Steve McIntyre
gregladen | September 22, 2014Who is Steve McIntyre? From DeSmogBlog.com:
Stephen McIntyre has been a long-time mining industry executive, mostly working on the “stock market side” of mining exploration deals. He published a blog called Climate Audit where he attempts to analyse in sometimes long and extensive detail the work of climate change scientists where he documents “statistical mistakes” in peer-reviewed scientific literature. ...
McIntyre has been described as a “persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003” and has been a prominent critic of…
tlambert | January 20, 2011Deep Climate catches Steve McIntyre in a particularly outrageous piece of quote mining. McIntyre strips a sentence written by Trenberth from its context to make it appear that Trenberth was saying that Jones was an IPCC author for the first time, when in fact Trenberth was saying that Jones was an IPCC lead author for the first time.
My comment from a previous McIntyre quote mining incident still applies:
You don't have to take my word for any of this -- check it out for yourself and ask yourself if you can trust the claims McIntyre makes about things that aren't so easy to check.
tlambert | November 16, 2010Deep Climate continues his examination of the Wegman report. It would seem that Wegman's "reproduction" of McIntyre's results amounted to nothing more than running McIntyre's code without understanding what it did. And while Mann's "short centring" method does tend to produce a hockey-stick McIntyre greatly exaggerated the extent that it does so.
tlambert | August 15, 2010The discussion involving Judith Curry and The Hockey Stick Illusion has continued at Collide-a-Scape, with posts on the views of Judith Curry (Curry did admit to getting one of her ten points wrong, but not the other nine) and those of Gavin Schmidt.
Steve McIntyre's comments in the second thread provides another case where readers can judge the reliability of his claims without having to delve into the mathematics. He wrote:
The non-Stickness of Mann-style reconstructions without bristlecones+Gaspe or with reduced bristlecone+Gaspe weight - a point conceded by Wahl and Ammann - was…
tlambert | July 7, 2010Following vindications from the NRC panel, the independent Penn State Committee, the House of Commons report, the International Panel, the Penn state Investigatory Committee, the Independent Climate Change Email Review has reported
On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. ... we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments. ... But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness
On…
tlambert | June 29, 2010Deep Climate investigates Steve McIntyre's claim that, in the IPCC TAR, Michael Mann used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in Briffa's tree-ring proxy. You will be shocked, just shocked, to discover that:
So, once again, the accusation that Mann "truncated" or "chopped off" the data set is proven to be utterly false.
tlambert | June 18, 2010Steve McIntyre claims:
One version of the trick is used in IPCC TAR. In this version, Mann replaced post-1960 values of the Briffa reconstruction with instrumental values, then did a smooth, then truncated the Briffa reconstruction back to 1960. Post-1960 instrumental values affected the smooth by the arithmetic of the smoothing filter.
Steven Mosher claims that the same "trick" was used in IPCC AR4.
Arthur Smith investigated and shows that the 1960-truncated Briffa curve in AR4 was not padded with instrumental values, but rather with the mean of the adjacent existing values, exactly as…
tlambert | June 9, 2010Steve Mosher and Steve McIntyre have alleged that the stolen CRU emails prove that Keith Briffa had violated IPCC rules in when working on the 4th Assessment Report. They can't point to any particular IPCC rule and rely on a creative interpretation of an email from Jonathan Overpeck, which Mosher claims means that Briffa "should have no contact with other scientists outside of the IPCC process". Some of us might have just pointed out that this is an absurd interpretation, but Brian Angliss goes the extra mile and checks with Overpeck who tells him that "there is no restriction on IPCC…
tlambert | May 16, 2010Deep Climate has been reading the stolen emails that Steve McIntyre didn't mention:
Arguing from a cherrypicked selection of quotes from the "Climategate" emails, McIntyre has claimed that IPCC authors Chris Folland and Michael Mann pressured Briffa to submit a reconstruction that would not "dilute the message" by showing "inconsistency" with multi-proxy reconstructions from Mann and Briffa's CRU colleague Phil Jones. Briffa "hastily re-calculated his reconstruction", sending one with a supposedly larger post-1960 decline before. According to McIntyre, Mann resolved this new "conundrum" and…
tlambert | May 12, 2010Deep Climate documents what happened when Steve McIntyre combined his talent for making mountains out of molehills with David Rose's talent for fabrication:
So in summary, we have a nonsensical accusation of "artful" manipulation of a key graph. And we have a fake "blowup" from the Mail on Sunday that contains important differences with the real figure.
