Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill8
if you want to summarize or present one or more of McIntyre's arguments, I'd be happy to take a look.
the wiki doesn't seem to present much in the way of his actual arguments.
it's a shame that McIntyre doesn't get a climate degree and get himself published.
your side has been slow to train and fund it's own climatologists, and I hope you will act together to amend that shortfall.
personally, i suspect you don't because you are afraid of what your climatologists will discover, but, still, you should take the risk, don't you think, considering how strongly you feel about it.
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I'm not guessing at this stuff, but you are coming back with arguments based on what you think not what you've found out. Wiki is shit, everyone knows that, but you read half of one page, then quit. Didn't follow any links, didn't check anything from another source. Isn't that wiki 101?
You state he's not published, but he is more than a few times. The top one is the one that gave sceptics a toe hold.
"Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series" in the journal Energy and Environment
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/res...r07/jgr07.html
And coming next year in the International Journal of Climatology
McKitrick, Ross R. and Nicolas Nierenberg (2009). Correlations between Surface Temperature Trends and Socioeconomic Activity: Toward a Causal Interpretation.
As for needing a climate degree, he's topline scholarship Oxbridge mathematician, followed by a WORKING career using maths. So no dunce by any means.
Follow a few links and read some papers and you'll see how much of climate science relies on statistics mangling existing data and not actual fresh data gathering.
But to summarise one of his central arguments - Dodgy statistical methods have been used on temperature data sets to make the past look cooler, the present look hotter and the angle between the stick and the blade of the hockey stick steeper.
AGW requires, for full disaster effect, that the current temperatures to be unprecedented and that rise is steep and correlated to industrialisation. It's probable neither is true. All we know right now, is that historical data is always adjusted DOWN, recent data is always adjusted UP.
I'm pretty sure most people don't even realise the data is even adjusted - I didn't till I got hooked and started following this seriously about 3 years ago - you read a bunch of thermometers, write down the number, then average the lot? What's tricky about that? Well, what if a town or an airport grows around the temp station or it just gets moved? Counter intuitively in these cases NASA GISS tends to adjust for these warming influences by adjusting temps UP. (moving stations should be neutral on average, but cooling stations tend to get dropped completely from the datasets)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
Try this link, if nothing else, it shows that the science is far from settled and that genuine consensus has not yet been reached. The maths is often hard to follow, but the politics and human nature aren't - there's a lot of arse covering backtracking, obfuscation, delaying tactics and weasel wording going on from the side that should have the slam dunk answers on hand and no hesitation in using them to debunk the "anti-science" idiots. There IS another side to this argument and no amount of name calling or link pulling will make it go away.
And as ever, I come back to this; record cold events all over the planet this year - but its the hottest year ever. not just a bit hot, but HOTTEST. Something seems a little off here...