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Newsflash: Hockey Stick Reaffirmed; No One Cares

Via Joe Romm, two new scientific studies reaffirm the infamous hockey stick graph. The first study appeared in Geophysical Research Letters: "We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years."

And the second study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: "The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.”

The dreaded Michael Mann wasn't involved in either of these papers, but the results are the same—the Earth's currently warming at a rate that's unprecedented over the last millennium. Think this will change anyone's minds? Yeah, me neither. (By the way, one of Romm's commenters makes a fair point: The climate skeptics who obsess over the hockey stick always insist that the Medieval Warm Period was much warmer, and more widespread, than scientists think. But if this was true, it would mean that the Earth's climate is more sensitive to radiative forcings than the consensus estimate, which would mean that all those greenhouse gases we're putting in the air are even more dangerous than we thought. But eh, details...)