Julien Emile-Geay, who has been very critical of McIntyre in the past, has emerged from blogging hibernation with a posting on McShane and Wyner, the paper about multiproxy methods as seen by two professional statisticians.
JEG's post has something for everyone, but readers here will be most struck by this:
Finally, I agree with [McShane & Wyner's] main conclusion:
“the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.”
That being said, it is my postulate than when climate reconstruction methods incorporate the latest advances in the field of statistics, it will indeed be found that the current warming and its rate are unprecedented…the case for it just isn’t completely airtight now.