[palmer]

Be that as it may, McIntyre has a specialty. I think he's doing a good job of keeping the practitioners on their toes and accelerating some necessary introspection. If he's finding errors that need to be corrected, I hope to h*ll they are corrected, ASAP.

Are they going to go back and correct the truncation of Briffa's reconstruction at 1960? Is Briffa going to explain what he meant by

"For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate. (Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)"

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/#more-9483

[cogitator]

As far as I can tell, they have to stop about 1960 because of the divergence problem. I haven't devoted a lot of intellectual resources into trying to understand why the divergence problem happens, I only know that it means that the tree ring methodology for correlation with temperature stops working around 1960. If they are attempting to present a realistic depiction of what global temperatures did over the 20th century and the tree rings stop being useful to depict that around 1960, then it isn't propaganda to utilize a different temperature record to finish the depiction.

It would be propaganda to depict global temperatures over the 20th century without indicating that there was a change in the methodology used around 1960. I haven't seen examples of that. Usually the instrumental record is clearly delineated.

As for Briffa, I don't know if he'll further explain what he said in the quote you provided. I like what he says at the end. Proving the first part of the statement, however, is different than proving the second part of the statement.