Hockey sticks drive deniers nuts...

Deniers really are nuts, you know. Apparently over at the Auditor's blog there is some fruitcake obsessing over the cover of an annual report. Not a peer reviewed publication. Not a scientific record. Nope. An illustration. A graphic. A drawing. A conceptual illustration. A piece of artwork.

Thing is, all they are showing is that scientists aren't just careful with their research, they are super-careful even when just producing an illustrated cover for an annual report. Scientists carefully documented where the data came from, what it related to and exactly what data was where. And the annual report itself described all this as well as references to the scientific papers on which the illustration was based. Read it and wonder (my bold underline italics):

WMO-No. 913
© 2000, World Meteorological Organization
ISBN 92-63-10913-3
Front cover: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal.
Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).
(Sources of data: P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa and T.J. Osborn, University of East Anglia, UK; M.E. Mann, University of Virginia, USA; R.S. Bradley, University of Massachusetts, USA; M.K. Hughes, University of Arizona, USA; and the Hadley Centre, The Met. Office).

Yep, you guessed it. I'm talking about something that happened fifteen years ago. That's right. Fifteen years ago. Sheesh deniers really are a bunch of wackos.  There's no other way to describe them. (Well, maybe you can think of other ways. Make sure your description is family friendly if you decide to post it :D) They are all obsessed because different colours weren't used to show where the paleo records stopped and the instrumental records started. Never mind that this was just a diagram. A cover illustration. Never mind that the cover description made it very clear that this was a composite illustration using both paleo records and instrumental records. Never mind that the scientists didn't just draw a few wiggles, that they carefully constructed the illustration to match known science of the day.

You can read the repost at WUWT archived here, along with all their misinterpretions and paranoia.

You can read more about the stolen emails at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Have these idiots got nothing better to do with their time than obsess over a piece of artwork on the front cover of an annual report, which was produced fifteen years ago?  Which has been confirmed over and over again by different scientists? Which was described in the annual report itself? Which was as meticulously accurate as any piece of artwork could be reasonably expected to be? Which wasn't prepared by Michael Mann though deniers want to bash him for it. Which was approved by the World Meteorological Organisation itself?

What next? Obsessing over whether Joseph Fourier really wrote his paper? Wondering whether Tyndall got his measurements right? Asking if the Heartland Institute was wrong to promote tobacco smoking?  Investigating Wegman for plagiarism? Correcting all the gross mistakes in McIntyre and McKitrick? (Scratch the last three. Science deniers don't like to be reminded of their deceptions.)

Do you want to read more about paleo reconstructions and the deceptions of deniers? Greg Laden has more patience with these ning-nongs than I do.


Back to the modern day and the real world - public opinion matters to Google and Facebook!  Liar deniers are falling out of fashion.