Not Again! Media Promoting Arctic ‘Hockey Stick’ – Claim Temps Warmest in 2000 Years – But Scientists Already Rebuking Study

The Washington Post is touting a new study purporting to show an Arctic temperature “Hockey Stick.” But the study appears to contradict numerous previous Arctic studies and scientists are already challenging the premise and claims of the new study. The study in under fire for basing key results and conclusions on Penn State Professor Michael Mann’s discredited “Hockey Stick” temperature graph. (Editor’s Note: Mann just recently attempted to invent a hurricane “Hockey Stick” as well. )

The new study claims to show “human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C.,” according to a September 3, 2009 article by the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin. The study will appear in the September 3, 2009 online version of the journal Science. The lead author was Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S. Kaufman.

The Washington Post also saw fit to gave prominent play to the environmental group World Wildlife Fund’s new dire Arctic study claiming a scary global warming caused “transformation” of the Arctic. (The study is getting the alarmist media promote. See: USA Today: ‘Arctic temperatures hit 2,000-year high’ – But Andrew Revkin of NYT has much more balanced coverage of the study.) The Post article on the new Arctic “Hockey Stick” completely glossed over years of contrary data and instead mostly gave the authors a scrutiny free ride. (Eilperin also misspelled the name of one scientist she quoted.)

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, “This looks like this week’s “Hockey Stick” including many of Mann’s collaborators.” [Editor’s Note: Mann’s has attempted multiple “Hockey Stick” inventions and his newest creation is the Hurricane “Hockey Stick.”.]

‘Closely matches the Mann version’

Climate data analyst Steve McIntyre who publishes Climate Audit and is known for his research discrediting Mann’s original “Hockey Stick” temperature graph, weighed in on the new Arctic study. “Amusingly, the [Arctic study’s lead author] Kaufman Team perpetuates Mann’s upside down use of the Tiljander proxy,” McIntyre wrote on September 3, 2009. “You can readily see that this closely matches the Mann version,” McIntyre noted. “The most cursory examination [of the study] shows the usual problem of seemingly biased picking of proxies without any attempt to reconcile proxy conflicts,” McIntryre wrote.

‘Several things wrong’

Atmospheric Scientist Dr.