Wood Romances

 For fun I've been collecting hockey sticks. The following are not complete, but I think they're pretty representative. In fact, I even collected the much maligned Loehle 2008 reconstruction, which has been the darling of contrarian "science." There are numerous issues with that reconstruction, which I document here , but I'm including it because doing so doesn't change the fact that all known temperature reconstructions covering anywhere from NH-extratropical temperatures to global mean temperatures have a hockey stick shape if you include the 21st century. I decided to break this up into three graphs, one showing GMST reconstructions, one showing NH and NH-extratropical reconstructions, and one showing NH-summer and/or NH-growing season reconstructions. I'm showing each with their respective instrumental counterparts (global, NH, and NH-summer). For reconstructions with annual resolution, those are shown faded, but I show running 10-year means for all of...

About 15 years ago a paper was published[1] that included a proxy reconstruction of extratropical Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last 2000 years. The graph included in the paper sometimes gets adapted by contrarians to give the impression that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today. Here's one example: The claim is then made that this is evidence or proof that Mann's hockey stick was a fraud, and scientists like Mann were actively trying to erase the Medieval Warm Period. Of course there are a few problems with this conclusion, beginning with the fact that it appears these people haven't even read the abstract of Ljungqvist's paper: Our temperature reconstruction agrees well with the reconstructions by Moberg et al. (2005) and Mann et al. (2008) with regard to the amplitude of the variability as well as the timing of warm and cold periods, except for the period c. ad 300–800, despite significant differences in both data coverage and methodology. Rather...