In the Canadian tradition, it would be "unparliamentary" to accuse ClimateAudit's Steve McIntyre of purposefully misrepresenting climate science, but his latest attack on the so-called "hockey stick" suggests that McIntyre is a great deal more interested in scoring distorted debating points than in saying anything that is actually factually correct.

McIntyre, apparently a retired mining stock promoter, has enjoyed a certain degree of fame in the denier community since 2003, when he and an economist named Ross McKitrick launched an attack on a graph (inset) by the highly respected actual scientist, Michael Mann.

In response to the M&M attack, Mann published an amendment to his original work, giving deniers the world over the courage to say that the original graph had been "debunked." They then extrapolated to say that if there was an error in this single graph, that must mean that climate change wasn't happening or wasn't caused by humans - that the whole anthropogenic theory had collapsed in the math of a single published paper. Here is a recent and typically ridiculous example.

The fabled "hockey stick" - Michael Mann's graph showing the last decade to be the warmest in a 1,000 years - has re-emerged, stronger and longer than ever.

In a peer-reviewed paper published today in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mann and six other scientists show that current warming is the most severe in more than 1,300 years - 1,700 if you accept still-controversial data drawns from tree rings.

Deniers Obsess about Old Science, Hiding from Corroborative New Research

In a desperate effort to distract attention from the real issue, Steve McIntyre and one of his more loquacious acolytes have renewed their attack on the fabled hockey stick - cheering themselves hoarse over their one, small "victory" in climate science debate, even while the science itself continues to pass them by.

Appended below is a little background on that debate as well as eight other graphs (supported by eight other scholarly papers), all of which independently corroborate Mann's work - and all of which the deniers have ignored with their undivided attention.

Hats off to Steve McIntyre, the most effective foot soldier in the campaign to deny or downplay climate change.