Bernie Lewin is in the blogging saddle again and has written a fascinating account of the early history of the millennial temperature reconstructions.
There is one temperature reconstruction of the last millennium that skeptics love to hate. And there is another that skeptics idolize in its place. The one is the ‘Hockey Stick’ northern hemisphere reconstruction, while the other appears as a schematic global trend line in the First Assessment Report of the IPCC. But neither graph is any good. They both obscure and distort the underlying science. Moreover, the skeptic’s idol itself usurped yet another dubious graph that reigned through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus, since global climate change anxiety emerged in the 1970s, we find a succession of three iconic millennium temperature graphs, each as different from the other as they are obscure in their scientific grounding. What is strange is that such plastic transformations are not found with the conventional reconstructions at smaller and larger timescales. The trend on the geological scale was only being refined over the same period. The large scale 100-year trend line has been more controversial. But both have maintained their general characteristics throughout the cooling and then warming alarm. So, what is it about the 1000-year timeframe? In the next couple of posts we uncover the origins of the two predecessors to the Hockey Stick. While the earliest version is as obscure in its origins as it is forgotten today (Part II not yet posted), the other remains the idol of the skeptic (Part I). And so smash it we do!
I'm not sure that the Lamb hockey stick is idolised as such, but this probing into the early history of the paleoclimate scene looks as though it will be pretty interesting. Read the whole thing.