'M and M' stick in craw of climate-change crew By Richard Foot, Canwest News ServiceDecember 5, 2009
Steve McIntyre, 62, is a Toronto retiree. He plays squash, dabbles with numbers and insists he never set out to stir up any trouble.
So why does his name appear again and again - in the most unflattering ways - in hundreds of e-mails written by the world's most influential climate change scientists, that were mysteriously taken from a computer in Britain last month and published on the Internet?
In these private messages, McIntyre is called everything from a "bozo" and a "moron" to a "playground bully."
"In my opinion," said one e-mail written by Benjamin Santer, a senior climatologist with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, "Stephen McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science."
The "climategate" e-mails have sparked a scandal - just ahead of next week's global warming summit in Copenhagen - for suggesting climatologists may have manipulated data to exaggerate the threat of global warming and conspired to keep contrary points of view out of the scientific journals.
But the e-mails are also conspicuous for their repeated, nasty references to two Canadians - McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick - who have become a serious thorn in the side of climatologists and others who say the planet is under serious threat from man-made global warming.
Although little-known in Canada, McIntyre and McKitrick - or M and M as they're called in climate change circles - have since 2003 put forward evidence of faulty calculations in some of the key scientific studies behind the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Their work has drawn the attention of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Wall Street Journal, which last month called them "the climate change gang's most dangerous apostates."
McIntyre, a Toronto mining analyst and speculator, became intrigued by the climate change issue when the Kyoto Protocol was up for debate in 2002.
He was skeptical of a key piece of science in the IPCC reports of the time - a graph, based on research by U.S. climatologist Michael Mann, that showed Earth's temperatures had remained relatively stable over the past thousand years then began rising suddenly in the 20th century.
The graph, shaped like a sideways hockey stick, became one of the most convincing illustrations in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which rallied millions to the cause of global warming. But it reminded McIntyre of the promotional graphs and statistics commonly used by mining promoters in search of investors.
He said he decided - purely out of curiosity and not because he wanted to shake up the global warming debate - to carry out some due diligence on the numbers.
Replicating the arcane calculations of climate modelling science would be an impossible task for most people. But McIntyre had been a math prizewinner in high school, had studied pure mathematics at the University of Toronto and had won, but turned down, a mathematics scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, choosing a business career instead.
"I read Mann's paper and thought, 'What this looks to me is like really overblown and high falutin' language for fairly simple linear regressions and matrix algebra. I figured it would be like doing a big crossword puzzle, so I went at it," he said in a recent interview.
"I had no particular expectations that it would be wrong, I just thought it would be interesting. It sounds bizarre in retrospect, but I take up odd interests from time to time."
McIntyre contacted Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph statistical economist who was also analyzing the science behind the IPCC reports. Together they unearthed evidence that Mann's calculations were predisposed to producing a hockey stick-shaped graph, with sharply rising temperatures in the 20th Century.
They also showed that Mann's calculations ignored the data showing a major warming trend in the 15th century, much like the warming of the 20th Century.
"That discovery hit me like a bombshell," wrote one scientist in the MIT Technology Review in 2004. "Suddenly the 'hockey stick,' the poster child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics."
M and M's findings sparked hearings on the science of global warming by the U.S. Congress, and an investigation by the National Academy of Sciences. Their report concluded that while the wider science behind 20th century global warming remains valid, the hockey stick graph and other long-term temperature models were fraught with "uncertainties" and that Mann's calculations "tended to bias the shape of (hockey stick) reconstructions."
Mann was required to publish a retraction about some of his statistical methods in the science journal Nature.
In 2007, M and M scored again, finding errors in NASA's own long-term temperature records. The agency was forced to issue a correction, stating that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the United States.
This year, M and M have also raised questions about the accuracy of another hockey stick-shaped graph, this one by a British climatologist. The Canadians showed that the British graph - also showing drastically warmer 20th century temperatures than in the past - is based on tree ring samples taken from a mere 12 tree cores in a single region of Russia.
McKitrick said at first it was "very stressful" questioning the work of the tight-knit climate change science community. "When we first came out with our criticisms, it was a pretty lonely and difficult time."
For one thing, their work was shunned by the main academic climate science journals, which forced them to put their findings on the Internet instead. McIntyre's blog, climateaudit.org has since exploded in popularity, receiving millions of hits each year.
Scientists such as Mann have also denounced M and M as "frauds" and called their research "pure crap." Others have accused them of being secretly sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, a charge both McIntyre and McKitrick deny.
McKitrick said his only salary comes from the University of Guelph, and while he is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute - a think tank skeptical of global warming, which has received funding from some oil companies - his affiliation to the institute is unpaid.
As for McIntyre, he said he's not paid by anyone, nor formally affiliated with any agency or industry. He's just an old math whiz with time on his hands, and an eccentric hobby.
"I don't know why I'm doing it," he said. "I have no particular cause, and I'm not trying to change public policies. I sort of like doing it, and I'm good at it."
If scientists were really interested in learning the truth about global warming, McKitrick said he and McIntyre would be encouraged for contributing to the debate. Instead, they are seen as unwelcome outsiders, meddling where they have no business.
He said many of the world's top climate modellers have circled the wagons, denied them access to raw data and cast personal aspersions against the pair.
"Look at the e-mails," said McKitrick. "There's such strong tribalism in the field.
"The extraordinary thing about the climate issue, is that the scientific principle of critical thinking, of exploring the data and stating your views regardless of what your senior colleagues think - that idea has been lost in this field."
Not all climatologists have dismissed their work.
"M and M need to be taken seriously," said Judith Curry - a global warming believer - who chairs the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
"Sometimes scientists can't see the forest for the trees until someone from the outside steps in and looks at this with fresh eyes. What McIntyre has done is elevate the level of statistical analysis used in constructing the paleo temperature record."
While McKitrick said he's dubious about the threat of climate change, and thinks his research has helped cast doubt on such fears, McIntyre - despite the demonization of him by his opponents - said he really doesn't know what to think.
"I honestly don't know whether it is a big problem, a little problem or a medium problem," he said. "And I don't think the skeptics have proven that global warming is not a problem."
What he will say is that the world needs clear, indisputable evidence of climate change - not scientific claims by the IPCC of rapidly rising modern temperatures, based on what he calls questionable data and "untested, inaccurate calculations."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
http://www.canada.com/technology/stick+craw+climate+change+crew/2307733/story.html I think the most interesting point of the article is that even the "debunkers" of much of the global warming research and their supporters are still believers of global warming or at least agnostic and open-minded on the subject.
: M and M's affiliations with the Fraser Institute and Mining Analysts should raise red flags however as the former is a right-wing, industry-friendly think tank and the latter suggests vested interests or at least sympathy towards a generally eco-unfriendly industry.
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