McIntyre and McKitrick to receive award

Thursday night, Steve and Ross will be presented with the Julian Simon Memorial Award at CEI’s annual dinner. The dinner will be held on Thursday, June 17, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Let me offer my sincere congratulations to Steve and Ross for their hard work and well deserved award.

There is a by invitation only congressional briefing from noon to 1:30PM that same day. People with interest may be able to attend by contacting Myron Ebell at the email address given below.

Two important figures at the heart of the ClimateGate e-mails, Canadians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, will provide key information on the remarkable revelations in thousands of e-mails and files that were leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in November last year.

They will show examples from the e-mails and related sources that reveal a core group of scientists manipulating the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process in order to keep policymakers in the dark about major uncertainties and problems in climate science.  They will also show how the inquiries set up in the aftermath of ClimateGate have been rigged and misdirected so as to whitewash the scandal and protect the climate establishment from genuine external scrutiny.

Much of ClimateGate involves research initially called into doubt by the analysis of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.  The scientists involved in the scandal saw McIntyre and McKitrick as major threats to global warming orthodoxy and to their own credibility.  Consequently, they are mentioned more than 150 times in the ClimateGate e-mails.

McIntyre and McKitrick are most famous for demolishing the infamous “hockey stick”—the graph promoted by the IPCC as proof that global temperatures had been stable for nine hundred years until increasing rapidly in the twentieth century.  Their debunking of the hockey stick was confirmed in 2006 by a panel of professionals statisticians convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Their exploits have been recounted in a new book by A. W. Montford, The Hockey Stick Illusion, which reads like a detective thriller.

Before laws regulating energy use are enacted that could well cost trillions of dollars, it is crucial to understand the extent to which the alleged scientific consensus supporting global warming alarmism has been discredited by ClimateGate and related scandals.  Join us for a discussion featuring two of the people at the center of the storm.

Stephen McIntyre is the editor and founder of Climate Audit, one of the web’s most popular and compelling climate science blogs as well as one of the best sources for expert analysis of the continuing ClimateGate and related scandals.  Before becoming interested in the scientific debate over global warming, Mr. McIntyre worked for thirty years in a variety of roles in the minerals exploration business in Canada, including as President of Northwest Exploration Co. Ltd.  He holds a B. A. in mathematics from the University of Toronto and earned another degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University.  Since the hockey stick scandal, Mr. McIntyre has continued to use his statistical expertise to analyze temperature data and has uncovered a number of other significant mistakes in official claims, which have proved highly embarrassing to U. S. government agencies and several leading climate scientists.

Ross McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.  Professor McKitrick has published a wide range of internationally-recognized studies on the economic analysis of pollution policy, economic growth and air pollution trends, the health effects of air pollution, statistical methods in climatology, the measurement of global warming, and other topics.  His 2003 co-authored book, Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, won the Donner Prize for the best book on Canadian public policy.  His newest book, Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy, will be published later this year.  Professor McKitrick’s willingness to question conventional thinking on environmental issues and global warming dogma has had an impact around the world.  He has made over 100 invited academic presentations in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, and has testified before the U. S. Congress and the Canadian Parliament.  

Myron Ebell

Director, Energy and Global Warming Policy

Competitive Enterprise Institute

1899 L Street, N. W., Twelfth Floor

Washington, D. C., 20036, USA

E-mail: mebell@cei.org