You wait for ages for a hockey stick to turn up and suddenly two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of the Wilson et al temperature reconstruction comes Xing et al, a new effort from a Chinese team. In their figure, shown below, it's the blue line we're interested in. In truth it's a pretty bendy hockey stick.
;)
A few thoughts and observations based on a skim of the paper:
- The method is a novel one. Caveat emptor.
- They reconstruct annual temperatures from tree rings. Compare this to Wilson et al, who believe that you can only reconstruct summer temperatures from tree rings.
- The usual caveats apply to the blade of the stick - the amount of data falls away precipitously towards the end of the series.
- The overlaying of the instrumental data is mostly there for rhetorical effect. You wouldn't get excited from the proxies alone.
- Data have been screened in a way that requires more careful study for me to grasp. Caveat emptor again.