This seems fair:
What does this all mean? First, let’s state what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we know that the planet isn’t warming, and it doesn’t mean that if it is, that we can be sure that it is not due to human activity.
But at a minimum it should be the final blow to the hockey stick, and perhaps to the very notion that bristlecone pines and larches are accurate thermometers. It should also be a final blow to the credibility of many of the leading lights of climate “science,” but based on history, it probably won’t be, at least among the political class. What it really should be is the beginning of the major housecleaning necessary if the field is to have any scientific credibility, but that may have to await a general reformation of academia itself. It would help, though, if we get a new government next year that cuts off funding to such charlatans, and the institutions that whitewash their unscientific behavior.
I'll say again that I can be persuaded that our climate is warming, if the scale issue is addressed (I'm just not worried that temperatures have been rising since the end of the last little ice age periods). I can be persuaded that man is causing warming that can be distinguished from the normal changes over decades, centuries, and millennia. I might even be persuaded that such man-caused warming is actually a bad thing. What I can't be persuaded about is that the statist solutions that deprive us of freedom and progress are the right response. For this, I'm a "denier."
Yet pro-global warming fanatics deny that the hockey stick is bunk and that this undermines their so-called proof of the entire string of conclusions that leads to massive government control of our lives to save us from burning in Hell on Earth. These people respect the "science."
At least the flat graph can still be used for pole-vaulting, I suppose, to finally reach our green authoritarian paradise.
