The iconic “hockeystick” simply refuses to die. It was first created by Mann, Bradley and Hughes in their 1998 paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (hereinafter “MBH98”).

MBH98 claimed to show that after a long period with very little change, suddenly the world started warming, and warming fast.

Back a couple of decades ago, Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit did yeoman work in discovering a host of errors in MBH98. And somewere in that time, someone, likely Steve but perhaps not, noted that the curious (and mathematically incorrect) procedure used in MBH98 could actively mine hockeysticks out of red noise.

Despite all of that, MBH was succeeded by various of what I call “hockalikes”, studies that purported to independently find a hockeystick in the historical record and thus were claimed to support and validate the original MBH98 hockeystick.

Of course, these repeated many of the same errors as had been exposed by McIntyre and others. Here is the money graphic from my post Kill It With Fire, which analyzed the Mann 2008 attempt to rehabilitate the hockeystick (M2008).