Another Hockey Stick broken

Borepatch

"So the government funded a study to the tune of $300,000, and the study was so shabby that bloggers shot it to pieces in two weeks. But all you Deniers need to just shut up because the Scienciness is Settled"

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There are some important findings at Climate Audit today. Once again I have tried to set out a layman's version of the discussion there.

One of the perennial problems with temperature reconstructions has been a lack of data covering the southern hemisphere - the Hockey Stick itself was a northern hemisphere reconstruction, although the IPCC billed it as global in extent. However, a recent paper by Gergis et al sought to partially remedy this by presenting an Australasian temperature reconstruction for the last millennium, based on 27 proxy records, primarily from tree rings and corals. The headline was, perhaps not unexpectedly, that late twentieth century warming was unprecedented:

The average reconstructed temperature anomaly in Australasia during A.D. 1238–1267, the warmest 30-year pre-instrumental period, is 0.09°C (±0.19°C) below 1961–1990 levels.

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