INHOFE IS A FREAKSHOW

Sen. Inhofe is another lying GOP barbarian. He recently claimed in a speech in the Senate that:

A 2006, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report discredited the now infamous "Hockey Stick" temperature graph. The study, created by UN IPCC lead author Michael Mann, purported to show Northern Hemisphere temperatures flat for 1,000 years and then spiked upwards in the 20th century -- allegedly due to mankind's emissions.

There are many NAS reports and since Inhofe does not cite his, I had to look and found this one that did reference Mann's hockey stick graph:
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (2006)

This report notes that:

The debate began in 1998 when a paper by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, andMalcolm Hughes was published in the journal Nature. The authors used a new methodology to combine data from a number of sources to estimate temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the last six centuries and later for the last 1,000 years. This research received wide attention, in part because it was illustrated with a simple graphic, the so-called hockey stick curve, that many interpreted as definitive evidence of anthropogenic causes of recent climate change. The research was given prominence in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and then was picked up by many in the wider science community and by the popular media.

For those of you who haven't seen it, this is the Hockey Stick Graph:



The NAS reviewed several independent sources of evidence and produced 4 graphs that SUPPORT the Hockey Stick graph:



The authors conclude:

It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.

And add:

...there is additional evidence pointing toward the unique nature of recent warmth in the context of the last one or two millennia. This evidence includes the recent melting on the summits of ice caps on Ellesmere Island and Quelccaya and other Andean mountains, the widespread retreat of glaciers in mountain ranges around the world (which in some places has exposed decomposing organic matter that dates to well before A.D. 1000), the recent disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, and the fact that ice cores from both Greenland and coastal Antarctica show evidence of 20th century warming (whereas only Greenland shows warming during medieval times). Ice cores from the Andes and Tibetan plateau and the recession of the ice caps on mountains in equatorial Africa, which reflect both temperature and hydrologic processes, also suggest that the 20th century climate is unusual in the context of the last few thousand years.