McKitrick
tlambert | November 29, 2011Deep Climate dissects Ross McKitrick's deceptive quoting from the emails stolen from CRU in 2009:
In one particularly outrageous and error-filled passage, McKitrick accuses IPCC AR4 co-ordinating lead authors Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth of selecting their team of contributing authors solely on the basis of whether they agree with the pair's scientific views. He even goes so far as to accuse Jones of "dismissing" (i.e. rejecting as a contributing author) one qualified expert who, supposedly in Jones's own words, "has done a lot, but I don't trust him."
But the record clearly shows that it…
tlambert | April 6, 2010I don't think I need to add much to Deep Climate's dissection of McKitrick's claims that one of his papers has been unfairly rejected, so I'll just make three quick points. McKitrick claims:
There was some excitement when a blogger found a minor error in our computer code (we had released the code at the time of publication), but we sent a correction to the journal right away and showed that the results hardly changed.
The "minor" error was confusing degrees with radians. As I wrote at the time:
correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it…
tlambert | March 16, 2009Allow me to shorten Heartland's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change for you.
Joseph L. Bast: Bray's survey shows that there is no consensus.
Vaclav Klaus: Environmentalists have a secret plan to "return mankind centuries back".
Richard Lindzen: It is an error to say "It's the sun!"
Tom McClintock: Al Gore is fat. And, it's the sun!
Lawrence Solomon: Environmental organizations are pawns of the foundations that fund them.
Tom Segalstad: Total human emissions of CO2 are twice the alleged increase in atmospheric CO2, therefore human emissions cannot be the cause of the increase.
Syun…
tlambert | March 14, 2007McKitrick and Essex have managed to get their "no such thing as average temperature" stupidity published in a journal! In their paper they add some new stupid to go with the old stupid from Taken by Storm. Can they take Chillingar and Khilyuk's crown? Eli Rabett is having a pinata party/open book exam to celebrate. See if you can see where they went wrong!
tlambert | June 30, 2006In February, 86 evangelical Christian leaders backed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, calling for federal legislation to reduce CO2 emissions.
Opposing them is a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance who are collecting signatures in support of a document
arguing against the existence of anthropogenic global warming. It's the usual discredited stuff: Oregon petition, Peiser's discredited claims, Bray's bogus survey etc etc. The most interesting argument is on page 12:
It is ironic that many supporters of the ECI rely heavily on the claim
of scientific consensus to buttress…
tlambert | May 9, 2006In the olden days to become a leading climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
A group of leading climate scientists has announced the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about man-made global warming. ...
The coalition includes such well-known climate scientists as:
Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most recently a visiting scholar at…
tlambert | April 8, 2006
Six Australian business leader reckon that the debate is over and climate change is real:
Six business leaders yesterday stepped into the greenhouse debate, and blew the whistle. Game over, they said: climate change is real, it's going to hurt, and unless we act now, it's going to hurt us a lot.
These guys know how to play the game. Westpac's CEO David Morgan is a former Treasury official, married to former Labor minister Ros Kelly. They weren't going to criticise John Howard over his handling of climate change; he doesn't like criticism. They just urged him to shift ground, and fast.…
tlambert | March 24, 2006
You have two 50g containers of cream. One is 10% fat, and the other 20% fat. You combine them. What is the percentage of fat in the mixture?
A. 10% of 50 is 5, 20% of 50 is 10. (10+5)/(50+50) is 15%. The answer is 15%, the arithmetic mean of 10% and 20%.
B. 14.1%, the geometric mean of 10% and 20%.
C. 15.8%, the root mean square of 10% and 20%.
D. It could be either A, B, or C. There is nothing to stop you using any of these means as the answer. And anyway, the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to solve, so how can we figure out what happens when we combine two fluids…
tlambert | February 16, 2006Hockey stick wars, the story so far: McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) first claimed that the hockey stick graph was the product of "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) published a correction to the supplementary information about their article, but which did not affect their results. Next, MM argued that the hockey stick was the result of incorrect normalization of the data. However, Hans van…
tlambert | February 14, 2006
Eli Rabett is working his way through Taken By Storm. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this work, it's a global warming denial book which contains some spectacularly Bad Physics, with the authors claiming that average temperature has no physical meaning. Anyway, Rabett is reading chapter two, and finds he needs to create a EssexMcKitrictionary. Here's an extract:
Doctrine of Certainty - the idea that anyone besides Essex (and maybe McKitrick) can know anything. Obviously false. Often called "The Doctrine" includes items that are "manifestly false or the claim to know it is false…
tlambert | January 3, 2006Eli Rabett has scored Essex and McKitrick's briefing for Taken By Storm at Global Warming Skeptic Bingo. Alas, they don't win. I reckon their book will do better. For example, they get another box at bingo with this passage (from page 134 of their book):
There are enemies of T-Rex who think that the satellite average is the true one and the surgface average is so much crap. The Knights of the White Boxes respond that the satellite averages are very silly and no one should pay any attention to them. The Defenders of the Satellites went before the Grand Council of the American…
tlambert | November 21, 2005Eli Rabett dissects Essex and McKitrick's incompetence with averages:
Unfortunately, either Essex or McKitrick or both do not understand zero and negative numbers. You know where my money is.
