EnviroSpin Watch

Jolly hockey sticks.....

Published this week:

Moberg, Anders, Wibjörn Karlén et al., 2005. 'Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.' Nature 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, February 10, 2005:

"A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing. These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data. Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data. Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model. According to our reconstruction, high temperatures—similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990—occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7 K below the average of 1961–90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue." [my italic]

Precisely. And this excellent work comes after these:

McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2005. 'Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significnace.' Geophysical Research Letters (in press);

Loehle, Craig, 2004a. 'Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data.' Ecological Modelling 171, No. 4, pp. 433-450, February 1, 2004;

Loehle, Craig, 2004b. 'Using Historical climate data to evaluate climate trends: issues of statistical inference.' Energy & Environment 15, No. 1, pp. 1-10, 2004;

McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2003. 'Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) 'Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series.'' Energy & Environment 14, No. 6, pp. 751-771, October 28, 2003;

Soon, Willie and Baliunas, Sallie, 2003a. 'Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years.' Climate Research 23, pp.89-110, January 31, 2003;

Soon, Willie, Sallie Baliunas, Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso and David R. Legates, 2003b. 'Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 Years: a reappraisal.' Energy & Environment 14, Nos 2 & 3, pp. 233-289, April 11, 2003.

"Sir, I need a new hockey stick. Mine is broken."

"Here's a tennis racket - you might do better with this."

"Love - 40!"

"Perhaps, not!"

Philip, off to broadcast.