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Benno Hansen

'The hockey stick is broken' | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist - 1 views

gristmill.grist.org/...236

climate change global warming climatology hockey stick graph methodology science

shared by Benno Hansen on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Study of the past can be informative for scientists, but it is not explanatory of the present nor is it predictive of the future.
  • The infamous "Hockey Stick" graph was featured prominently in the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers.
  • Two Canadians, an economist and a petroleum geologist, took it upon themselves to verify this proxy reconstruction by getting the data and examining the methodology for themselves. They found errors in the description published in Nature of the data used -- errors that prevented them from duplicating the study. Mann et al., the hockey stick's creators, published a correction in Nature, noting where the description did not match what had actually been done.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The fact is, there are dozens of other temperature reconstructions. They tend to show more variability than the original hockey stick (their sticks are not as straight), but they all support the general conclusions the IPCC TAR presented in 2001: late 20th century warming is anomalous in the last one or two thousand years, and the 1990s were likely warmer than any other time in that period.
  • dozens of other proxy reconstructions, some by the same team or involving some of its members, some by completely different people, some using tree rings, some using corals, some using stalagmites, some using borehole measurements -- all supporting the same general conclusion. That general conclusion is what's important to me, not whether or not one Bristlecone pine was or was not included correctly in a single eight-year-old study.
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