Hockey pucks.
It's the sample size, stupid!
You look at the "hockey stick" graph from the 1880s and compare it with the (admittedly) imputed data for the past five hundred thousand years, the "hockey stick" data is so insignificant in the long run that it's ridiculous to do any hand-wringing over it.
I'm not implying that recent temperature measurements are false or faulty, just that it's too small a sample.
Yeah, the long-term information from past millenia is "imputed" data, but it shows a fairly regular hundred thousand year cycling overlaid on large short-term variations, and if this "imputed" data is so bad, it would not show such a regularity of the cycles.
That's my opinion and I'm stickin' to it for now. But I'm basically "scientifically conservative," so I may change my mind after two more 100,000 year cycles. Just to make sure.
But in the meantime, it leaves me open to consider other suggestions as to why the "hockey stick" data is causing such a panic. Must be something else involved to explain why some climatologists seem to be married to the ideas that (A) there is long-term global warming in the first place, and (B) that CO2 generation (and other greenhouse gases) is causing it, based on a mere 126 years' worth of data.
And it seems to me that I recollect 50 years ago reading articles allowin' as to how we're heading into a new ice age. But of course, 50 years ago, science was still science and Terry was still Terry and hockey sticks were still things you batted hockey pucks around with.
Terry, 230RN
