Few scientists sweet on M & M
Eric Gisin
It's about time someone recognized the efforts of these important Canadians.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/scientists+sweet/2306270/story.html
Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, are a thorn in the side of climatologists who say
the planet is under threat from man-made global warming
By RICHARD FOOT, Canwest News ServiceDecember 5, 2009
Steve McIntyre, 62, is a Toronto retiree. He plays squash, dabbles with numbers and insists he
never set out to stir up any trouble.
So why does his name appear again and again in the most unflattering ways in hundreds of emails -
written by the world's most influential climate change scientists - that were mysteriously taken
from a computer in Britain last month and published on the Internet?
In these private messages, McIntyre is called everything from a "bozo" and a "moron" to a
"playground bully."
"In my opinion," said one email written by Benjamin Santer, a climatologist with the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, "Stephen McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy
of climate science."
The "climategate" emails have sparked a scandal - just ahead of next week's global warming summit
in Copenhagen - for suggesting climatologists may have manipulated data to exaggerate the threat of
global warming and conspired to keep contrary points of view out of the scientific journals.
But the emails are also conspicuous for their repeated nasty references to two Canadians - McIntyre
and economist Ross McKitrick - who have become a serious thorn in the side of climatologists and
others who say the planet is under serious threat from man-made global warming.
Although little-known in Canada, McIntyre and McKitrick - or M & M, as they're called in climate
change circles - have since 2003 put forward evidence of faulty calculations in some of the key
scientific studies behind the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.
Their work has drawn the attention of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and
the Wall Street Journal, which last month called them "the climate change gang's most dangerous
apostates."
McIntyre, a Toronto mining analyst and speculator, became intrigued by the climate change issue
when the Kyoto Protocol was up for debate in 2002. He was skeptical of a key piece of science in
the IPCC reports of the time - a graph based on research by U.S. climatologist Michael Mann that
showed Earth's temperatures had remained relatively stable over the past 1,000 years then began
rising suddenly in the 20th century.
The graph, shaped like a sideways hockey stick, became one of the most convincing illustrations in
Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But it reminded McIntyre of the promotional graphs and
statistics commonly used by mining promoters in search of investors.
He said he decided - purely out of curiosity and not because he wanted to shake up the global
warming debate - to carry out some due diligence on the numbers.
Replicating the arcane calculations of climate modelling science would be an impossible task for
most people. But McIntyre had been a math prizewinner in high school, had studied pure mathematics
at the University of Toronto and had won, but turned down, a mathematics scholarship to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, choosing a business career instead.
"I read Mann's paper and thought, 'What this looks to me is like really overblown and high falutin'
language for fairly simple linear regressions and matrix algebra. I figured it would be like doing
a big crossword puzzle, so I went at it," he said in a recent interview. "I had no particular
expectations that it would be wrong, I just thought it would be interesting."
McIntyre contacted Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph statistical economist who was also
analyzing the science behind the IPCC reports. Together, they unearthed evidence that Mann's
calculations were predisposed to producing a hockey stick-shaped graph. They also showed that his
calculations ignored the data showing a major warming trend in the 15th century, much like the
warming of the 20th century.
"Suddenly the 'hockey stick,' the poster child of the global warming community, turns out to be an
artifact of poor mathematics," wrote one scientist in the MIT Technology Review in 2004.
M & M's findings sparked hearings on the science of global warming by the U.S. Congress and an
investigation by the National Academy of Sciences. Their report concluded that while the wider
science behind 20th-century global warming remains valid, the hockey stick graph and other
long-term temperature models were fraught with "uncertainties" and that Mann's calculations "tended
to bias the shape of (hockey stick) reconstructions." Mann was required to publish a retraction
about some of his statistical methods in the science journal Nature.
In 2007, M & M scored again, finding errors in NASA's own long-term temperature records. The agency
was forced to issue a correction, stating that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the
United States.
This year, M & M have also raised questions about the accuracy of another hockey stick-shaped
graph, this one by a British climatologist. The Canadians showed that the graph - showing
drastically warmer 20th-century temperatures - is based on tree ring samples taken from a mere 12
tree cores in one region of Russia.
McKitrick said at first it was "very stressful" questioning the work of the tight-knit climate
change science community. For one thing, their work was shunned by the main academic climate
science journals, which forced them to put their findings on the Internet instead. McIntyre's blog,
climateaudit.org has since exploded in popularity.
Scientists such as Mann have also denounced M & M as "frauds" and called their research "pure
crap." Others have accused them of being secretly sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, a charge
both McIntyre and McKitrick deny.
Ouroboros Rex
> I read this in the weekend Vancouver Sun, which does not have the
> complete article online. It's about time someone recognized the efforts of
> these important
> Canadians.
> http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/scientists+sweet/2306270/story.html
>
>
> Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick,
...denialist liars.
Chom Noamsky
> I read this in the weekend Vancouver Sun, which does not have the
> complete article online.
> It's about time someone recognized the efforts of these important
> Canadians.
