The "Hockey Stick" debate again

John Ray at Greenie Watch has a great link to the debate about the Hockey Stick debate. It seems that the two Canadians we discussed here have been having a quite a debate about the whole matter with the original author of the study that described the "Hockey Stick", which has become the linchpin for the IPCC papers and the very foundation of the prevailing view of global warming. Dr. Ray sums it up nicely:

The original hockey-stick team now seem to be ignoring most of the data and hanging their whole case on a single sample of long-lived desert trees -- bristlecone pines. That what happens in one desert might not represent the whole climate of the earth is obvious to anyone who knows how great regional climate variations can be. Due to local effects, one place can be cooling while the other is warming and vice versa.

Obviously, we are not scientists, but we are struck by the fact that the author of the original Hockey Stick study, Michael Mann, who publishes at Realclimate.org, seem to attack their critics above for being statisticians, not scientists. However, their criticisms are how the data was analysed statistically, their field of expertise!

Here is a link to the original work.