Articles Tagged "Steve McIntyre"

In response to a question asking Oxburgh about criticisms that the report – all five of pages of it – appeared “rushed and superficial”, Oxburgh described how the panel had patiently stayed in Norwich to see the project through. Oxburgh (my approximate transcript at about 10:51 time on program):

After we had done all the interviewing and talking and scrutiny, we kept the panel together in Norwich while the report was written and while it went through a series of drafts. So we did not go through the endless iterative procedures with which your committee must be familiar, circulating reports, getting comments here, getting them back, balancing them with someone’s opposing comments. We did it all around the table, that probably saved six weeks over normal procedures.

Q: we all appreciate . can I just clarify this point – you said that all the committee members stayed in Norwich.
Oxburgh – [unintelligible]
Q – OK. Does that mean that they were spending all their time on this report over that 2 week period?
Oxburgh – Not over 2 weeks. Probably over 4 days, 5 days something like that. They’d done a lot beforehand.
Q- How much time did each individual spend working on this report?
Oxburgh – Gosh, you mean altogether, not just in Norwich,
Q- You said that it had happened over a 3 week period but most of the time was spent in Norwich.
Oxburgh – People had done an immense amount of work before, one of the most important things. They had a really tough work schedule before they arrived. Then in Norwich, when they were there, they worked continuously. Total number of person-days spent on this was around 15. Something like that. It was… does that answer your question?

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Alex Reichmuth, Die Weltwoche, 22 July 2010: In November 2009, just days before the big climate summit in Copenhagen, thousands of internal e-mails from leading climate researchers at the University of East Anglia were made public. In the e-mails, the researchers at the university's Climatic Research Unit discussed how to manipulate data series. They discussed with colleagues from other research centres how to sideline critics of mainstream climate science. And they requested each other to delete scientific data in order to protect the scientific information from the clutches of their critics. The affair - soon referred to as "Climategate" - was explosive because the IPCC, in its reports, had again and again relied substantially on the research conducted at CRU - for example, in reconstructing the climate of the last thousand years with the help of so-called proxy data, such as tree rings or ice cores. In addition, CRU researchers also play a leading role in determining the global temperatures today.

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Global warming's most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang's Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described "auditing" a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!

We thought some of you would like to see this CO2Sceptics gem from 27th January 2005......Canada.Com (Join in our Forum section The Missing Hockey Stick to read the debate)

Breaking the hockey stick
Marcel Crok
Special to the Financial Post

The famous graph that supposedly shows that recent temperatures are the highest in a thousand years has now been shown by careful analysis to have been based on faulty data

Few people dispute that the earth is getting warmer, but there are people -- so-called "climate skeptics" -- who question whether the change is historically unique and whether it is the result of human activity. These skeptics are generally outsiders, reviled by "true" climate researchers.

On the one hand, Michael Mann, the first author of the two noted hockey-stick papers (in Nature in 1998 and in Geophysical Research Letters in 1999), is the unofficial king of climate research. In 2002, Scientific American included him as one of the top 50 visionaries in science. On the other hand, the two Canadian skeptics are outsiders: Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics and Stephen McIntyre is a mineral exploration consultant -- which Mann likes to call a conflict of interest.

Two Part YouTube


H/T WUWT

The video showing the climate research work of Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT and Steven McIntyre of Climate Audit is now up on YouTube. One of the most compelling portions of the program has to do with the erroneous reversal of the Tiljander sediments, and Dr. Michael Mann’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge his error, even though other authors of peer reviewed papers have done so. In my opinion, salvation of the hockey stick seems to trump the salvation of good science practice.

The investigative journalism here is refreshing, and well done. It’s the sort of thing CBS 60 minutes used to do.

Here is part 1, a transcript link follows

When the infamous hockey-stick graph that purported to prove that human activities are causing runaway global warming was finally broken, there is some irony in the fact that a couple of Canadians did the breaking. Retired mining engineer Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, have been a thorn in the side of global warming alarmists for years. McIntyre, McKitrick and, more often, the acronym “M&M” to refer to the pair, are the subject of many discussions in the e-mails released from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November.

Reading the e-mails, it quickly becomes clear that leading alarmist scientists, like Michael Mann at Penn State and Phil Jones at the CRU, seemed positively obsessed – almost to the point of appearing deranged at times – with discrediting McIntyre and McKitrick. For example, when the pair published their first hockey stick busting paper in 2003, Mann sent an angry e-mail to his colleagues, telling them how to deal with MM: “The important thing is to deny that this has any intellectual credibility whatsoever and, if contacted by any media, to dismiss this for the stunt that it is.”

Yesterday Ross and I submitted an article to IJC with the following abstract:

A debate exists over whether tropical troposphere temperature trends in climate models are inconsistent with observations (Karl et al. 2006, IPCC (2007), Douglass et al 2007, Santer et al 2008). Most recently, Santer et al (2008, herein S08) asserted that the Douglass et al statistical methodology was flawed and that a correct methodology showed there is no statistically significant difference between the model ensemble mean trend and either RSS or UAH satellite observations. However this result was based on data ending in 1999. Using data up to the end of 2007 (as available to S08) or to the end of 2008 and applying exactly the same methodology as S08 results in a statistically significant difference between the ensemble mean trend and UAH observations and approaching statistical significance for the RSS T2 data. The claim by S08 to have achieved a “partial resolution” of the discrepancy between observations and the model ensemble mean trend is unwarranted..

A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time…

The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre’s site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up.

There has been some turmoil yesterday on the leaderboard of the U.S. (Temperature) Open and there is a new leader.

A little unexpectedly, 1998 had a late bogey and 1934 had a late birdie. (I thought that they were both in the clubhouse since the turmoil seemed to be in the 2000s.) In any event, the new leader atop the U.S. Open is 1934.

2006 had a couple of late bogeys and fell to 4th place, behind even 1921. I think that there’s a little air in the 2006 numbers even within GISS procedures as the other post-2000 lost about 0.15 strokes through late bogeys, while it lost only 0.10 strokes. It is faltering and it might yet fall behind 1931 into 5th place.

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings are calculated separately.) Note: For the new leaderboard see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt. The old data has been erased; by sheer chance, I had the old data active in my R-session but I can’t give a link to it.)

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