Joe, this chart comes from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Norwich. This group, which is part of the Faculty of Science for the University of East Anglia, used climate data to create this graph. This graph looks strikingly similar to the hockey stick graph, which we showed was bunk in this Spotlight by Professor Balling.

As we all know, environmental alarmists like to select their dataset to reflect their agenda. The chart that USA Today uses, relies upon a graph that begins in the 1860s and ends in 2005. The researchers who compiled this data state that the reason only this data was used is because of the availability of climate data; though, we all know that the reliability of the available data in the 1860s is questionable. But, this is how they chose to represent the data, so we’ll move on.

Despite work to the contrary that debunked a study that lead to the hockey stick graph (see, McIntyre, S. and R. McKitrick, 2003: Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) proxy data base and northern hemispheric average temperature series. Energy & Environment, 14, 751-766), the Climate Research Unit, and USA Today, chose to use this data as a scare tactic.

I think, though I’m not sure, that the original flawed data used to create the hockey stick graph appears in both the CRU and USA Today graph because: (1) the low point on the CRU graph in 1860, as well as the alleged “high point” is very close to the one on our hockey stick graph replica in the Spotlight. (2) CRU sites, in part, its information from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This report, published in 2001, was one of the main propagators of the hockey stick graph and its selective data points that point to carbon induced global warming.