RealClimate

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 for some other folks: Surface temperature records are correlated across fairly substantial distances---a few hundred km. This is what makes paleoreconstructions possible, and what makes it possible to initialize global numerical weather prediction models with so few observations.)

Unfortunately, even in the published version McKitrick still treated the records as independent, and Benestad shows that their model is invalid.

And check out my McKitrick guide if you're having trouble keeping all your McKitrick studies straight. This one is the one that purported to show that the surface temperature record was contaminated by economic influences, not the one that purported to destroy the hockey stick. (Michael Mann is a contributor to RealClimate, so we might see something there as well.)

Update:Chris Mooney is also pleased.

More like this

Chris Mooney notes that McKitrick defended Inhofe's claim that "manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated" I'm not the only one who has found problems with McKitrick's writings on climate. Robert Grumbine has some comments on another McKitrick paper: He was…
I 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…
I've had a closer look at the "bombshell" paper that Patrick Michaels described like this: After four years of one of the most rigorous peer reviews ever, Canadian Ross McKitrick and another of us (Michaels) published a paper searching for "economic" signals in the…
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…

Thanks for posting this link. The site seems to be great.

By Ken Miles (not verified) on 11 Dec 2004 #permalink

Many thanks. Do your really know what you are on about Tim? Holey Moley,

By Louis Hissink (not verified) on 12 Dec 2004 #permalink

Alert to another economist pretending to be a climatologist. The EconoPundit is trying his hand after being inspired by the latest Michael Crichton trash. My analysis here.

If McKitrick is a hockey stick, this guy's a hockey puck (to quote Don Rickles).

Alert to another economist pretending to be a climatologist. The EconoPundit is trying his hand after being inspired by the latest Michael Crichton trash. My analysis here.

If McKitrick is a hockey stick, this guy's a hockey puck (to quote Don Rickles).

Alert to another economist pretending to be a climatologist. The EconoPundit is trying his hand after being inspired by the latest Michael Crichton trash. My analysis here.

If McKitrick is a hockey stick, this guy's a hockey puck (to quote Don Rickles).

Alert to another economist pretending to be a climatologist. The EconoPundit is trying his hand after being inspired by the latest Michael Crichton trash. My analysis here.

If McKitrick is a hockey stick, this guy's a hockey puck (to quote Don Rickles).