David Flick wrote:.
. Here's the latest on Michael Mann's broken hockey stick. Turns out that the University of Virginia was caught red-handed in telling lies. They lied about having Mann's documentation. Read about it below.
Hockey stick coverup, a sequelBy Lawrence Solomon
December 3, 2010 – 10:05 am
More fallout over the University of Virginia’s mysterious conduct concerning the infamous hockey stick graph, the UN icon that purported to show that temperatures were steady over the last thousand years before shooting up in the last century.
The University of Virginia, which employed Michael Mann, the graph’s creator, and which received government funding that financed research for the graph, has been fighting attempts by investigators to learn its exact role in the entire affair. One of its manoeuvres: falsely telling a state lawmaker who requested information under the Freedom of Information Act that it no longer had access to the documents he requested.
That falsehood came to light after state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli decided to use the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to compel the university to turn over documents related to Mann’s work. The university now admits it had the documents it refused to earlier divulge, but is still resisting handing them over.
Finish reading article here:
Another take in the battle of wordsIf the denailist machine wants to snoop through old email, they better be ready to open their email servers as well. Where's Wiki?
And through it all, when the
technical dust settled and Mann.etal redid their "reconstructions" without the Principle Components error in their 1998/9 papers, the facts remain that
the 20th century has seen the most rapid rise in temperature ever recorded in the paleoclimatic data as shown below:

More info about this plot given
here.
The hockey stick long handle is not straight, but the 20th century blade remains!
Note that this is the same plot as David's second reconstructed plot that he (and I) have linked before. He just doesn't look at it carefully for the conclusion (in
red above) that Mann, etal reached in their 1998/9 papers and subsequent reconstructions. The
rate of increase is obviously and more consistently greater in the 20th century that in the upswing to the Medieval Warming Period (MWP). BTW many/most scientists think the MWP was only local to Europe/Asia where the tree ring data/other proxy dtaa was gathered; it is not detected at other ice core sites.
Does David even realize that Mann's conclusions are about the
rates of temp increase not the magnitude - I doubt it. He continues to say the MWP was hotter than today (more on that below) misising the point being made. Since I choose to believe in David's basic integrity, I say he is just dumb, duped, and data-aversed not dishonest.
There is clearly better (more self-consistent) paleo data in the 1900-1960 period - it is striking in its agreement withn itself(within ~ 0.1C range) than at other periods like the MWP (within 0.4C range) or the Little Ice Age (within 0.7C range). By "range" I mean the delta between highest and lowest data point on the colored lines at a given timeframe. And it is in good agreement with the instrumental data (black line), ever since the instrumental data began in 1850 until 1960.
Now after 1960 the paleo reconstructions (not shown in the above due to the unreliability of tree ring settling) the temps diverge up and down - click below for plot (too big for BL format):
Plot with post 1960 paleo dataNow if you cannot see the
upward 20th century trends in the plot above and in the post 1960 plot linked, you are DATA blind; probably looking for what your pre-conceived wishes are whether you realise it or not.
Note that the reconstructions past 1960 are not considered valid by the paleo scientists not because they do not like the data (it still makes their case) but because they are honest enough to say tree rings take 50 years or more before they settle into a fixed tree ring spacing. This is the acknowledged "divergence" issue - acknowledged in Mann, etal's 1998 paper and all papers thereafter. That is why the first plot stops at 1960 (with an overlay of the much more reliable and precisely measured instrumental temp record- which is the most fundamental proof of GW). But the linked plot gives the 1960-2000 tree ring results anyway since detractors wanted to see it. But that didn't make the denialist case, so they are reverted to bitching about the Principle Component error that removed the MWP Mann's 1998/1999 and has been rectified since.
Now David likes to say the MWP temps were higher than today. Even that is not true according to the latest paleo data on which he rests his claim. Looking at the magnitudes of the paleo-based temps in 1960 (end of the color lines on the first plot above) the temp anomaly is higher than the temp during the MWP. Sure the highest blue line is more than the highest 1960 reconstructed data But a real data analysts/scientists looks first at the means (aka average). The average at the peak of the MWP is -0.15C while the average from the paleo data at 1960 is -0.10C.
Realize also that by 2004 (on that same temp scale) the global temp is +0.44C in 2004 and
will be over +0.6C in 2010 (off the scale). From Oct 09 through Sept 2010 it was +0.655C and Oct 10 was higher than Oct 09 (0.62 vs 0.60C).
Real DATA, read the explanations at top and bottom.
And above all of those facts, recognize the paleo data is not at all the lynchpin of GW, there are many other indicators that mankind has affected our climate.
several hockey sticksthe human fingerprintThe rhetoric and political grandstanding will go on (unfortunately), but the science is settled! And 97% of the scientists most published and most involved in GW studies agree according to not only one poll but two polls (posted many times herein).
Informed by Data.
Driven by the SPIRIT and JESUS’s Example.
Promoting the Kingdom of GOD on Earth.