In the comments to the last thread, Richard Betts is amazed by my statement that the NAS panel's version of events is closer to the truth than the IPCC's and wonders if I now accept the Hockey Stick.
I'm not sure why. The NAS's idea that it is "plausible" that modern temperatures are warmer than medieval ones is surely unarguable. Nobody is suggesting that such a thing is implausible, just that there has been no demonstration that it is the case.
Saying that it is plausible that modern temperatures are unprecedented is therefore essentially to say nothing very much, and is clearly much less objectionable than saying that modern temperatures are "likely" unprecedented.
That said, the NAS panel did still conveniently fail to report the use of bristlecones in most of the temperature reconstructions they discussed, despite North apparently being aware that at least some of them did so. For him to argue that these studies in some way justified the Hockey Stick seems, ahem, less than than straightforward.
In some ways, I think Richard and I are getting caught up in the backdraft from all the spin that went on in the wake of the NAS report. When journalists present the word "plausible" as exoneration of the Hockey Stick, you can end up talking at cross purposes.
Bishop Hill
A later thought - does the word "likely" have any place in civilised discourse on the state of our knowledge of temperatures of the last millennium?