Hockey Stick “Hokum” & “Consensus”
The “Hockey Stick” Drives Conservatives Crazy The Wall Street Journey (my favorite newspaper) and its Editorial Page (my least favorite editorials) are showing their strange schism again. Friday’s (7.14.06) second editorial was headlined “Hockey Stick Hokum.” Whoo boy, what a piece o’weak thinking. What weak evidence. What strange rationalizations. Basically, the Fox-ites in print denied the current state of paleoclimate research in favor of the old, anecdote-based thinking about what’s been happening with global temperature changes over the past thousand years. They attack the original analysis that created the “hockey stick” graph (showing things have been heating up fast in the last century) by excerpting a new report commissioned by the House Energy Committee. The work was done by statisticians, not – heaven forbid – climatologists. Here are the graphics the WSJ editors used: The top graph is what we’ve had in our textbooks for decades, based on little more than historical