Warmist Raymond Bradley on his hockey stick, the one that was supposed to inspire us to blow $45 trillion on the climate hoax: "It is hard to imagine how much more explicit we could have been about the uncertainties in the reconstruction; indeed, that was the point of the article!"

News: Research and Politics - Inside Higher Ed

In the late 1990s, Raymond Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, collaborated with two researchers on a pair of studies that altered the dialogue on climate change. The studies, a collaboration between Bradley, a geophysicist named Michael Mann (then finishing up his Ph.D. at Yale University) and University of Arizona climatologist Malcolm Hughes, presented evidence of global climate change over the past millennium and set off a political firestorm. The work was widely cited by those who (like the vast majority of scientists) take climate change seriously, but was doubted by skeptics of climate.
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Q: The debate around your study looking at past climate patterns seemed to explode after you extended it to include projections going all the way back to 1000. In hindsight, do you think this was overreaching? From a purely political standpoint, did this hurt the case for climate change?

A: Our reconstruction of temperatures over the last 1000 years was titled, "Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations" (Geophysical Research Letters 26, 759–762; 1999). In the abstract, we stated: "We focus not just on the reconstructions, but on the uncertainties therein, and important caveats" and noted that "expanded uncertainties prevent decisive conclusions for the period prior to AD 1400." We concluded by stating: "more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached."

It is hard to imagine how much more explicit we could have been about the uncertainties in the reconstruction; indeed, that was the point of the article! So, the topic of the paper had very little to do with the subsequent furor that surrounded it. One figure from our paper was selected for use in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s "Summary for Policy-Makers." Because it was a rather compelling image (easy to understand) it was reproduced in many magazines and newspapers, and quickly became an icon for the IPCC’s message that human activity was affecting climate. Those opposed to legislation that would set controls on greenhouse gas emissions thus decided to try and destroy the credibility of our research, in order to cast doubt on the entire IPCC report.

The idea that the conclusions of the IPCC rested entirely on our study was absolutely ridiculous, but from a political point of view, they had a good strategy.