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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by William M. Connolley (talk | contribs) at 12:17, 2 November 2004 (Replace garbled overly pro M&M text with something closer to reality). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ross McKitrick is an economist who has recently (since approximately 2002) worked on global warming; in this connection he is a skeptic. His best-known work is Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series, coauthored with Stephen McIntyre. This presented an "audit" of work by Michael Mann and others; it appeared in the minor journal "Energy and Environment" in 2003. Mann et al. have replied, doubting the validity of McIntyre and McKitrick's work . The matter was later referred to Nature, following which Mann et al. published a corrigendum, including a re-statement of their data and methods, which appeared on July 1, 2004. The corrigendum did not affect the results, however. McKitrick et al. wrote up a longer version of their results, which was rejected by Nature.

McKitrick's own data analysis has been strongly criticised, in particular by Tim Lambert, who has written on his web page about what he considers serious flaws in some of McKitrick's publications. Most notable is a failure to distinguish radians and degrees which Lambert claimed invalidates the conclusions of one of McKitricks papers. The author's response (nb this is the authors response; it is not yet clear whether the journal will accept it) acknowledges the programming error (it glides over the mistaking of degrees and radians as "There was a small error" without acknowleding the details) but asserts the effects were minor and did not undermine the paper's conclusions.

McKitrick also wrote Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, coauthored with Christopher Essex and published by Key Porter Books. It was runner-up for the Donner Prize as the Best Canadian Book on Public Policy and finalist for the Canadian Science Writers' Association Book Prize.

More criticisms of MBH

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick claim to have found further errors in the MBH approach. A paper claiming to show this was rejected by Nature.Richard A. Muller has promoted their claims but it is by no means clear that their claims are correct .

The essence of the claim is that the statistical techniques used by MBH has a built-in tendency to produce an upward trend over the last century as an artifact of the dataprocessing. MBH deny this.

External links

• http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/ross.html - his home page
• http://www.takenbystorm.info/ - home page for his book, "Taken by storm"
• http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html - "Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series"
• http://www.climate2003.com/ - home page of his coauthor Stephen McIntyre

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