Global warming’s most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science.
By ANNE JOLIS
Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.
But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang’s Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.
The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described “auditing” a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa’s much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists’ posters. Like other so-called “hockey stick” temperature graphs, it’s an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We’re burning ourselves up!
“It was the belle of the ball,” Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. “Its dance card was full.”
At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia’s Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.
Mr. Briffa denounces Mr. McIntyre’s work as “demonstrably biased” because it uses “a narrower area and range of sample sites.” He says he and his colleagues have now built a new chronology using still more data. Here, as in similar graphs by other researchers, the spike soars once again. Mr. McIntyre’s “work has little implication for our published work or any other work that uses it,” Mr. Briffa concludes.
He and his colleagues may well ignore Mr. McIntyre, but the rest of us shouldn’t. While Mr. McIntyre’s image may use data from fewer sites, it still has nearly three times as many tree cores representing the modern era as Mr. Briffa’s original.
Yet Mr. McIntyre is first to admit his work is no bullet aimed at the heart of the theory of man-made climate change. Rather, his work—chronicled in papers co-written with environmental economist Ross McKitrick and more than 7,000 posts on his Climateaudit.org Weblog—does something much more important: It illustrates the uncertainty of a science presented as so infallible as to justify huge new taxes on rich countries along with bribes to poor ones in order to halt their fossil-fueled climbs to prosperity. Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.
It all started in 2002 when—as many might given the time and Mr. McIntyre’s mathematics background—he decided to verify for himself the case for action on climate change.
“It was like a big crossword puzzle,” he told me. “Business was a bit slow at the time, so I started reading up.”
Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted “hockey stick” graph prominently featured by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. Alerts about review boards’ seemingly lax standards litter his blog, highlighting in particular the IPCC, which has used both the Mann and Briffa graphs in its reports. In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.
“At the beginning I innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff. … So often my mouth would drop, when I realized no one had really looked into it.”
Even more innocently, he assumed the billion-dollar climate change industry would welcome his untrained but painstaking work. Instead, Mr. McIntyre is subjected to every kind of venom—that he must be funded by Big Oil, by Big Business, by Some Texan Somewhere. For the record, the 62-year-old declares himself “past my best-by date, operating on my own nickel.”
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In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.
Apparently changes have been made in the data at NASA since then so that 1934 is no longer warmer than 1998.
“You mention his name (i.e. Stephen McIntyre) in my community, people just smile. It’s a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists,” affirms Stanford University’s Stephen Schneider.
One must consider Stephen Schneider’s reputation when evaluating his viewpoint of Stephen McIntyre.
What’s most amazing is how the craven Mr. Harrop casually deflects all requests for any actual critique of Steve McIntyre’s arguments, or any evidence in favor of the AGW hypothesis. Instead he just keeps repeating the charge that Steve is “a quack,” and citing alarmist propaganda like that from Lord Stern.
I suppose one can understand this kind of irrational response from a businessman who has, he says, invested ten years in R&D for some scheme hoping to capitalize on the tree of ‘climate change’, and now sees the ‘deniers’ and ‘quacks’ sawing away at the base.
It’s enough to give one hope that the lumberjacks are coming.
/Mr Lynn
If I were not already sceptical, Barrie Harrop would have converted me LOL.
DaveE.
Inside the front cover of Al Gore’s latest climate fraud promotion book are these words: “I’m offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses.” –Deuteronomy Chapter 30, Verse 19……..As the scientific basis for Warmism becomes vanishingly small, the religious nature of it comes to the fore.
Barrie Harrop is an interesting fellow isn’t he, not a very nice person from the way he conducts himself online. It is pointed out to him that Steve was a reviewer within the IPCC process and he responds “in his dreams” .
I suppose if you have the sort of money invested in AGW that he has you may be blind to reality. I’ve not seen such a dogmatic position defended even when proved to be wrong.
Regards
Michael
Unfortunately one part of the article is wrong. Barack Obama gave a speech in china and said he and China would sign a deal in Copenhagen. This was at the start of the week and broadcast live in the UK (on BBC) at 5am
Jeff C said: “That is what makes his scientific intregrity all the more impressive. His honesty in science tends to anger those in his own political camp, yet he presses forward relentlessly with the auditing.”
——–
It’s being a squash player that does it. If you don’t call your own carries, double bounces, up balls, down balls and contacts, no-one will play with you and you will have to do single drills for the rest of your life.
As for his being an apostate, I don’t know. Apostasy gets our religious brethren so exercised because they can’t stand the idea that someone would be shown the light, only to turn their back on it. Was he shown it? Was it the light? Did he turn his back on it?
Steve in the WSJ. Now *that* has made my day.
Thank you Anne Jolis for an excellent article and thank you Steve McIntyre for your outstanding work. Please keep it up and don’t let the warmers wear you down. You both bring truth to the world and the world needs that.
David Alan (17:03:51) : Julian, The Apostate — too deep?
The story is quite complex. Try this quote (Robt. Ingersoll)
“Julian changed the religion of the Empire, and diverted the revenues of the church. Whoever steps between a priest and his salary, will find that he has committed every crime. No matter how often the slanders may be refuted, they will be repeated until the last priest has lost his body and found his wings. These falsehoods about Julian were invented some fifteen hundred years ago, and they are repeated to-day by just as honest and just as respectable people as these who told them at first. Whenever the church cannot answer the arguments of an opponent, she attacks his character. She resorts to falsehood, and in the domain of calumny she has stood for fifteen hundred years without a rival.
