This video clip explains inaccuracies with one of the most recently accepted methodologies for describing temperature variations over the past thousand years, known as the “Hockey Stick Curve,” which has been put forth in a report in 1998 entitled “MBH98,” which was quickly accepted by official organizations in the global warming community without proper auditing as the “smoking gun” showing that recent warming is unusual.

The report rejected previously widely accepted temperature graphs in favor of flattening the high and low temperatures over the past thousand years, which makes the current century appear to be out of the ordinary compared to the temperatures of the past.

An Independent audit put forth in the “MacIntyre McKitrick” report have shown the methodologies for deriving the “hockey stick curve” to be flawed due to a computer programming error, which has been shown to nearly always result in “hockey stick” shaped results with a variety of different input data.  The report created so much controversy that the US Congress authorized the National Academy of Sciences to study and report on the issue.  The National Academy essentially supported the “MacIntyre McKitrick” report by warning that the methodology used by the MBH98 report should not be used by this type of research because it “tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions.”  Although the report criticized other aspects of the MBH98 report, it did so in an apologetic manner, leading the media to proclaim that the report actually supported the MBH98 report.

Separate from the National Academy, the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives commissioned three prominent statisticians chaired by Edward Wegman, Chairman of the National Sciences Committee on Theoretical and Applied Statistics to refute both the MBH98 and the Macintyre McKitrick report.  Wegman wrote, “While the work of Michael Mann and colleagues presents what appears to be compelling evidence of global temperature change, the criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as those of other authors mentioned are indeed valid.  We found the MBH98 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of [McIntyre-McKitrick] to be valid and compelling.”

In spite of many questions about the legitimacy of the “Hockey Stick” graph, Al Gore prominently displays its results in his film “Inconvenient Truth,” as do many official reports put out by the United Nations.