From yesterday's NY Times Two G.O.P. Lawmakers Spar Over Climate Study:
A public dispute has flared between two Republican House committee chairmen over an inquiry one of them began last month into the integrity of an influential study of global temperature trends.
The [hockey stick] study, published in 1998 and 1999, meshed data from modern thermometers and evidence of past warmth or cold, like variations in tree rings. The result was a curve showing little variation for nearly 1,000 years and then a sharp upward hook in recent decades.
The "scientists who generated the [hockey stick] graph"
- Michael E. Mann, the climatologist who led the research and has just become the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University\
- Raymond S. Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts
- Malcolm K. Hughes, a tree-ring expert at the University of Arizona
Their blog: Real Climate. Their response to the inquiry: Scientists respond to Barton.
The "two Canadians with no expertise in climate change" (gee, I wonder who the NYTimes likes best?):
- Steven McIntyre, an amateur statistician and mining consultant
- Ross McKitrick, an [environmental] economist at the University of Guelph
Their blog: Climate Audit.
None of this is pretty. For example, Climate Audit links to Climate Science but not vice versa. In Monday's post at Climate Audit, McIntyre says:
“Public access” to Mann’s FTP site includes blocking: I (and my neighbors on my street who use the same internet server) continue to be blocked from access to Mann’s FTP site and I’ll have to go to another IP address to look at the FTP URLs to see if there’s anything new.
Full disclosure: An ASU colleague, Mark Strazicich, is a co-author of McKitrick's. Their ASU working paper is Stationarity of Global Per Capital Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Implications for Global Warming Scenarios. The abstract:
Annual global CO2 emission forecasts at 2100 span 10 to 40 billion tonnes. Modeling work over the past decade has not narrowed this range nor provided much guidance about probabilities. We examine the time-series properties of historical per capita CO2 emissions and conclude that per capita global emissions are stationary without trend, and have a constant mean of 1.14 tonnes per person with standard deviation of 0.02. With estimates of 21st century peak population levels in the 8-10 billion range, this implies that most emissions scenarios currently used for global warming forecasts are unrealistically high.
Here is a link to the paper: http://econ.ucalgary.ca/Guest%20Lecturers/ms.pdf.