The great Empire was crumbling to its fall. The literature of the world was being destroyed by priests. The gods and goddesses were driven from the earth and sky. The paintings were torn and defaced. The statues were broken. The walls were left desolate, and the niches empty. Art, like Rachel, wept for her children, and would not be comforted. The streams and forests were deserted by the children of the imagination, and the whole earth was barren, poor and mean.
Christian ignorance, bigotry and hatred, in blind unreasoning zeal, had destroyed the treasures of our race. Art was abhorred, Knowledge was despised, Reason was an outcast. The sun was blotted from the intellectual heaven, every star extinguished, and there fell upon the world that shadow — that midnight, known as “The Dark Ages.” This night lasted for a thousand years … “
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), Great Infidels, first published in 1881.
Find at: http://plato2051.tripod.com/emperor_julian.htm
It’s been my experience that the warmers, when confronted with facts that don’t fit their theories, respond not with facts, reason or logic but with name calling.
Hansen says he doesn’t joust with jesters. Other warmers resort to the most vile venom-spitting hatred one could imagine.
Andy,
until you see the actual video, don’t believe anything you hear on the BBC as these guys are seriously in the pocket for global warming ™.
Mailman
It’s great that Steve M’s work finally gets some publicity in mainstream media. As a mathematician myself, with some experience with statistics, my main gripe with the AGW hypothesis isn’t that it’s necessarily wrong, but that the science is founded on what appears to be very bad math. In fact, to claim that there is no AGW whatsoever is IMHO just as foolish as believing that it’s possible to give as detailed grim future scenarios as those promoted these days. However, what Steve has basically done, is to show that the claim of “unprecedented warming” has no good foundation in science (and while not an expert on Principal Component Analysis, I think I understand what he’s doing).
The main consequence of that is that we still have good reasons to assume that the world was about as warm in the MWP as it is now, and that was a good period for planet earth (the warm periods always were, it was the cold spells that brought drought and famine to humankind). The counter-argument to that may be that the current warming may have broken a long-term cooling trend brought on earth by the orbit eccentricity changes, so it’s still not natural. But – so what? Maybe the warming is just for the good then?
I think we know far too little about how climate works to build computer models of it. I think we have far too uncertain knowledge about previous climate to know whether the current climate is “natural” or not. I think we know far too little about the consequences of a future climate with high atmospheric CO2 content to know whether it will be dangerous or beneficial to us.
Gene Nemetz (20:29:39) :
“You mention his name (i.e. Stephen McIntyre) in my community, people just smile. It’s a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists,” affirms Stanford University’s Stephen Schneider.
Right, but nowhere near as funny as them now having to play hockey using a short stick without a blade – a quip which, btw, I don’t think Steve would even consider indulging at his blog.
Let’s not forget Jim Inhofe…
http://www.youtube.com/JimInhofePressOffice#p/u/1/xBTBGy_jIlc
David Harrington (21:47:07) :
Steve in the WSJ. Now *that* has made my day.
Yes, it is great to see, but can you folks in the New World confrim it is in the USA edition (and print), as I read the whole thing in the midde of the night and seem to remember a comment soemwhere that it was only for European readers only?
sorry for the repetition of only – still half asleep. At least I got the italics tags right.
Unfortunately Barrie Harrop seems to have the ear of the Australian politicians. Maybe this is because he saved the South Australian Premier from a savage, magazine-wielding maniac:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/2925848/S-Australia-premier-bashed-at-dinner
Clearly one should not mess with Harrop, because he is a man of action.
He also has a lot vested in windmill-based desalination R&D. He, like the Goracle, is an eco entrpeneur:
http://www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/user-profile/1248-barrie-harrop.html
His rent-seeking snout is well in the UN trough:
http://hughespublicrelations.blogspot.com/2009/05/wind-desalination-expert-to-represent.html
Is it any wonder he rants and raves when people undermine the CC science his investments rely upon? Sadly the man fails to understand that he is his own worst enemy in the blogosphere.
I wonder how many Australian birds it takes to make a litre of fresh desal water….
BTW, Barrie… if you are reading… the lack of water at the South Australian end of the Murray River has a lot more to do with over allocation upstream and inappropriate land use than it does with climate change. Being a crow eater (nickname for those from SA) you should know this better than most… apparently not according to your blog comments.
Mr. Gore, tear down that wall.
ROTF there is coffee all over my computer screen….
Andrew Ursitti replied:
McIntyre cherry-picked data with regard to Briffa’s work. Really? REALLY?
You picked a terrible hill to die on.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574496850939846712.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs=comments#comment648266
Follow the money…on all the AGW studies…and you know why Mr. McIntyre has been vilified.
McIntyre: “At the beginning I innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff. … So often my mouth would drop, when I realized no one had really looked into it.”
Likewise.
McIntyre: “[…] operating on my own nickel.”
Likewise.
Many months ago I was “encouraged” to come up with something related to CO2 & catastrophes if I wanted to secure new funding, but in light of what the data show, one would have to abandon all moral principles to go down that road — there is absolutely nothing in the data that suggests to me that CO2 & catastrophes are linked – and yet there are tons of very interesting patterns in the data that are not even mentioned in mainstream publications.
@Leopold Danze G.
I think you’ll find that Rob Wilson is one of the good guys, for which he’s getting himself into trouble with the AGW Thought Police. He is an AGW advocate, but he’s quite willing to discuss the science and share his thoughts with sceptics. Keep in mind there will be a rainbow of different opinions in the AGW camp, what we’re seeing is the work of around 50-60 fanatics and then a cohort of breathless followers, many scientists who believe in AGW don’t necessarily see it as being catastrophic, and for sure there will be those who see GW as beneficial, which it most probably will be.
Great to see that Steve is getting some of the recognition he deserves.
Seems to be more and more anti-CAGW poping up in the press and other media.
Politicians beware.