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
I think “Deep Climate” should be really named “Deep Swiftboating”. Its rare to find such incredible character assassination outside of the extreme fringes of the Republican Party.
I read about half the article before boredom set in. There was more straw men fallacies in that half an article than I ever seen even on Doltoid.
Only the already convinced would find that article at all persuasive.
My wake-up call came when CA published the entry, “A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open,” on August 8, 2007. I heard about it while listening to an obscure talk radio show, which referred me to an article in the Toronto Star. After reading the article I visited the CA site for the first time. I was immediately horrified, as I became aware for the first time of Hansen’s “adjustments.”
I was so upset I mentioned my upset in a newsy email I sent out regularly to my friends. One friend happened to be a leftist, and he promptly hit the “reply all” button and tore me to shreds, publicly, for being a “ditto head.” (I was unaware Rush Limbaugh had commented on “A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open,” a few days after it was posted.) This awoke me to the fact that, if you dared question the way Hansen was coming up with his data, you could expect to get blasted. It was a sort of baptism by fire, in my case.
It was an amazing thing to me. All I needed to do was ask a few obvious questions, and I found myself called a brainwashed shill of Big Oil. At first I was hurt, and innocently expressed my hurt and repeated my questions, however when this only earned me further blastings I became angry, and developed my ability to blast right back.
It was at this point I learned something about CA. They snipped me, when I did little more than rave. They were not interested in sinking to that level. (I actually found other sites where one could blast and get blasted back. Accuweather’s site was the best, when it came to raving and getting raved at. On that site a topic such as “rising sea levels” would often degenerate into furious discussions about religion and whether the Red Sea could really be parted.)
CA did not snip me merely for disagreeing, as sites such as Real Climate did. Often I was agreeing, (albeit with foam around my mouth.) Rather they snipped me for sinking to the level of trolls.
This taught me yet another lesson.
All in all, I feel I owe Steve McIntyre a very great deal. He has remained amazingly calm in a storm, and has simply stood for truth.
I feel there are times truth deserves a capital “T,” and should be written as “Truth.” It has a power all its own, for it does not matter if the whole world calls It a lie, It cannot help but be what it is: “True.”
I pray this power manifests and blesses Steve McIntyre, and protects him from all the trolls, including the ones in Congress.
Let me add my congratulations; still a long struggle ahead I think, but in good company.
Wonderful!
Now maybe we can get them to investigate the HEART of the whole thing–what happens to terrestrial animals when CO2 or temperatures rise. There are hundreds to thousands of scientific studies on plants, most of which (not all) show that more CO2 is beneficial to them, as are generally higher temperatures (in most cases). Higher CO2 also means plants use LESS water despite faster growth, because they do not have to open their stomata (“mouths” in their leaves) as much to get CO2 and hence lose less water through transpiration.
There are some studies about insects and CO2, which are not really the animals we want. It is birds, mammals and people that concern us. There is almost no scientific research–at least I have found only a handful of studies, and those at concentrations above 70 times ambient (and it was still beneficial).
Lack of science leaves the field open to wild guesses. We all learned as tiny children that the byproducts of digestion, peepee and poopoo, are harmful to us and flushed away. Then we learned in grade school a tidbit about the carbon cycle. We learned that plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen (except at night) and animals including us breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. So CO (2) must be bad, right?
Actually carbonic acid is a vital component of the blood and its levels must be exact. Too little is as deadly (or more so) as too much. Also, when it is too easy to expel CO2 with your breath, you can’t breathe enough to get all the oxygen you need. So there is an optimal level of carbon dioxide in the air. Almost all our physiology evolved under conditions of far, far, higher carbon dioxide than today’s. So it is not surprising that an increase is actually beneficial (at least according to the very few studies I have found).
Climatology is all very interesting and new, but we have lost sight of the fact that the real point of the debate is the welfare of life.
Biologists have been asleep at the switch, almost totally suckered into mental gymnastics about how more growth is really bad and how more plants mean a higher rate of extinction (I wish I was kidding). They could use a few “M & M’s.”
–Esther Cook