2. John H. has a very nice post. and gives some added info about the IPCC previous versions.

3. Pete hits a point that I’ve wondered about. Just how good is that cartoony looking 1990 reconstruction that is often referred to?

Mann, however, made falsifications and he is lying to the media. He knows what he is going to loose. This is a fact and this will gradually also reach media. Many people still want to think that he is honest in his views.

Founding of IPCC was nothing else than a back step in climate science. IPCC promotes only certain views including bad science (at least in WG-II which I know better than WG-I) independently of the diversity of new scientific results that are accumulating. Synthesis have been made on “theological” grounds, not on scientific grounds.
This has nothing to do with believing or not believing in something.

We can see the two parts in the current drama:

1. IPCC using trillions of dollars to hide results, methods, data etc.
2. Those who use their brains to disclose results, methods, data etc.

Only one of these parts will have a future.

***”Bradley and Jones ….. developed a Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstruction since 1400 from 16 palaeoclimatic records ….. and THE WARMING SINCE THE LATE 19TH CENTURY IS UNPRECEDENTED in this record.” (My emphases.)

“Overall, however, it appears that the 20TH CENTURY HAS BEEN AT LEAST AS WARM AS ANY CENTURY SINCE AT LEAST 1400 AD.”***

The graphic the WSJ and 1990 IPCC uses is already in-line with these comments. It seems to me that most reports of the MWP have it ending (in terms of warming on a relatively global scale) no later than 1300-1400. So these 1995 IPCC comments added no new insight.

***”The term Little Ice Age is often used to describe a 400-500 year long, globally synchronous cold interval but studies now show that the climate of the last few centuries was more spatially and temporally complex than this simple concept implies ….. It was a period of BOTH WARM AND COLD CLIMATIC ANOMALIES that varied in importance geographically.”***

I think “global warming” is also more spatially and temporally complex than this simple concept implies, too. Some locations warm more than others. Some may actually cool. It’s the “global average” that is presented on charts to show the impact, correct? Just because some locations may have been warm during the LIA or cold during the MWP doesn’t mean the global means weren’t abnormal in the opposite direction. Fort Smith, Arkansas, US, for example (just a quick internet search and a result from an unbiased source not a cherry-picked example), cooled from the 1920s and 1930s through the 1990s. Yet the 1990s were supposed to be “the hottest decade on record/ever.” Do examples like the Fort Smith temperature record dispell this statement? Certainly not, unless you’re talking specifically about Fort Smith or those locations. We have plenty of data locations for the 20th century and relatively good instrumentation. For the LIA and MWP, we have few data locations, mostly anecdotal evidence, and some limited questionable proxy data/interpretations.

As the IPCC has concluded (at least at times) and as I believe it, we don’t have enough information about the MWP to know with certainty whether or not it was warmer or cooler globally than today. And I don’t think we will be able to conclusively say one way or the other, at least in my lifetime or with current means/information.

The comments that you quote from IPCC SAR are certainly on point. They seem to be based on Bradley and Jones [1993] and Hughes and Diaz [1994]. I agree that Jones, Bradley and Hughes have been at this much longer than Mann. I don’t think that the earlier studies are valid either. The history of the developing reliance on these very low-quality studies would be interesting to examine in detail. Steve

In the last paragraph, they complain that WSJ attacked the research of a single geoscientist – Michael Mann from University of Virginia – namely the hockey stick. In the same paragraph, however, they say that it does not matter if the scientific work about the climate history is based on wrong methodology and assumptions because WSJ stands against “scores of authors” and “hundreds of other scientists” who reviewed it.

This is a typical behavior of a totalitarian groupthink. One first creates the impression that a group of people (or one person) is very innocent, weak, and exploited by another group (Jews, capitalists, men, anything you want to imagine), and then it applies brutal force to eliminate or at least suppress this “guilty” group.