Bishop Hill Bradley on the Hockey Stick 2
Sep 10, 2011 Books Climate: other 
Time after time when reading Bradley's defence of the Hockey Stick, I was struck by how he avoided the criticisms that were actually made of the paper, preferring instead to knock down a series of strawmen. There are also parts that are grossly misleading.
Take this next excerpt for example, where Bradley describes McIntyre and McKitrick's Nature submission in 2004.
The authors then went on to make a similar pitch to the editors of Nature, who asked us to respond. Once they read our response it was clear that there was no point in publishing the discussion and so the criticism was rejected.
Coming after a long section in which Bradley belittles the M&M critique of the Hockey Stick, anybody reading that would surely conclude that there was a problem with the content of the M&M paper, an idea that can be assessed by reviewing the Nature correspondence.
Or what about the bit where he touches on the statistical issues:
...Detective Mann was on the case and soon discovered the reason [why M&M's result was so different]: they had not, in fact, repeated our analysis in the same way.
By changing the statistical procedure, these critics had effectively eliminated a sizeable set of data from the western United States. It was no surprise, then, that their graph was quite different from ours. Instead of a hockey stick-shaped curve, theirs was more U-shaped, with strange warm period in the fifteenth century...This flew in the face of all that we knew about the fifteenth century, a time when glaciers advanced around the world.
I suppose you can say that it is true that they had not repeated the analysis in the same way - they had of course corrected a significant error in the statistics. I leave readers to make up their own minds about how straight Bradley is being with his readers when he tries to pass this off as a failing of M&M.
McIntyre's position to on the MWP is, I believe, that he doesn't know whether there was an MWP or not, but he thinks it unlikely that tree rings will ever be able to tell us the answer. He has explained many times that he and McKitrick have not created an alternative reconstruction, they have simply shown that Mann's result of no MWP is only obtained by using dodgy data and incorrect statistics. If by processing the dodgy data in a statistically correct manner, you get a "strange warm period in the fifteenth century", that simply reinforces the point that tree rings don't have the answer.
Presumably Bradley knows this though.
Reader Comments (54)
Really? De-carbonisation will kill the primary industries. Its happening. Electric tractor anyone? When the tax base dies, so will the public sector. What will be left is the finance sector. They won't have any problem hiring servants.
De-carbonisation will kill the primary industries. Its happening. Electric tractor anyone?
What's the problem with electric tractors? The extra weight of batteries and low-end torque of electric motors are great features for a tractor.
Of course, tractors could also be hydrogen powered using hydrogen made using surplus wind energy . . . or they could run on methane from the farm's methane digester . . .
Naturally you are uncomfortable with change - most so-called 'sceptics' are (some might call them 'conservatives' with a small 'c'). Change happens, in fact change is what has driven the economy in the past - and now the European and US economies are stagnating.
Not saving the planet because it might temporarily inconvenience tractor manufacturers seems a little short-sighted. In the medium term rapid decarbonisation could well be the boost the economy needs.
"What's the problem with electric tractors?"
It's hard to know where to start where one party clearly has no knowledge of the problem whatsoever. Electric cars can run (for example) 50-100km on a single charge in ideal conditions (low load). Add in a heater, air-con, lights or wipers, and that performance drops off a cliff. That's running a light throttle..
How you run a tractor (or a truck or any industrial machine) is under constant load. In this case you use the rev counter to monitor the engine (max power/max efficiency/whatever) and the gearbox as a switch to keep the machine in the appropriate band.
The power required to run a 5 share reversible plough up one side of a field would flatten and cook the batteries of any electric vehicle currently in mass production.
De-carbonised farming has another name: subsistance farming. That is unless you are a rich landlord and have access to serfs.
The power required to run a 5 share reversible plough up one side of a field would flatten and cook the batteries of any electric vehicle currently in mass production.
There you go again - 'currently in mass production'
For one example of a prototype see here
And you conveniently ignored the hydrogen and methane options
Of course large diesel tractors may still be necessary for plowing large areas for a few years yet, but the technology to do a myriad of smaller tasks on farms without fossil fuels already exists. And of course, tractors use a very small percentage of the daily diesel/petrol consumed if this country compared to private cars, where electric tech is coming on apace.
Of course, the 'tractor' is a classic example of denialist cherry-picking where one exception automatically condemns the whole concept. This quaint idea that we have what we have now and nothing will change is what has always held progress back.
If it was up to you we would probably never have come down from the trees.