Comments on: Global warming bombshell?

By: Jon H

Jon H — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 04:05:10 +0000

It’s depressing that this wound up in something related to MIT. Tech Central Station, I can see. But MIT Technology Review? That’s just sad.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 03:23:36 +0000

Alas, Walt, I am too honest. It is my nature. This thread has been a very successful lazyweb experience for me. (Although admittedly I was a bit lazy to start it.)

By: roublen vesseau

roublen vesseau — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 23:36:54 +0000

I think it’s safe to say that any global warming skeptic who doesn’t address the question “Why are the glaciers melting?” is a hack.

By: Adi

Adi — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 20:59:20 +0000

the only people with long(enough)term research to be credible at all seem to be the aforementioned IPCC. good stuff, if depressing. at least the russians are on board Kyoto now, so hopefully there will be enough of an impact that i can argue that things were much worse in my day….

By: Peter Shor

Peter Shor — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 18:41:26 +0000

Your links led me to read Michael Crichton’s diatribe against environmentalism and he (or his sources) seem to be taking a cue from the Republican strategists: to attack your opponent’s strongest points. There’s definitely been some dubious science done on behalf of environmentalism, but Crichton is claiming that two triumphs of the enviromental movement with absolutely solid science behind them are suspect: namely, he claims that DDT didn’t kill birds of prey, and that second-hand smoke doesn’t cause cancer. It makes me wonder whether there’s any overlap in the strategists behind the Republican and the anti-environmentalist campaigns.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 18:01:27 +0000

John: You never should have explained. I had just assumed you were joking…

By: Tim Lambert

Tim Lambert — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:52:37 +0000

OK, here is my post on Muller. Even if we discount all of McKitrick’s previous problems, it still looks like they are wrong about this one as well.

By: Motoko Kusanagi

Motoko Kusanagi — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:33:05 +0000

The same McIntyre and McKitrick who discovered all kind of flaws in global warming charts because they “exported the original raw data to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns of data into a 112-column spreadsheet“?

By: Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:24:39 +0000

My hunch is that Rich Muller has been taken in. McKitrick looks like a loon to me. Elsewhere, he writes: “The catch does not involve a novel, contentious or obscure theory; it involves an old, standard, well-known definition from introductory thermodynamics. Indeed it seems to have been overlooked precisely because it is so elementary. The main problem in the debate over what the Global Temperature is doing is that there is no such thing as a Global Temperature. Temperature is a continuous field, not a scalar, and there is no physics to guide reducing this field to a scalar, by averaging or any other method. Consequently the common practice of climate measurement is an ad hoc approximation of a non-existent quantity.” This argument proves that nothing bigger than a single molecule has a temperature…

By: jholbo

jholbo — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:24:32 +0000

Naw, I just got you guys to do it for me. And now I know. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time. (Must have clean missed Quiggin’s post first time out. Bit silly, I admit.) I’ll do an update to avoid wasting other folks time. I was just clicking around and thought maybe I’d heard some good news. Ah, well.

By: Sean Hurley

Sean Hurley — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:21:15 +0000

If global warming were based solely on the “hockey stick” graph then perhaps global warming would be in for a serious rethink. However, it is not. Check out Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for a more thorough backgrounder on the global warming data. To be sure, the IPCC use the hockey stick graph on their summary page (it certainly looks impressive, until one considers the confidence intervals in the historical data (estimated by using tree growth rings, ice deposition, etc…)). However the “hockey stick” graph isn’t the only data which shows the same trend—look at this data based on maritime measurements, reported by a different group. Expect all the global warming naysayers to leap on this one as proof that global warming is a hoax. Except it isn’t. Perhaps Mann et al. (1998) has serious flaws. If so, then McIntyre and McKitrick haven’t done anyone any favors by not having more recent work published in a peer reviewed journal (whether or not Nature decided not to publish it). Furthermore, by focusinging so much on McIntyre and McKitrick’s work, Muller in his overview does us a disservice by not allowing Mann and colleagues a chance to respond. Indeed, it seems that Muller is all to happy for the hockey stick to go away. Take this with a (hefty) grain of salt.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:20:02 +0000

Holbo, I think you’ve kind of grossly failed to do due diligence on this one.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:16:07 +0000

The same McKitrik who doesn’t know the difference between radians and degress? http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002392.html

By: Aaron Bergman

Aaron Bergman — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:10:34 +0000

There was a big controversy over this stuff a few months ago. The upshot of all of it, as best I could tell back then was that McIntyre and McKitrick had very little idea what they were talking about.