Environmental news, expensive oil, dismissive Greenspan, and no Global warning?

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• 1 - Hal Pawluk

  Oct 16, 2004 at 1:55 pm

  Just to pick up from where you left off, Jeremy, here's an update:

  In a paper published last month in Energy & Environment, a social science journal known for reports critical of climate-change research, Canadian businessman Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick of Canada's University of Guelph charge that the Nature report contains numerous errors regarding temperatures from the past six centuries.
  
  When corrected, the data suggest the 15th century was actually warmer than today, they say. [Global warming debate heats up Capitol Hill 11/23/2003] (opens in new window)

  
  
  Many others disagree with the disagreement (which is probably not surpising, with McIntyre being a businessmand and McKitrick an economist):
  
  

  The authors of the Nature paper, led by climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, respond that the critics botched their analysis, selectively dropping records to invent a warm 15th century and making numerous other statistical mistakes.
  
  Climate researcher Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. in Boulder, Colo., calls the critics' complaints "seriously flawed" and "silly."
  
  In addition to the Nature paper, about a dozen independent studies suggest the 20th century was warmer than normal, Wigley points out.
  
  From a statistical viewpoint, "I lean in favor of Mann," says statistician George Shambaugh. of Georgetown University. "There is an increase in the 20th century that is greater than the cyclical patterns found by either group since 1550. And since the early 1900s, we have been hotter than any time since then."
  
  Princeton geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer. compares climate skeptics to tobacco industry scientists who sought for decades to obscure the link between smoking and lung cancer. Arguing over whether man-made global warming exists obscures a more important debate over what steps are possible to moderate its effects, he says. [Global warming debate heats up Capitol Hill 11/23/2003] (opens in new window)

  It looks like the businessman and the economist may have cooked the books, and made more errors of their own.
  
  

• 2 - Hal Pawluk

  Oct 16, 2004 at 2:24 pm

  Here's a newer discusssion with links to a number of interesting articles:

  According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues.
  
  This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott's shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick's work is even shoddier than Lott's.
  
  In previous rounds of the debate, Lambert has shown that McKitrick messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations, showed he knew almost nothing about climate, flunked basic thermodynamics, couldn’t handle missing values correctly and invented his own temperature scale.
  
  Bear in mind that McKitrick's main claim to fame is his assertion to have done a painstakingly careful check of the work of others and to have found numerous errors.
  
  And Michaels was a reputable climate scientist before he sold out to the fossil fuel lobby.

  The links are worth following up if you're really into this.
  
  

• 3 - Bob A. Booey

  Oct 16, 2004 at 4:01 pm

  Good research, Hal.

• 4 - Hal Pawluk

  Oct 16, 2004 at 4:54 pm

  Thanks, Bob - I mistrust just about anything that has even a whiff of "American Enterprise Insititute" attached to it.
  
  

• 5 - omni

  Jan 23, 2005 at 11:53 am

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