Rob Wilson emails a copy of his new paper (£) in QSR, co-authored with, well, just about everybody in the dendro community. It's a tree-ring based temperature reconstruction of summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere, it's called N-TREND and excitingly it's a hockey stick!

I gather that Steve McIntyre is looking at it already, so I shall leave it to the expert to pronounce. But on a quick skim through the paper, there are some parts that are likely to prompt discussion. For example, I wonder how the data series were chosen. There is some explanation:

For N-TREND, rather than statistically screening all extant TR [tree ring] chronologies for a significant local temperature signal, we utilise mostly published TR temperature reconstructions (or chronologies used in published reconstructions) that start prior to 1750. This strategy explicitly incorporates the expert judgement the original authors used to derive the most robust reconstruction possible from the available data at that particular location.

But I'd like to know how the selection of chronologies used was made from the full range of those available. Or is this all of them?

If so, there are not many - only 54 at peak. Moreover, the blade of the stick is only supported by a handful. On a whim, I picked one of these series at random - a reconstruction of summer temperatures for Mount Olympus by Klesse et al, which runs right up to 2011. Here's their graph:

You can see the uptick in recent years, but you can also see an equally warm a medieval warm period. This is only one of the constituent series of course, but I think it will be worth considering this in more detail as it does raise questions over the robustness of the NTREND hockey stick blade.