Read the whole thing.
illconsidered | February 12, 2010And this one is a beauty.
Of course, like models, all analogies are wrong but some are useful! I think this hits the nail on the head in terms of CRU's perspective but I grant you it does not describe well any of the probable things that might be in the heads of the Climate Audit crowd. Undoubtably, some are sincere crusaders.
I really do prefer to take people at face value, but some impressive bit of researching over at Deep Climate kinda makes it hard to believe in the whole "gee, we're just asking" schtick Steve McIntyre puts out to the general public.
Check out the very substantial Part…
illconsidered | February 11, 2010For most of us, the F in FOI stands for "freedom". It seems for Steve McIntyre, it stands for "form letter".
Via Eli Rabett we learn that the Freedom of Information requests (FOI) that are central to the only potentially damnng aspect of the CRU "swifthacking" incident have been released. They can be found here[PDF].
I have not looked at them yet, but Eli points out a very interesting one that begins thus (and we are quoting):
I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries…
tlambert | January 26, 2010Imagine, if you will, that the emails stolen from CRU had included fawning comments from an MSM journalist to a climate scientist like this:
As a veteran member of the MSM (Vanity Fair and the UK's Mail on Sunday) may I state for the record: Sir, I salute you. Bravo!
or this:
without Steve's brilliant work and this magnificent website, it could not have been written.
What do you think the denialists would have said? Since a perfectly innocuous query from Seth Borenstein in the stolen emails lead to Anthony Watts calling for "AP to remove Seth Borenstein as 'science reporter'", you can bet…
tlambert | December 11, 2009The phrase "hide the decline" from the stolen CRU emails has been taken out of context and construed to refer to a decline in temperatures this century when in fact it was a reference to a decline in tree-ring density since 1961. Steve McIntyre knows this, but instead of a correction, he offers another misrepesentation of its meaning, quote mining the stolen emails to argue that the IPCC was hiding stuff:
IPCC Lead Authors met in Arusha, Tanzania from September 1 to 3, 1999 ... at which the final version of the "zero-order" draft of the Third Assessment Report was presented and discussed…
tlambert | October 7, 2009One of McIntyre's repeated complaints about Briffa was that he refused to release his data. For example, in his post Fresh Data on Briffa's Yamal #1:
A few days ago, I became aware that the long-sought Yamal measurement data url had materialized at Briffa's website - after many years of effort on my part and nearly 10 years after its original use in Briffa (2000).
I am very grateful to the editors of Phil Trans B (Roy Soc) - at long last, a journal editor stood up to CRU, requiring Briffa to archive supporting data.
This got turned into statements like this one, from Tom Fuller:
The data,…
tlambert | October 3, 2009Over the past few days we have had another outbreak of stories of how global warming has been totally disproved. For example, James Delingpole: the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie
When finally McIntyre plotted in a much larger and more representative range of samples than used those used by Briffa - though from exactly the same area - the results he got were startlingly different.
The scary red line shooting upwards is the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one, heading downwards,…
tlambert | March 16, 2009Allow me to shorten Heartland's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change for you.
Joseph L. Bast: Bray's survey shows that there is no consensus.
Vaclav Klaus: Environmentalists have a secret plan to "return mankind centuries back".
Richard Lindzen: It is an error to say "It's the sun!"
Tom McClintock: Al Gore is fat. And, it's the sun!
Lawrence Solomon: Environmental organizations are pawns of the foundations that fund them.
Tom Segalstad: Total human emissions of CO2 are twice the alleged increase in atmospheric CO2, therefore human emissions cannot be the cause of the increase.
Syun…