Last week we suddenly saw a barrage of articles about the climate change “hockey stick” graph, with absurdly overheated headlines like this one at Britain’s Telegraph: How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie.

Not just a lie, but a MASSIVE lie. Wow. That sounds really bad.

The article begins with this carefully reasoned paragraph:

For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the following story is dynamite. And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, it will no doubt feel as comfortable as the rectally inserted suicide bomb that put paid to an Al Qaeda operative earlier this week.

Leaving aside the rectally inserted suicide bomb, the claim made by this article and a similar one in National Review is that the infamous “hockey stick” graph is based on tree ring data — and the latest claim of the AGW deniers is that the data is not only wrong, but fraudulent.

I received at least a dozen emails from people begging and/or demanding that I link to these reports, claiming that the AGW “fraud” had finally been utterly destroyed.

Well, there’s certainly fraud here, but once again it’s coming from the global warming denial industry and their shills. (I say “once again” because the pattern of dishonesty is becoming wearyingly familiar.)

RealClimate shows how the latest deception works.

The timeline for these mini-blogstorms is always similar. An unverified accusation of malfeasance is made based on nothing, and it is instantly ‘telegraphed’ across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to anything ‘hockey-stick’ shaped and any and all scientists, even those not even tangentially related. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally the ‘hoax’ has been revealed and congratulations are handed out all round. After a while it is clear that no scientific edifice has collapsed and the search goes on for the ‘real’ problem which is no doubt just waiting to be found. Every so often the story pops up again because some columnist or blogger doesn’t want to, or care to, do their homework. Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science? Zip.

Having said that, it does appear that McIntyre did not directly instigate any of the ludicrous extrapolations of his supposed findings highlighted above, though he clearly set the ball rolling. No doubt he has written to the National Review and the Telegraph and Anthony Watts to clarify their mistakes and we’re confident that the corrections will appear any day now…. Oh yes.

Read the whole thing and pay careful attention to the graphs based on real scientific data.

Again, I’m struck by the similarity between the techniques of global warming deniers and creationists; they both use cherry-picked data, they both make outrageous claims couched in pseudo-scientific language that sounds convincing to gullible people, they both compile lists of skeptical “scientists” that turn out to be packed with ringers, frauds, and people who never signed in the first place, and they both use quote mining.

And they’re often the very same people; National Review is a big promoter of the Discovery Institute’s creationist fables in addition to being a leading proponent of AGW denial.