular. If this is a pendulum, why do temperatures fall when they should be rising more or less smoothly?