http://climateknowledge.org/figures...0_Documents/Nature_News_Hockey_Stick_2006.pdf
In its report, released on 22 June, the NAS committee more-or-less endorses the work behind the graph. But it criticizes the way that the plot was used to publicize climatechange concerns. And it leaves open big questions about whether researchers should be obliged to make their data available (see ‘Plotting a course’).
“We roughly agree with the substance of their findings,” says Gerald North, the committee’s chair and a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station. In particular, he says, the committee has a “high level of confidence” that the second half of the twentieth century was warmer than any other period in the past four centuries. But, he adds, claims for the earlier period covered by the study, from AD 900 to 1600, are less certain. This earlier period is particularly important because global warming sceptics claim that the current warming trend is a rebound from a ‘little ice age’ around 1600. Overall, the committee thought the temperature reconstructions from that era had only a two-to-one chance of being right.
Now you see why lying little bastards like Bripat take things out of context.