Among the many tortures in store for us over the next years, John Shimkus(R-IL) or Joe Barton (R-TX) will most likely be holding hearings on the "fraud" of human-caused global warming, expressing apologies to God and/or BP for any doubts that have been expressed about their environmental stewardship. Now may be a good time to help spread a little information on what actually became of the recent uproar over "Climategate" and the famous hockey-stick reconstruction of the temperature record over the last millennium.
First, we need to be clear about the role of these millennial reconstructions of climate history. They play no direct role in the modeling of the last century's temperature, for which we have have a combination of good thermometry records and physics-based theory. (see e.g. my little primer) Why then does anybody care enough about the "hockey stick" graph (showing roughly constant temperature, T, until the rise over the last 100 years), to make a fuss about it?
continued at Daily Kos....
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