The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity - Independent Media Center

Caption The `Hockey Stick': A New Low in Climate Science by John L. Daly (graph courtesy
wattsupwiththat.com)
Canadian Professors Ross McKitrick and Christopher Essex deconstructed that hockey-stick
science along with their notable non-conformist collaborator and businessman from Toronto,
Steve McIntyre, in their 2003 book Taken by Storm, long before climategate. But Prof. Ross
too, circumspectly, only called it “bad science”, judiciously refraining from calling it Science
in the Service of Empire which it is:
'Michael Coren: “What's all this about a hockey-stick?”
Ross McKitrick: “Well, the hockey-stick graph. This was back in 2001, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], it's a UN body that every
five years puts out a big assessment of the science. And they are especially
alert to any evidence that really promotes the Global Warming story and they
give it lots of promotion. And in 2001, they latched onto this result that was fairly
fresh in the literature, that had to with what's called paleoclimatology. The study
of the behavior of the climate from way back before we had thermometers.
Now, for decades the standard view has been that over the past thousand
years, there is a Medieval era, which is very warm compared to the present.
You know, the Greenland, the Vikings were able to have farms in Greenland.
All over the world there is evidence that it was warmer, and basically better for
people. And then things got cold for about 500 years, up to the 1800s, and then
we were in a warming phase coming out of the little ice-age as it was called.
The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity 143 / 334 Zahir Ebrahim