New Hockey Stick Sent to the Permanent Penalty Box
Source: Heartland Institute 
The “4,000-year hockey stick” scare is over, after a shelf life that did not last a full month. The warmist-fawning media used the 4,000-year hockey stick to create one of the most intense global warming scares in recent memory, but it quickly died with a thud – just like so many asserted global warming scares before it.
A little-known scientist who had only recently completed his Ph.D. published a paper claiming proxy temperature reconstructions showed a 4,000-year decline in global temperatures until the twentieth century. The paper claimed the 4,000-year decline abruptly ended in the twentieth century as recent warmth obliterated the 4,000 years of cooling and placed the Earth at its warmest in the 4,000-year record. Moreover, the asserted rapid temperature spike during the past century appeared to be the sharpest in 11,000 years.
Immediately after the paper’s publication, the media and alarmist Web sites trumpeted the paper as a monumentally important, and frightening, development. “‘Rapid’ heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years,” the Associated Press claimed. “We’re screwed,” the Atlantic crassly proclaimed.
While the alarmists and their media allies predictably jumped off the cliff like lemmings before taking a closer look at the paper, its data, and its methodology, scientists quickly discovered major flaws in the paper. Most of the proxy data came from ocean beds rather than the terrestrial surface and were less reliable than other available proxy data. Much of the terrestrial proxy data came from previously discredited proxies manipulated by global warming activist Michael Mann. Much more reliable proxy data strongly contradicted the new paper’s assertions.
Climate expert Ross McKitrick this week in the Financial Post published perhaps the best summary of the spectacular death of the 4,000-year hockey stick paper. The final death blow of the paper, as McKitrick reports, is the author’s admission, “[The] 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”
Wow! According to the author of the paper himself, the very portion of the paper alarmists and the media have been proclaiming as the climatic equivalent of the Zombie Apocalypse “cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes.” So all we are left with is a temperature reconstruction that shows temperatures by 1900 A.D. had sunk to their coldest levels since the last ice age epoch ended 11,000 years ago. Perhaps maybe a little twentieth century global warming may have been just what the planet needed after all.
Prior posts on this bogus hockey stick
by James M. Taylor, J.D.
A little-known scientist who had only recently completed his Ph.D. published a paper claiming proxy temperature reconstructions showed a 4,000-year decline in global temperatures until the twentieth century. The paper claimed the 4,000-year decline abruptly ended in the twentieth century as recent warmth obliterated the 4,000 years of cooling and placed the Earth at its warmest in the 4,000-year record. Moreover, the asserted rapid temperature spike during the past century appeared to be the sharpest in 11,000 years.
Immediately after the paper’s publication, the media and alarmist Web sites trumpeted the paper as a monumentally important, and frightening, development. “‘Rapid’ heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years,” the Associated Press claimed. “We’re screwed,” the Atlantic crassly proclaimed.
While the alarmists and their media allies predictably jumped off the cliff like lemmings before taking a closer look at the paper, its data, and its methodology, scientists quickly discovered major flaws in the paper. Most of the proxy data came from ocean beds rather than the terrestrial surface and were less reliable than other available proxy data. Much of the terrestrial proxy data came from previously discredited proxies manipulated by global warming activist Michael Mann. Much more reliable proxy data strongly contradicted the new paper’s assertions.
Climate expert Ross McKitrick this week in the Financial Post published perhaps the best summary of the spectacular death of the 4,000-year hockey stick paper. The final death blow of the paper, as McKitrick reports, is the author’s admission, “[The] 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”
Wow! According to the author of the paper himself, the very portion of the paper alarmists and the media have been proclaiming as the climatic equivalent of the Zombie Apocalypse “cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes.” So all we are left with is a temperature reconstruction that shows temperatures by 1900 A.D. had sunk to their coldest levels since the last ice age epoch ended 11,000 years ago. Perhaps maybe a little twentieth century global warming may have been just what the planet needed after all.
Prior posts on this bogus hockey stick
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