of their 1998 article: Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations and pointed out more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached and that the uncertainties were the point of the article. History In the 1960s, Hubert Lamb generalised from historical documents and temperature records of central England to propose a Medieval Warm Period in the North Atlantic region, followed by Little Ice Age. This was discussed in the IPCC First Assessment Report with cautions that the medieval warming might not have been global. Using proxy indicators for quantitative estimates of past temperature record had developed sporadically from the 1930s onwards, and introduced the "Composite Plus Scaling" (CPS) method. Their reconstruction back to 1400 featured in the IPCC Second Assessment Report. The Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes reconstruction (, MBH98) showed global patterns of annual surface temperature, and average hemispheric temperatures back to 1400 with emphasising on uncertainties. independently produced a CPS reconstruction extending back for a thousand years, and (MBH99) used the MBH98 methodology to extend their study back to 1000. The term hockey stick was used by the climatologist Jerry Mahlman to describe the pattern this showed, envisaging a graph that is relatively flat to 1900 as forming an ice hockey stick's "shaft", followed by a sharp increase corresponding to the "blade". A version of the MBH99 graph was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), which also drew on Jones et al. 1998 and three other reconstructions to support the conclusion that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was likely to have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year during the past 1,000 years. The graph was featured in publicity, and became a focus of dispute for those opposed to the strengthening scientific consensus that late 20th century warmth was exceptional. In 2003, as lobbying over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol intensified, efforts by the Bush administration to remove climate reconstructions from the first Environmental Protection Agency and Jim Inhofe's Senate speech claiming that man-made global warming is a hoax both drew on the Soon and Baliunas controversy. Later in 2003, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published disputing data in the MBH98 paper, but their argument was refuted. In 2004 Hans von Storch said that the MBH98 statistical techniques understated variability, but he erred in saying this undermined the