Hockey Stick? What Hockey Stick? - WEBCommentary

AN EXTRAORDINARY SERIES of postings at www.climateaudit.org, the deservedly welltrafficked
website of the courageous and tenacious Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, is a
remarkable indictment of the corruption and cynicism that is rife among the alarmist climate
scientists favored by the UN’s discredited climate panel, the IPCC.
In laymen’s language, the present paper respectfully summarizes Steve McIntyre’s account of the
systematically dishonest manner in which the “hockey-stick” graph falsely showing that today’s
temperatures are warmer than those that prevailed during the medieval climate optimum was fabricated
in 1998/9, adopted as the poster-child of climate panic by the IPCC in its 2001 climate assessment, and
then retained in its 2007 assessment report despite having been demolished in the scientific literature.
It is a long tale, but well worth following. No one who reads it will ever again trust the IPCC or the
“scientists” and environmental extremists who author its climate assessments.
At some time or another, most people will have seen the hockey stick – the iconic graph which purports
to show that, after centuries of stable temperatures, the second half of the 20th century saw a sudden
and unprecedented warming of the northern hemisphere – a warming caused, we were told, by
humankind burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere –
The IPCC’s infamous and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph that falsely abolished the medieval warm period and
enhanced by at least half the true temperature increase since 1980, giving the misleading impression that temperatures in
the latter half of the 20 th century were unprecedented in the recent history of the Earth. In fact, temperatures were warmer
than the present for almost two-thirds of the past 10,000 years – most recently during the “medieval climate optimum”, a
warm period from about 950 to 1350 A.D. The “hockey stick” appeared in the IPCC’s 2001 assessment report six times,
and in full color, the only graph to be so favored. The graph was not based on science. It was a political statement.
Very briefly, we shall summarize the earlier stages in the campaign of disfiguring machination on the
part of the climate “scientists” who – but for Steve McIntyre and his colleague Professor Ross
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