Have Another Schlitz, Mikester

My only real question is - why did this Mann guy stop at 1,000 years? I mean, if the dude really wanted to underscore the evilness of human civilization/advancement, he could have just as easily taken his little hockey stick figure back 12-14,000 years. That way he could have eliminated not just the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, he could have also eliminated the Dark Ages Cooling, the Roman Warm Period, the Bronze Age Cooling, the Minoan Warm Period, the Akkadian Cooling, the Second Holocene Warming Optimum, the Egyptian Cooling, the First Holocene Warming Optimum, The Younger Dryas, the Allerod, the Older Dryas, and even the Bolling. The only thing that I can think of is that the fellow is either an ignoramus, or he totally thinks that we are. But, man, oh man, this guy really could have gone for the jugular had he wanted to (tongue planted firmly in cheek, obviously)..............................................................................................Seriously, though, I am not in any way, shape, or form trying to shit on the concept of sudden paradigm shifts. In fact, I'm pretty much on board with it as a general rule (Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Watson and Crick, etc.). But I'm sorry, there was just something suspicious about this whole hockey stick thing right from the start; the manner in which the politicians rallied behind it, the woefully inadequate peer-review, the way that it coincided so perfectly with Kyoto, etc., etc.. And just this very concept of such brazen oversimplifying, the fact that these people focused strictly on one variable (man-made CO2) and disregarded the myriad of others (like, I don't know, the fact that we haven't had a major volcanic eruption with an VEI of over 4 in over 20 years). It just didn't seem like science at that point, and still.