Reasons exist to have serious investigations of the whole of climate change (aka global warming) science. Global warming inevitably rests on current temperatures setting records in geologic time, or at least since early human civilization.  And this is where the 1998 Nature article by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcom Hughes depicting what has become known as the iconic "hockey stick" graph becomes critical.  The "hockey stick" showed modern temperatures far hotter than in the year 1400. The hockey stick graph was adopted into the third assessment report (2001) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and contradicted a chart that had appeared only eleven years before in an earlier IPCC assessment report.  The hockey stick eliminated what had traditionally been considered the hottest era, the Medieval Warm Period. As reasonably accurate thermometers were not developed until well into the 19th...(Read Full Post)