Well,
I don't think Dr.Mann came up with his Hockey Stick just because he
first discovered MW and LI in the data and then wanted to prove that
there were no MW or LI at all. He only put a lot of numbers into his
computer, played with statistical subroutines for a while and wow,
headline-breaking results popped up! Of course he was excited and happy
of becoming the man who was able to create a radical shift of paradigm!
Good old Bert Bolin was almost dancing of joy when he presented the
Hockey Stick for the first time.

The problem was that nobody could repeat the calculations because Dr.
Mann did not provide exact information about the data files and
computing procedures. So much for the referee-process, the referees
judge the quality of the work according to their  personal opinions
about what may be true or not, not by double-checking the calculations
because it was not possible. How can Dr. Mann claim that his greenhouse-
believer fellow Dr. Storch has made flawed calculations if he cannot
repeat them? He looks at the assumptions behind and he does not accept
them as he says. But it may be the results that he does not like.

To be honest, the way Dr. Storch play with climate models does not
convince me either. The downplaying of the Hockey Stick is nice but the
way it was done may simply be bad science due to the fact that the
climate models do not reliably model the real climate . I have seen
(and made) so much junk science during my 30 years of work with
chemical process analysis by statistical methods and process
simulations so I have became typical sceptic on almost anything. My
processes usually offered a lot of surprises that were never modelled.
And they were very simple compared to the World Climate. (Of course I
don't believe in the Hockey Stick).

In fact global and NH mean temperatures are not very interesting.
Nobody lives in the mean temperature, it is the local temperature at a
certain time that matters.

Greenhouse religion is a funny thing. There are so much feelings and
aggressions in it. Just as in classical religions.

cheers Jarl