I have taken the liberty of bolding, underlining and italiicizing a word in your post. That one word appears to be beyond FC's comprehension. I bet he still doesn't get why I linked him to "How to Lie with Statistics" That the "hockey stick chart is a statistic" appears to go beyond FC;s reasoning. If he actually looked that it is a chart of "Variants"...oh, well, a chart of absolutes instead of relatives would CLEARLY show no changes...but, those who have been suckered into the plan delineated in "The Report from Iron Mountain" would still be suckered in somehow!
They're called confidence or probability intervals. To simply dismiss them because statistics are involved is brainless stupidity, something the deniers are very good at.
http://www.livescience.com/21980-global-warming-skeptic-turnaround.html
A prominent scientist who was skeptical of the evidence that climate change was real, let alone that it was caused by humans, now says he has made a "total turnaround." Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, says he has become convinced that "the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct," and that humans are "almost entirely the cause" of that warming.
Muller co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team two years ago in order to independently assess what he viewed as questionable evidence of global warming. In a series of papers published last year, BEST presented their statistical analysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports spanning the last 200 years, controlling for possible biases in the data that are often cited by skeptics as reasons to doubt the reality of global warming.
Their analysis indicated that global warming is real â that the average global land temperature has risen by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) since 1750, including 1.5 degrees F (0.9 degrees Celsius) in the past 50 years. The numbers closely agree with the findings of past studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA and others; but finally, they were rigorous enough to satisfy Muller.
Land and surface temperature from the Berkeley Earth average, compared to a linear combination of volcanic sulfate emissions and CO2 emissions. The large negative excursions in the early temperature records are likely to be explained by exceptional volcanic activity at this time. Similarly, the upward trend is likely to be an indication of anthropogenic changes.
