[agere_contra]

In his piece, McIntyre replaces a number (12) of these original measurement series with more data (34 series) from a single location (not one of the above) within the Yamal region, at which the trees apparently do not show the same overall growth increase registered in our data.

Yes, that would be the point. If I have understood this correctly McIntyre demonstrated that Briffa's data-analysis technique would show no hockey stick at all if Briffa hadn't carefully cherry-picked 12 trees with high growth for the most modern dataset.

Briffa apparently got a hockey stick by choosing to use only a small subset of the available data and excluding all others. Which would be farcical science.

[aruanan]

Yes, that would be the point. If I have understood this correctly McIntyre demonstrated that Briffa's data-analysis technique would show no hockey stick at all if Briffa hadn't carefully cherry-picked 12 trees with high growth for the most modern dataset.

And I remember seeing that out of the twelve trees, only one exhibited really high growth, and that it was this single tree that was responsible for the increase seen in the graph. I remember doing stats on patient data sets that we typically threw out the extreme outliers.