Those who I refer to as ‘the new deniers’ keep trying to repair the infamous climate “hockey stick”. This is a term coined for a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years, which suggests a recent sharp rise in temperature caused by human activities. The chart is relatively flat from the period AD 1000 to 1900, indicating that temperatures were relatively stable for this period of time. The flat part forms the stick’s ‘shaft’. However, after 1900, temperatures appear to shoot up, forming the hockey stick’s ‘blade’.
Those who support the hockey stick focus on the blade, but it was not the major issue originally. The bulwark claim of the anthropogenic global warm (AGW) hypothesis and the objective of the stick are that current global annual average temperatures are the warmest ever. This meant that the upturn of the blade in the twentieth century was only relevant if it was higher and steeper than any previous record.
Earlier warm periods were not a threat in the first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their mandate required that they only look at human causes, which they interpreted to mean the industrial period. However, as experts who were denied participation in the IPCC process began to examine what was said, they identified earlier warmer periods, especially the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) dating from 900AD to 1300AD, and more rapid temperature increases.
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