The «hockey stick» may be a cause celebre among denialists, but it's only a secondary part of
the mainstream case for global warming, which is based on the physics of the greenhouse effect and the observed warming of recent decades.
For the
case of climate change, Thagard and Findlay (2011) showed that the contrarian position, exemplified by the opinion that
global warming is a natural fluctuation, is incoherent in comparison to the
mainstream scientific position.