Anyone familiar with the global warming debate knows the following scientific “fact” with metaphysical certainty: temperature increases over the last century are unprecedented, at least when considered on a time-scale of the last 1,000 years. The 1990s were the warmest decade on record, with 1998 being the warmest year since temperature records began in 1861. This is known from the proverbial hockey stick graph, which shows a gradual cooling beginning around 1400 AD (the hockey stick handle) then a sharp warming starting about 1900 (the hockey stick blade). The graph was revolutionary, overturning widespread evidence adduced over many years confirming significant natural variability long before the advent of SUVs. The IPCC was so impressed that the hockey stick was featured prominently in its Third Assessment Report in 2001. Its truth was self-evident. Expressing agnosticism, even outright suspicion, of its validity was evidence of incompetence, or, worse, heresy. One of its authors, Dr. Michael Mann, confidently declared in 2003 that the hockey stick “is the indisputable consensus of the community of scientists actively involved in the research of climate variability and its causes.”

 

FACT: The “consensus” is disputable, has been disputed, and the “community of scientists actively involved in the research of climate variability” is taking notice. In an earth-shattering paper, mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, have exposed the hockey stick as statistical legerdemain. In the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters-the same journal, incidentally, that published a version of the hockey stick in 1999-Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick wrote that the program upon which the hockey stick is based “effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns.” In other words, even random and totally meaningless data produces a hockey stick. Moreover, when McIntyre and McKitrick corrected for other statistical errors, they found evidence of a Medieval Warm Period, in which temperatures were just as high as they are today. Professor Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley recently wrote that the findings “hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.” Dr. Hans von Storch, an IPCC contributing author and internationally renowned expert in climate statistics, said the hockey stick “contains assumptions that are not permissible. Methodologically it is wrong: rubbish.” He stressed that the hockey stick “has been elevated to the status truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”