(Wegman's other comments show that the science is messy, but not that it is wrong.)

Yes it stands up. The idea that Wegman is not a climate scientist is funny since Mann is also lacking a degree in climate science. The statistical flaws of the hockey stick are within Wegman's area of expertise. Wegman has been Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Theoretical and Applied Statistics. This was the primary focus of his work, though he also did a social network analysis to show the scientists are too closed a group and not able to do proper peer-review. That hockey-sticks are produced by other papers is irrelevant, both because of the non-independent nature of these scientists, and for the basic reason as reported by Wegman, ANSWER CORRECT + METHOD WRONG = BAD SCIENCE. Ian Jolliffe is another expert who has agreed with the criticisms of Mann's work. He was a reviewer for a submission to Nature by McIntyre and McKitrick who approved the paper, and complained of Mann's response,'I don't think disputes are resolved by yelling louder.'

It would have been pretty simple to walk away from the bad methods and try to get a better result, but too often climate scientists are not willing to do that, Mann in particular. Instead they opt for a circle the wagons approach to defend all lousy science.

Sometimes critics point to the NAS Report at the same time from another Congressional Committee. However, the Chairman of that panel testified with regards to Wegman, whether he disputed any of his findings:

DR. NORTH. No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the claims are made, doesn’t mean they are false.

Panel member Bloomfield also testified to this effect.

Some of the Wegman Report holds up even better today than then. Since the report, ClimateGate e-mails came out, showing that the pal review was even worse than suggested by Wegman, with Phil Jones saying 'these reviewers will know what to say without prompting.' 'We can't afford to lose GRL' 'The hole at GRL has been plugged.'

The main point I got from the Wegman report was the connections between climate scientists. There is a very small pool of scientists who write the papers, do the peer reviews and act as authors for the IPCC. They called themselves The Team.

As peer reviewers and IPCC authors they have great power in the field of climate science. They can control which papers see the light of day and which do not. The fact that they used this control can be seen in the climategate emails.

The Mann et al hockeystick can be replicated but I think you need two key ingredients, one is a particular set of tree ring samples and I can't remember the other (sorry!). If you omit any one then you get a hockeystick. If you omit both then you don't but that is not what gets published.

There are questions about the data and procedure used but the real question is: "Was there a medieval warm period that was warmer than today, or not?" If we do know then what is the answer? If we don't know then why not? (Note by "warmer" I mean was the global average surface temperature higher than today. I am not concerned with any local/global obfuscation.)

The hockey stick is reflected in many areas of climate science and all tell a similar and consistent story: human activity has caused a profound and rapid disturbance to our climate systems and positive feedback means the effects are escalating.

The hockey stick was criticized for years for a variety of reasons BUT others can to basically the same conclusion stick has been criticized by know nothing deniers for a long time BUT others conducted studies that came to the same basic conclusion by various methods substantiating Mann's results.

For those in doubt watch this