Lies, damned lies and hockey sticks

Spiked
"On Easter Sunday, Marcott and his colleagues published a response on the Real Climate blog. Most notable was this comment: ‘Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the twentieth century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the twentieth-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.’
Wow.
In other words, all that stuff about having the highest temperatures for millennia and about eye-popping warming over the past 100 years appears to have no basis in the paper’s actual temperature reconstruction. As climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr points out, that correction/clarification needs to be trumpeted as loudly as the original claims were. Remove the twentieth-century portion of the reconstruction and it merely shows that temperatures have been falling overall for the past few thousand years. That doesn’t exactly support the case for urgent action on climate change, does it?"