Misplaced Pages

Ross McKitrick

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Chris Chittleborough (talk | contribs) at 06:03, 10 November 2005 (→Criticism of McKitrick: Fix last sentence). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 06:03, 10 November 2005 by Chris Chittleborough (talk | contribs) (→Criticism of McKitrick: Fix last sentence)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Ross McKitrick is a Canadian environmental economist. He is known for his work on global warming. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario (since 2001) and, since 2002, Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian policy think tank that opposes the Kyoto Protocol.

McKitrick co-wrote the 2002 book Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming with Christopher Essex. It was runner-up for the Donner Prize as the Best Canadian Book on Public Policy, and finalist for the Canadian Science Writers' Association Book Prize.

Criticism of Mann et al

McKitrick has recently (since approximately 2002) worked on global warming, concerning which he is a sceptic. His best-known work is Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series, coauthored with Stephen McIntyre. This presented an "audit" of work by Michael Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH); it appeared in Energy and Environment in 2003. MBH have replied, claiming that the results are not affected. Nature published a corrigendum by MBH, including a re-statement of their data and methods, on July 1 2004. The corrigendum did not affect the results. In 2005, Ammann and Wahl claimed (in a press release) to have replicated MBH, but their paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters.

Stephen McIntyre and McKitrick have reported finding further errors in the MBH approach , . In 2004, they submitted a short article to Nature; after two revisions to meet space limitations, Nature declined the submission, partly because it was "too technical" to explain in 500 words.

In October 2004, Richard A. Muller brought McKitrick and McIntyre's critique of MBH to wider public attention in a column for Technology Review. (Tim Lambert's response to this colum is here.)

In February 2005, the article "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance" by McIntyre and McKitrick was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

To summarise McKitrick and McIntyre's critique, they claim that MBH:

and that the global warming reported by MBH depends on the inclusion of data from a few bristlecone pines in California which are known to be poor proxies for temperature.

Criticism of McKitrick

McKitrick's own data analysis has been criticised. In 2004, he and Patrick Michaels published a in Climate Research and made their data and code available via the Internet. Tim Lambert found a software bug in their code related to whether a cosine functions used radians or degrees. Lambert claimed that this bug invalidated their. McKitrick and Michaels acknowledged the error but claimed that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected . Lambert has other criticisms of McKitrick in a special category on his blog.

Notes

  1. McKitrick gained his doctorate in 1996 from the University of British Columbia, and in the same year was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph ).

See also

External links

Categories: