You forgot to mention anthropology and history. Peoples prosper when the climate warms. Examples are the Cahokia culture in the central U.S. and the Thule culture which spread east from Northern Alaska.

Both of these cultures thrived during the Medieval Warm Period (allegedly confined to the North Atlantic) and faded away during the subsequent cold (but apparently statistically insignificant) Little Ice Age.

I also suspect the Mongol invasions were abetted by warmer climate and the Mauri emigration to New Zealand (~1,000 A.D.) by more clement weather.

Jeff

Your “dummies guide” has confused me in an exponential sense even before I achieved a satisfactory base understanding of your theorem.
In the First Section, you use the ambiguous term ‘noisy records’. Can you define ‘noisy records’ for my mom?
From the Second Section please explain the following: Please explain in a geo-metaphysical sense, the relationship between ‘climate data applications’ and ‘the physics’ of a given algorithmic situation. Please explain this so my mother could understand it.
From Section 3: Explain the ‘Monte Carlo’ simulation for us “dummies” before you apply it to your empirical position. Please do it in a way that my mom could understand.
From Section 4: If your methods are objectively scientific, explain your ‘a priori’ parameters so my mom could understand them.
This should keep your plate full. I will wait with baited breath for your response that will, no doubt, assimilate nicely with invective for the truth, and the scientific method.
Mat McClain

John: Nope. I quoted the spiel from the website but as to actually what this organization does, I am none the wiser.

 I came across a comment on RealClimate – comment #23, on this thread, which highlights that the IPCC TAR only rated the Mann Hockey Stick as "66-90%" likely. Of course, as we know, it now lives somewhere below the "1-10%" range, but I thought it would be interesting to see how many "spot the hockey stick" cases on the web present the hockey stick as "fact" or include the "66-90% likely" caveat. I notice this one doesn’t include any such caveats. As for slidesmanship, page 30 is one of the worst examples of "powerpoint ranger syndrome" I’ve come across for some time. It’s the old wild extrapolation based on bad models trick that has been around since Rev. Thomas Malthus first predicted a horrible death for everyone.

John: You think? For some mysterious reason, these climate models extrapolate a weak warming trend from the mid 1960′s all the way to the year 2100. Am I the only person who finds that just a little bit unjustified in a mathematical as well as economic sense? As for the Hockey Stick, I think the realclimate authors should win gold medals at the next Olympics for synchronized backpedalling. Whatever happened to the "scientific consensus", the "settled science", the "peer-reviewed study" which was so incredibly "robust"?