Read his post to see why.
Mind you, Steve McIntyre isn't convinced that there is anything wrong with their argument because "Chris Essex is an accomplished thermodynamicist" and
my impression was that your counter-argument was mostly just belligerence. While it's possible that they made a mistake. I very much doubt whether Essex made a trivial mistake and your argument seemed to be assuming that it was…
tlambert | November 10, 2005Eli Rabett continues to try to puzzle out the weird statements about temperature in Taken by Storm:
Reading the several versions of Essex and McKitrick anyone familiar with thermodynamics (heat engines, blackbodies, chemical reactions, etc.) will start to scratch their heads. One peculiar statement after another appears dealing with temperature and other basic stuff. It turns out that Essex is using a rather special definition of temperature for a non-equilibrium radiation field. If you want to read about it look up "How hot is radiation", C. Essex, D.C. Kennedy and R.S. Berry, Am. J. Phys.…
tlambert | October 29, 2005Eli Rabbett has encountered Essex and McKitrick's briefing about their book Taken by Storm (which I criticised here) and is not impressed:
with so many dubious claims that one hardly knows where to begin.
tlambert | August 31, 2005The Wall Street Journal has a reputation for publishing excellent news pages and mendacious editorial pages. Now, an investigation by Environmental Science and Technology on an WSJ front page article on McIntyre and McKitrick makes you wonder if the editorial pages are influencing the news reporting. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few extracts:
But the harshest critic of the whole issue is former Wall Street Journal page-one editor, Frank Allen. He now directs the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources in Missoula, Mont. When asked to read the front-page article…
tlambert | June 29, 2005
HangLeft:
"it fits the pattern we've come to know and expect from the Republicans: when facts get in the way of their bankrupt ideology, they cover up those facts and intimidate the messenger."
Coturnix: "With all the misuse of science by the current Administration I still never expected the Lysenko-style persecution of scientists whose data do not support the party line. Yet, this day has come. The USA has its Lysenko, and his name is Joe Barton."
Will: "Barton is known for being a staunch opponent of the Kyoto Protocol and referring to climate change provisions as "odorous" measures…
tlambert | June 27, 2005Chris Mooney reports on the latest attack on the hockey stick. Joe Barton, chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce has sent out a set of letters, supposedly "requesting information regarding global warming studies". However, if you look at the letters, you will find that the only study he is interested is Mann, Bradley and Hughes from way back in 1998 (the "hockey stick" study); and the questions are loaded ones of the form: "Can you explain why you made all the errors detailed in Mcintyre and McKitrick's Energy and Environment paper?"
It is probably just a coincidence that Joe Barton…
tlambert | December 10, 2004 Excellent news. Some climate scientists have started a blog called RealClimate, something sorely needed to correct the disinformation put about by Tech Central Station and the like. I hope they can do for climate science what The Panda's Thumb does for evolution.
One of the first posts is by Rasmus Benestad on the McKitrick-Michaels paper that got degrees and radians mixed up. Years ago, when McKitrick was first working on the paper Robert Grumbine observed that McKitrick had
Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but…
tlambert | October 21, 2004 There seems to be some confusion about McKitrick's latest attempt to refute global warming. For instance, Andrew Sullivan thinks that McKitrick's famous degrees-radians screw up is part of this latest attempt. However, McKitrick claims to have refuted global warming in several different ways and the degrees-radians screw up was a in a different paper to his latest one. I decided to draw up a table to help folks sort them out.
Authors
Summary
Consequences if he is right
Status
Essex and McKitrick
There is no physical basis to average temperature.
No global…
tlambert | October 18, 2004 In this column, Richard Muller claims that McKitrick and McIntyre have shown that the hockey stick graph is an "artifact of poor mathematics". If you have been following the global warming debate this claim should look familiar, because McKitrick and McIntyre made the same claim last year as well. So what's new? Well, last year they claimed that the hockey stick was the product "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal…