Hockey Sticks are de rigueur for AGW

Well, de rigueur isn't quite the right word.  A Hockey Stick graph is essential to the claim of AGW.  The A up front, Anthropomorphic, requires that we know humans are causing most of the warming.  If mama Nature can change world average temperature[0] faster than is currently happening, well, we can't know with certainty that humans are causing the warming.  The Mann hockey stick was the proof positive of AGW -- before it was debunked.  Now, AGW proponents argue hockey sticks don't matter.

UPDATE: Mann and crew published a paper in 2008 building the hockey stick using a wider data set.  Of course, this was before we found out that Dr. Mann was happy to play games with his graphs and data sets, so I'm not really sure how much trust we should extend to this latest effort until it has been vetted by actual disinterested statisticians.  Somehow, peer-review has gone seriously awry in the climate science field.

In case you, gentle reader, want to build your own hockey stick -- perhaps using pseudorandom red noise, perhaps using temperature data -- here is a nice intro to the art of making hockey sticks via statistical analysis.  Try it, and you will learn something about the whole sausage making process.  Plus, you'll have a nice hockey stick at the end, and you will understand why.


[0] - whatever that statistical creature is defined to be