The words quoted above were written by Richard Muller of MIT's Technology Review in December of 2003.

In that article, "Medieval Global Warming," he describes how six editors from the journal Climate Research resigned because of a paper that they had published, 'Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes for the Past 2,000 years' by W. Soon and S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Their paper attracted attention because it created doubt about The Hockey Stick.

What's The Hockey Stick? See the accompanying photo. That chart depicts a graph of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years—showing what could, loosely, be seen as a hockey stick. The sharp rise in temperatures shown by the blade of The Hockey Stick signifies "…a sharp rise in temperature caused by human activities," according to an August, 2004 article from BBS News World Edition. The authors, mentioned in the BBC piece, "…drew on a variety of sources that give information on past climate to reconstruct their temperature patterns. These included tree rings, ice cores, coral, instrumental data and historical records." The article continues, "The data led researchers to the inevitable conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions were the dominant factor influencing climate variability in the 20th Century, a standpoint that remains hotly contested by some scientists. Over the years, the chart has gradually become a potent symbol of man's impact on global climate change that remains hotly contested by some scientists."

As far back as the BBC article, one think tank scientist called the stick "broken." Professor David R. Legates of the University of Delaware said that the stick represented "…an exaggeration of recent trends…", continuing "…[the authors of the paper] did not take into account other errors associated with estimating large-scale trends and temperature from observational data." While some climate scientists claim that the sudden temperature upsurge is all too real, Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, said "This isn't a scientific paper, it's absolutely awful."

"Dr. Legates says he has preliminary calculations that indicate the uncertainty…is probably twice as large as they indicate. This, he suggests, means that recent temperature trends do not show unprecedented global warming. Professor Legates adds that he plans to work on his analysis for publication in a scientific journal."

Back to Medieval Global Warming, "Meanwhile, critics excoriated Climate Research for allegedly failing to vet the Soon and Baliunas paper properly. The publisher, a German company called Inter-Research, agreed, leading to the resignation of the journal's editor-in-chief and, eventually, five other editors." It continues, "Then last month the situation became even more complex. S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick published a paper in Energy and Environment with a detailed critique of the original hockey stick work. They stated bluntly that the original Mann papers contained 'collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.'"

Fast-forward to another article, "Global Warming Bombshell" by Tech Reviews's Muller in October, 2004, "Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue."

It seems, at that point, that two Canadian scientists found not flaws in the methodology, as was the case in previous criticisms of the report, but a "…fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken."

Muller says, "If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously--that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling."

An interesting sidenote: whether or not one believes that the planet is warming due to greenhouse gases and the actions (or inactions) of humans, what we have from Muller and the BBC is at least very good, thought-provoking reporting and analysis. A year later, the jury's still out. At least we know, however, that The Hockey Stick—called "…poster child for the environmental movement"—is seriously and undoubtedly flawed. Does it prove that the planet is warming? No. Does it prove that the planet is cooling? No. Scientifically, it seems to prove very little.

Proving very little is heartening, though, as it is a step up from USA Today's article which proved nothing.