www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html -> www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/trc.html
We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is that the values in the early 15 th century exceed any values in the 20 th century. UPDATE: March 19, 2004 In response to a couple of requests for an update, here is a quick one. A few papers are undergoing review at some journals, including Steves and my contributions, and there is not a dull page to be found in any of them. McIntyre has been winning squash tournaments and I have started bagpiping lessons . UPDATE: January 22, 2004 Despite the long quiet on this page, the past 7 weeks have been very busy for us. A number of people have written to ask about progress on Part II, while others have interpreted the 7 week gap as a sign that maybe we ran out of material. No, there is a lot of material, and the challenge has been to sift through it and put it into coherent form. There are now some new journals involved in handling material that arose from our paper, and we have held back releasing any of the Part II contents connected to these review processes. Professor Manns response focuses on the role of 3 out of 22 key indicators available in the 15th century portion of the data base. His calculations show that without these series the MBH98 results would look like ours, and his assertion is that we improperly omitted the series in question. Our response will establish that the series in question are in fact inadmissible. Of course the discovery that the 1998 conclusions rest so sensitively on only 3 series already points to the lack of robustness of this famous graph. UPDATE: December 1 We are continuing to work on Part II of our response, which has required a detailed examination of Professor Manns ftp site, hence the delay. We also traveled to Washington DC on November 18, to present a briefing on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, on our work to date. Some interested experts at a European climate lab had privately criticized us for what they regarded as an insufficiently wide circle of reviewers for the E&E paper. We offered to them that they could review Part II before its release, on the condition that if they found errors they could hold us to public account to rectify them, but if the document checks out they would have to issue a statement saying so. After considering it for a week they declined the offer, saying they dont have time to do the review, and would prefer to follow the debates progress in journals.
UPDATE: November 11 Our response to the replies thus far from Professor Mann and his colleagues will be presented in three parts. Our overarching goal is to ascertain exactly what data and what computational steps were used by MBH98, so as to focus in as quickly as possible on the real sources of differences between our results. But along the way there are a few new isses that must also be dealt with. Part 1, available here in PDF format responds to the claim that the data we audited was prepared in April 2003 in response to McIntyres request to Mann, and that we ought to have gone to Professor Manns ftp site instead. We show that the data file we were sent was in existence long before April 2003 and had we gone to the ftp site we would have found it contains the same data anyway. This document, by establishing the practical equivalence between Professor Manns ftp site and the data file we were sent, returns our focus to the basic question of data quality and sets the stage for the subsequent parts in which we will extend our existing critique. Part 2 will present a detailed examination of the contents of Professor Manns FTP site, in light of the claim that it is the official repository for the MBH98 data. This document has been sent to some colleagues for their comments and will be made available shortly thereafter. Part 3, now under way, will seek to resolve the outstanding differences between our computational methods and those of MBH. Completion of this part will be contingent on our receiving the specific computer programs MBH used, and we are seeking this disclosure. McKitrick is going to an economics workshop in Manitoba for a couple of days, to discuss the question Does the possibility of climate change imply that we should wash our laundry in cold water? Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have revised their reply to our paper, see here . They have also corrected some errors in their goodness-of-fit calculations. Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have made a more detailed reply to our paper, available here in PDF . His reply and our response are available here in MSWord and here in PDF .
It introduced the multiproxy method to the study of past climates, and produced what was purported to be a 600-year history of the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the basis for the claim by Environment Canada and many other governmental agencies that the Earth is warmer now than it has been for 600 years. A companion paper published a year later in Geophysical Research Letters extended the 600-year series back to 1000 and spliced a surface temperature record to 1998, producing the famous hockey stick graph of the NH climate. This graph figures prominently in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has been reproduced many times. It was the basis for the claim in pamphlets mailed by the Government of Canada to Canadians in 2002 that said The 20 th Century was the warmest globally for the past 1,000 years. The pamphlets were sent to generate support for ratifying and implementing the Kyoto Protocol in Canada. In 2003, Steven McIntyre, a Toronto business man who specialized in mathematics at university, got interested in the process by which IPCC Reports were being put together and used for driving major policy decisions. Long experience in the mining industry, including close observation of the delinquent accounting that led to the Bre-X scandal, gave him a good nose for promotions based on unaudited claims. It also taught him that when big investments are at stake, due diligence requires relentless testing and independent verification of the data by all parties at every stage. Also, attention must be paid to potential conflicts of interestfor instance the author of a project feasibility study should not also be a major shareholder in the project. These are rigorous requirements in the private sector, yet in the case of the IPCC, chapter authors routinely promote their own research. This makes it even more important that there be external auditing of the reports foundation. The Mann hockey stick curve was given central prominence in the 2001 IPCC Report. If this is true, the Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper should have no problem passing a detailed audit. Since governments around the world including here in Canada are making some very expensive policy decisions based on uncritical acceptance of the IPCC Report, an independent review seemed in order, and indeed should be a mere formality. McIntyre obtained the underlying data set from Professor Michael Mann of the University of Virginia. Based on some apparent difficulties experienced by Manns associates in supplying the data set, he surmised that it was possible that no one had ever previously requested the data set and that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to try to replicate the famous graph. In the summer of 2003 he contacted Ross McKitrick , an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and coauthor of Taken By Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming , to discuss his findings to that point. Their paper has been published in the British journal Energy and Environment .
We have created an audit trail so that third parties can verify these findings for themselves. This includes what we think is the first Internet posting of the original proxy data used in Mann et al 1998. To verify the collation errors resulting in duplication of 1980 entries in the data, one needs only inspect a few numbers. Weve created excerpts from the data ...
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