The trouble is that the hockey stick graph become an icon and deniers reckoned if they could smash the icon, the whole concept of global warming would be destroyed with it.
Michael E. MannKeith's [Briffa] series...differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil's [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we'd like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).
Michael E. MannI was interested in variations in temperatures of the oceans over the past millennium. But there are no records of these changes so I had to find proxy measures: coral growth, ice cores and tree rings.
Michael E. Mann