A long story short: Prof. Michael Mann (of the (in)famous hockey stick paleo-"temperature" reconstruction) released a new hockeystick paper earlier this year. Antagonist Stephen McIntyre has been having field weeks to pick apart the inconsistencies in the recent publication. So far it's been amusing and vaguely interesting to read the two parties parry, but this recent post of McIntyre is really screamingly loud embarrassing for Mann - if true.

Ok. This is how I get it: The new hockeystick reconstruction of the Mann paper comes in a few versions, also to curve around some of the controversies surrounding tree ring analyses. One of McIntyre's long-standing arguments is that Mann's paleotemperature reconstructions which exclude tree ring analyses do not show a statistically significant uptick in temperature over the past 1500 years. One of the newer additions to the dataset of the new reconstruction without tree rings data were a set of varve (thin mud layers) analyses done in northern Finland. The authors of that research got this picture in their publication:

X-rays are here correlated to organic material, and organic material is seen as a proxy of higher temperatures. Inverted to temperatures, the graph reads thus:

Yet how does the Mann paper interprets the results according to McIntyre? This way:

Mann inverted the wrong way to give himself an extra hockeystick in his dataset! Mcintyre has further been hinting that these data sets could be heavily weighted by Mann, in order to get the final results.

If true, Mann has an ostrich egg on his face.