October 18, 2004

Global warming bombshell?

Posted by John Holbo

UPDATE: Apparently it’s a dud. In fact, John Quiggin defused it last month. Well, that’s a bit silly not to read my very own weblog. (I knew it was a bit suspicious, what with it being good news and all. What a world, what a world.)

I’ll tuck what now looks to be nonsense under the fold, for the curious. Comments are quite interesting below. And Tim Lambert has an interesting post up in response to the general question. Turns out this is a newer model than Quiggin discussed before.


This seems interesting and potentially quite important. But I know nothing about this stuff. That’s what comment boxes are for. Excerpt:

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on?

I reemphasize my lack of a hockey stick to grind. Really, I’m dead ignorant. (When Michael Bérubé does his hockeyblogging thing my eyes glaze over. And I never really was much good at math.) I would be pleased if it turns out the world isn’t boiling as soon as we feared, because I like things the way they are. (Link via Kikuchiyo.)

[UPDATE: Bérubé doesn’t blog about global warming. Just hockey. Don’t want to actually send anyone looking for stuff that’s not there. Just a joke.]

Posted on October 18, 2004 03:49 PM UTC
Comments

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.

Posted by Aaron Bergman · October 18, 2004 04:10 PM

The same McKitrik who doesn’t know the difference between radians and degress?

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002392.html

Posted by Rob · October 18, 2004 04:16 PM

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

Posted by lemuel pitkin · October 18, 2004 04:20 PM

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.

Posted by Sean Hurley · October 18, 2004 04:21 PM

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.

Posted by jholbo · October 18, 2004 04:24 PM

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…

Posted by Brad DeLong · October 18, 2004 04:24 PM

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”?

Posted by Motoko Kusanagi · October 18, 2004 04:33 PM

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.

Posted by Tim Lambert · October 18, 2004 04:52 PM

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

Posted by Walt Pohl · October 18, 2004 06:01 PM

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.

Posted by Peter Shor · October 18, 2004 06:41 PM

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….

Posted by Adi · October 18, 2004 08:59 PM

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.

Posted by roublen vesseau · October 18, 2004 11:36 PM

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.)

Posted by jholbo · October 19, 2004 03:23 AM

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.

Posted by Jon H · October 19, 2004 04:05 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.