McKitrick
tlambert | September 10, 2004 McKitrick has added a correction his page describing his paper that purports to find economic signals that I posted on here. McKitrick admits to mixing up degrees and radians but claims:
There was a small error in the calculation of regression coefficients in our paper. Our conclusions were not affected by this problem
As I noted in my post, correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it from 0.16 (out of 0.27) to 0.09. McKitrick's correction states:
Outside the dry/cold regions the measured temperature change is…
tlambert | August 25, 2004 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 temperature record. ... The research showed that somewhere around one-half of the warming in the U.N. surface record was explained by economic factors, which can be changes in land use, quality of instrumentation, or upkeep of records.
There seems to be some problems with…
tlambert | July 8, 2004 Mann, Bradley and Hughes have published some corrections to the supplementary information for the famous hockey stick graph showing the temperature record of the last 1000 years. They say that the errors do not affect their published results. This could explain why McKitrick and McIntyre could not reproduce their results, but McKitrick is continuing to insist that Mann's graph is wrong.
McKitrick has also published some errata. Unlike Mann's error McKitrick's error affects his results:
Figure 3 in the Cooler Heads Briefing on TBS contains an error. Tim…
tlambert | May 20, 2004 Last week I wrote about Paul Georgia's review of Essex and McKitrick's Taken by Storm. Based on their book, Georgia made multiple incorrect statements about the physics of temperature. Of course, it might have just been that Georgia misunderstood their book. Fortunately Essex and McKitrick have a briefing on their book, and while Georgia mangles the physics even worse than them, they do indeed claim that there is no physical basis to average temperature. They present two graphs of temperature trends that purport to show that you can get either a cooling trend or a warming trend…
tlambert | April 28, 2004 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 fooling around with correlating per capita income with the observed temperature changes. He concluded that the warming was a figment of climatologists imaginations, as there was a correlation between money and warming. 'Obviously' this had to be due to wealth creating the warming in the dataset,…
tlambert | April 27, 2004
The graph above, which Iain Murray claimed showed that
"The fact that the ten hottest years happened since 1991 may well be an artifact of the collapse in the number of weather monitoring stations contributing to the global temperature calculations following the fall of communism (see graph)"
comes from this paper by Ross McKitrick. McKitrick recently was in the news for publishing a controversial paper that claimed that an "audit" of the commonly accepted reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1000 years was incorrect, so I thought it would be…
tlambert | April 27, 2004[This correspondence started with an email from McKitrick commenting on this post. I've edited it to remove most of the quoted text from previous emails. Further discussion is here.]
I saw your suggestion about how to test whether the increase in average T was an artifact of the changed sample. I can see 2 problems with it. First, there was a change post-1990 in the quality of data in stations still operating, as well as the number of stations. Especially in the former Soviet countries after 1990, the rate of missing monthly records rose dramatically. So you need a subset of stations…
tlambert | April 21, 2004 John Quiggin has another post on the right wing attack on science, this time describing the Australian front. Chris Mooney has great article in the The American Prospect about James Inhofe's part in the attack on science.
And Iain Murray is at it again. He has a post where he refers to graph on the left, saying that it is one of the most important elements in the debate, and writing:
"The fact that the ten hottest years happened since 1991 may well be an artifact of the collapse in the number of weather monitoring stations contributing to the global temperature…