The Hockey Stick, Reforged  

MIT Technology Review has published a few stupid columns (by their freeper-in-residence Richard Muller) about the mythical "broken hockey stick" in the past, so its good to see David Appell setting the record straight.

McIntyre and McKitrick have obtained a lot of attention for their attack on the hockey stick graph of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, which shows the average climate over the past millennia. (In fact, it shows a rapid rise between 1900 and 2000 after 900 years of relative stability.)

As you'll recall, M&M made a big stink out of their inability to replicate MBH's results, publishing in Geophysical Research Letters, which led to a major writeup in the Wall Street Journal. Neither McIntyre or McKitrick is a climatologist, and their results have always been in somewhat of a limbo.

Now Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code.

In fact, they found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their findings "contradict the assertion by McIntyre and McKitrick that 15th century global temperatures rival those of the late 20th century and therefore make the hockey stick-shaped graph inaccurate."