You're a clown, Eric, just a fraudulent little clown. Here's what
McKitrick said (and why you didn't link to the Vancouver Sun article):
"I honestly don't know whether it is a big problem, a little problem or
a medium problem," he said. "And I don't think the skeptics have proven
that global warming is not a problem."
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Climate+dissenters+vilified/2307733/story.html
o *nb o
Canuck57
> So why does his name appear again and again in the most unflattering
> ways in hundreds of emails -
> written by the world's most influential climate change scientists - that
> were mysteriously taken
> from a computer in Britain last month and published on the Internet?
Lets hope more computers get hacked. While it is against the law to do
so, these guys are like Robin Hood. But exposing fraud.
Here is a list of hacks that would be good:
GM - Where did the money really go. All of it.
Government studies on how to milk the public for more taxes.
Bank fraud, the juicy stuff.
MPs, senators and congress people not paying their income taxes.
Special interest donations to poliicians with their declarations, and
what is missing.
FBI and governemtn files on criminals they don't prosecute.
Now we know why people fly, to keep it out of email.
We need more of this, exposing the crooks.
Climate Realist
> I read this in the weekend Vancouver Sun, which does not have the complete article online.
> It's about time someone recognized the efforts of these important Canadians.
>
Few scientists sweet on M & M.
That is correct, few fraudsters are sweet on the people that expose
them.
erschro...@gmail.com
> I read this in the weekend Vancouver Sun, which does not have the complete article online.
> It's about time someone recognized the efforts of these important Canadians.
>
Really? Then you can provide a reference, I'm sure.
BTW, the National Academy of Sciences validated the hockey stick.
They did not say it was "fraught with uncertainties" as you claim.
They said:
""The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late
20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented
during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently
been supported by an array of evidence"
At the request of the U.S. Congress, a special "Committee on Surface
Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years" was assembled by
the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and
Climate. The Committee consisted of 12 scientists from different
disciplines and was tasked with explaining the current scientific
information on the temperature record for the past two millennia, and
identifying the main areas of uncertainty, the principal methodologies
used, any problems with these approaches, and how central the debate
is to the state of scientific knowledge on global climate change.
The panel published its report in 2006.[29] The report agreed that
there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded
that they were small in effect.
The instrumentally measured warming of about 0.6 °C (1.1 °F) during
the 20th century is also reflected in borehole temperature
measurements, the retreat of glaciers, and other observational
evidence, and can be simulated with climate models.
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean
surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th
century than during any comparable period during the preceding four
centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the
evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
In response, a group-authored post on RealClimate, of which Mann is
one of the contributors, stated, "the panel has found reason to
support the key mainstream findings of past research, including points
that we have highlighted previously." Similarly, according to Roger A.
Pielke, Jr., the National Research Council publication constituted a
"near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al.";Nature
reported it as "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph."
More:
The Wegman report has itself been criticized on several grounds:
* The report was not subject to formal peer review. At the
hearing, Wegman listed 6 people that participated in his own informal
peer review process via email after the report was finalized and said
they had no objection to the subcommittee submitting it.
* Dr. Thomas Crowley, Professor of Earth Science System, Duke
University, testified at the committee hearing, "The conclusions and
recommendations of the Wegman Report have some serious flaws."
* The result of fixing some of the alleged errors in the overall
reconstruction does not change the general shape of the most recent
part of the reconstruction.
* Similarly, studies that use completely different methodologies
also yield very similar reconstructions.
* The social network analysis is not based on meaningful criteria,
does not prove a conflict of interest and did not apply at the time of
the 1998 and 1999 publications. Such a network of co-authorship is not
unusual in narrowly defined areas of science. During the hearing,
Wegman defined the social network as peer reviewers that had "actively
collaborated with him in writing research papers" and answered that
none of his peer reviewers had.
* Gerald North, chairman of the National Research Council panel
that studied the hockey-stick issue and produced the report Surface
Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, stated the
politicians at the hearing at which the Wegman report was presented
"were twisting the scientific information for their own propaganda
purposes. The hearing was not an information gathering operation, but
rather a spin machine." In testimony when asked if he disputed the
methodology conclusions of Wegman's report, he stated that "No, we
don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much
the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the
claims are made, doesn’t mean they are false."
* Mann has himself said that the report "uncritically parrots
claims by two Canadians (an economist and a mineral-exploration
consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the
peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton's 'panel'.
These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in
their report just weeks ago.
>
> In 2007, M & M scored again, finding errors in NASA's own long-term temperature records. The agency
> was forced to issue a correction, stating that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the
> United States.
The lower 48 states. Of course, we're talking about global warming,
not 48-state warming.
>
> This year, M & M have also raised questions about the accuracy of another hockey stick-shaped
> graph, this one by a British climatologist. The Canadians showed that the graph - showing
> drastically warmer 20th-century temperatures - is based on tree ring samples taken from a mere 12
> tree cores in one region of Russia.
No proof.