Making a mountain out of molehill

By Elmer Beauregard

One month ago if you read the the main stream press headlines you would have thought the world was burning up. Global Warming was everywhere and it was worse then we thought.

Here are a few examples:

New York Times: Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years

Atlantic Times: We're Screwed: 11,000 Years' Worth of Climate Data Prove It

Courier Post Online: Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years

New Scientist: True face of climate's hockey stick graph revealed

All of this hysteria is based on this new Hockey Stick Chart made by Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University.

Then on March 17th Steven McIntyre started loosen the lug nuts of the global warming bus, noticed a problem with Marcott's data McIntyre also got a Hockey stick blade in the 20th century, the only problem is it's pointing down instead of up. This caused a lot of hubbub on the skeptical blogs but nothing was said by Marcott. Then on Easter Sunday Marcott responded with this blog entry on realclimate.com and produced a new chart seen below.

As you can see the blade of the Hockey Stick is pretty much gone, when asked about the difference in temperature in the 20th century Marcott said (emphasis added)

considering the temporal resolution of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval (Figure 1G) this difference is probably not robust.

At first glance I thought these are 2 completely different charts but on closer inspection they really are the same chart. In the animation below I use Marcott's Hockey Stick Chart as the base than superimpose his not so hockey stick close up of the last 130 years.

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One thing I noticed is that on the degrees side or X-Axis of the chart, there were 2 different scales, the first one only showed 2.5 degrees while the close up view was on a 7 degree scale. Then of course the first chart deals with 11,000 years or more while the second chart only deals 130 years.

In order to compare these two charts, I stretched the second chart vertically 280% and reduced it horizontally by 95%. By doing this it exaggerates the slope of the hockey stick blade by a whopping 5,600%, which will turn any uptick at all into a hockey stick.

For those of you without Flash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp5wWOLF7c8