This chart shows two lines: The red one going up and the black one maintaining a level "bounce" across the page. This happens to reflect the graph Al Gore used in his "Inconvenient Truth" movie and the results of doing the tests over again (resulting in the black line).
There is an article in the UK Telegraph that explains how this black line came to be. It is an interesting story and worth clicking through the links, as well as an opposing view here.
There's quite a "dialog" about this review of the data that has produced these new results. Obviously, someone is wrong with their projections and there are consequences for being wrong (i.e. credibility, funding, the destruction of the planet, etc).
The "Believers" (in Man-made global warming, which the red "hockey stick" demonstrates) say,
"So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks, who declares without any evidence whatsoever that Briffa didn’t just reprocess the data from the Russians, but instead supposedly picked through it to give him the signal he wanted. These allegations have been made without any evidence whatsoever."The "Deniers" (of Man-made Global Warming, which the black line validates) say,
"In a comment to the same post, I clearly stated my view that there was no crude cherrypicking of the type that Briffa accuses me of implying. I stated :
bender, I agree with your point. I've tried to steer a careful line here. If you think otherwise, can you give me particulars as I don't wish to unintentionally feed views that I don't hold. It is not my belief that Briffa crudely cherry picked. My guess is that the Russians selected a limited number of 200-400 year trees - that's what they say - a number that might well have been appropriate for their purpose and that Briffa inherited their selection - a selection which proved to be far from random and which, as you and I agree, falls vastly short of standards in the field for RCS chronology (as opposed to corridor or spline chronologies)."
Well, I guess us non-scientific people will just have to stand back and watch this food-fight continue. Again, my own bias is to default to the sceptic view. So if, as the Telegraph article explains, this new black line is a true result of the data being worked again, and is a valid use of the data that originally produced the "hockey stick", than maybe the world won't end before I die. That's what I'm hoping for, at least. Now if we could only find some climate scientists who were as certain as the economists we have around this country we'd be in great shape.