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Stephen McIntyre is the editor of "Climate Audit", a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is most prominent as a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Career

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford before graduating in 1971.

McIntyre worked for 30 years in the mineral business, the last part of these in the hard-rock mineral exploration as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada. He was the president and founder of Northwest Exploration Company Limited and a director of its parent company, Northwest Explorations Inc. When Northwest Explorations Inc. was taken over in 1998 by CGX Resources Inc. to form the oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy Inc., McIntyre ceased being a director. McIntyre was a strategic advisor for CGX in 2000 through 2003.

Prior to 2003 he was an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies.

The Hockey stick controversy

With Ross McKitrick, McIntyre co-authored a paper questioning the validity of the "hockey stick" graph used in a journal article by Michael E. Mann and co-authors.

ClimateAudit.org

McIntyre's blog has as a recurrent topic the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at the climatology blog RealClimate. An earlier website, www.climate2003.com, provided additional information for papers co-written by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, including raw data and source code.

Inspiration

McIntyre became interested in these issues after advocates of the Kyoto Protocol used the Hockey Stick graph from the 1998 paper by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes in ways that he found similar to Bre-X and other stock frauds, leading him to try to audit the data and analysis. He launched the blog in January 2005 just before Geophysical Research Letters published a paper by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick critiquing the Mann et al. paper. The blog is largely concerned with McIntyre's efforts to audit current climate publications. It supports comments, but topics not related to auditing results in climate science are generally discouraged.

Auditing

Stephen McIntyre has been highlighted by the press including The Wall Street Journal and United Press International.

In 2007, McIntyre started auditing the various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the urban heat island effect. He discovered a small discontinuity in some U.S. records in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and "thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000". The adjustment caused the average temperatures for the continental United States to be reduced about 0.15 °C during the years 2000-2006. Changes in other portions of the record did not exceed 0.03 °C; it made no discernible difference to the global mean anomalies.

McIntyre later commented:

My original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of “fixing” bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming. According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and ) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined.

The instrumental temperature record

McIntyre has supported the efforts of Anthony Watts and SurfaceStations.org to document the quality of weather stations in the US. McIntyre was investigating the ability of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) software to fix data problems due to poor quality stations.

Awards

Climate Audit was co-winner of a 2007 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog award, receiving 20,000 votes in the online poll.

Personal

He is an active squash player and once won a gold medal in the World Masters Games in squash doubles.

See also

• Global warming controversy
• Instrumental temperature record#Calculating the global temperature
• Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident

References

1. ^ Stephen McIntyre (25 October 2003). "Short Bio: Steven McIntyre". Retrieved 2007-09-01.
2. Stephen McIntyre (22 March 2006). "Blog comment". Climate Audit. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
3. "Stephen McIntyre". George C. Marshall Institute. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
4. "Consolidated Statements of Operations & Deficit" (PDF). cgxEnergy. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
5. McIntyre, Stephen (2005). "Hockey Sticks, principal components, and spurious significance" (PDF). Geophysical Research Letters. 32: L03710. doi:10.1029/2004GL021750. Retrieved 2007-09-01. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
6. Stephen McIntyre (23 March 2006). "Blog comment". Climate Audit. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
7. Mann M.E., Bradley R.S., Hughes M.K. (1998). "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries". Nature. 392: 779–787. doi:10.1038/33859.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
8. "Climate Change Emails Reveal Rigged "Consensus"".
9. "Article in The Washington Times".
10. Data @ NASA GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP)
11. Climate Audit - by Steve McIntyre » Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”?
12. Best Science Blog - The 2007 Weblog Awards

External links

McIntyre's websites and publications

• ClimateAudit — McIntyre's blog
• Article detailing the Wegman and North Reports with links and summarization
• McIntyre's biography (.doc file, last updated in 2003)
• The M&M Project: Replication Analysis of the Mann et al. Hockey Stick at McKitrick's website
• "The IPCC, the 'Hockey Stick' Curve, and the Illusion of Experience by McIntyre and McKitrick, Marshall Institute, 18 November 2003
• Publications by McIntyre at the Marshall Institute's website
• McIntyre's interview on BBC

Articles about McIntyre and responses

• "Kyoto Protocol Based on Flawed Statistics" by Marcel Crok with English translation by Angela den Tex, Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, February, 2005
• "In Climate Debate, The 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off", Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2005
• "Global-Warming Skeptics under Fire", Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2005.
• All in a good cause by Orson Scott Card, March 8, 2007.
• Video of talk by Gerald North (head of the NRC committee) regarding their report.
• Global warming? Look at the numbers by Lorne Gunther, National Post, August 13, 2007.
• Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder by Daniel Dale, The Star, August 14, 2007.
• Toronto blogger turns up NASA climate error published by CTV.ca, August 15, 2007.
• Nasa climate change error spotted by blogger, Natalie Paris, Daily Telegraph, 16 August, 2007.
• New York Times article on the NAS report
• The NAS report
• "Revenge of the Climate Laymen", Wall Street Journal Europe article on McIntyre & ClimateAudit, November 18, 2009.
• "Climate science's PR disaster", Margaret Wente's column for November 30 2009, The Globe and Mail

• Living people
• University of Toronto alumni
• Alumni of the University of Oxford
• American non-fiction environmental writers