While this thread has digressed from Hansen's failed doomsday predictions, to Mann's failed hockey stick,
perhaps it is time to remember why they was a need for a hockey stick in the first place.
Part of AGW was to show that the temperature changes between 1979 and 1998 were abnormal.
This requirement existed, because most people learned in school, that Eric the Red founded a colony in Greenland,
when it was warmer than it is currently. This does not fit into the AGW script, an so a requirement existed
to prove that the Greenland colony was a local event.
With these requirements in hand, the fearless Dr. Mann set about to find proxies that said exactly that.
Unfortunately the proxy data did not behave, the post 1980 proxies mostly declined if they interpreted temperature
the same way across the time series.
The Solution, Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards).
Instead of showing the last 20 years of the proxies, they dispose of that low resolution data, and replace it with high resolution
thermometer data. Magic Mike has saved the AGW movement by putting aside one of the big skeptical arguments.
He is awarded with Millions in Grants, and even claims to have won part of a Nobel Prize.
At the end of the day, the hockey stick is irrelevant.
The average temperature on earth appears to be increasing slowly, with burst of El Nino events.
The period between 1979 and 1998, mostly appear abnormal because of the large El Nino spike in 1998.
Without the .2 C single year spike, the 19 years between 1979 and 1998 would be a modest .25 C, or .13 C per decade.
The predictions of .21 C per decade warming, were based on a 19 year period, ending with one of the
strongest El Nino events ever recorded, This caused the models to be high by almost a factor of 2.
