The Hockey Stick, the “Smoking Gun” for Man-made Global Warming, Miraculously Did Away with the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age

A team led by Professor Michael Mann of the University of Virginia (since departed for other, dare I say "greener" pastures) published a chart in Nature magazine in 1998 purporting to reconstruct global temperatures, showing a stable climate for six hundred years. In 1999 Mann extended the reconstruction to cover 1,000 years, showing temperature as having been stable throughout. This miraculously did away with well-established climatic phenomena known as the Medieval Warm Period, followed by a Little Ice Age. These phenomena, it turned out, actually did appear in his data, but didn't find their way into his representation.

The result was the "Hockey Stick" graph-so called because it appeared to resemble a hockey stick on its side, the shaft being a 900-year straight line followed by a spike in temperature-the blade. This confirmed everything the climate alarmists hoped for. It was touted as the "smoking gun" for Manmade global warming by establishing that, until human influence, climate was largely stable.

In 2001, the "IPCC Third Assessment Report" included the Hockey Stick, giving it prominent placement, in the Technical Summary, as well as the second page of the Summary for Policymakers (that section which has proven time and again to be the only one read by journalists or politicians and, as either a cause or effect of that truth, chock-full of alarmism not justified by the underlying work). In short, no one could possibly miss it. Of course, this reconstruction wildly contradicted the IPCC's own previous report, as well as extensive history and climate scholarship.

--Christopher C. Horner, Global Warming and Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007), 120.