You posted a reference to this on the politics forum too. It is a nicely crafted work, better than many in Quadrant on this subject and it is cleverly designed to delude in and ever so gentle way.
I find myself wondering how it was funded.....
It is a shame to see the "missing data" flag run once more up the hockey stick graph. It seems millions of dollars have been expended analysing this work and by and large, the conclusions are still relevant. In fact, as more data has accumulated, the anomalous warming of recent years has become more pronounced.
" ... a paper on 9 September 2008, Mann and colleagues published an updated reconstruction of Earth surface temperature for the past two millennia. This reconstruction used a more diverse dataset that was significantly larger than the original tree-ring study. In this work, they again said that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years "