Edited sentence: - "Making conclusive statements without specific findings with regard to atmospheric forcings suggests a lack of scientific rigor and possibly an agenda.- "Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis.- "The centering of the proxy series is a critical factor in the using principal components methodology properly.It is not clear that Dr.Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the MBH paper.Some quotes from the Wegman Report about Michael Mann and his 'hockey stick' graph.The Wegman Report basically came to the conclusion that Michael Mann's hockey stick graph was utterly worthless because Mann used poor methodology, science and mathematics.The Wegman Report was an independent Report commissioned by the United States Congress.The net effect of the decentering is to preferentially choose the so-called hockey stick shapes.Wegman Report