It’s been a busy week for climate buffs and spin-meisters as the National Academy of Sciences released its eagerly awaited report on past climate change. Its origin is the scientific debate about the iconic “hockey stick,” the graph published by Michael Mann and colleagues that showed a smooth decline in temperature since A.D. 1000 with a sudden warming in the 20th century, presumably caused by burning of fossil fuels…
Global warming partisans, including some scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. science panel, embraced the hockey stick as “evidence” for greenhouse warming. This, even though the hockey stick denied the existence of natural climate fluctuations: the well-established Medieval Warm Period around A.D. 1000, when Vikings grew crops in Greenland, and the Little Ice Age, from about A.D. 1400 to A.D. 1850, when summer harvests failed and rivers and lakes froze over during severe winters.
There’s more on this in the article, and even more detail found at the Junk Science web site.