Bradley interview
Aug 13, 2011
Bishop Hill in Books, Climate: Mann, Climate: Statistics

Raymond Bradley is interviewed by Insider Higher Ed.

The story seems to be that the Hockey Team emphasised the doubts and caveats over their findings

Q: The debate around your study looking at past climate patterns seemed to explode after you extended it to include projections going all the way back to 1000. In hindsight, do you think this was overreaching? From a purely political standpoint, did this hurt the case for climate change?

A: Our reconstruction of temperatures over the last 1000 years was titled, "Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations" (Geophysical Research Letters 26, 759–762; 1999). In the abstract, we stated: "We focus not just on the reconstructions, but on the uncertainties therein, and important caveats" and noted that "expanded uncertainties prevent decisive conclusions for the period prior to AD 1400." We concluded by stating: "more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached."

This is true, but of course the earlier paper MBH98 was not similarly caveated. The other point to recognise is that any caveats and uncertainties were dropped long before Mann completed his work on the IPCC Third Assessment Report.

Bradley also steers into the realm of economics, claiming that controlling greenhouse gases will create new industries and jobs. True, but his erroneous conclusion that such controls are therefore good for the economy brings us back, once more, to the broken windows fallacy.

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