Bishop Hill Ross McKitrick succeeds Henderson
Dec 15, 2014 Climate: McKitrick GWPF GWPF have announced that Ross McKitrick is to take over from David Henderson as chairman of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.
Dr McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, specialising in environmental economics, and has been a foundation member of the Council since November 2009. He succeeds Professor David Henderson, who has held the chairmanship with great distinction since its inception in 2009. Professor Henderson is stepping down from the chairmanship at his own request, but will remain an active member of the Council. Nigel Lawson, Chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said:
“I am extremely grateful to David, whose contribution to the work of the AAC and the success of the GWPF over the past five years has been immeasurable”.
Reader Comments (14)
Congratulations to Dr McKitrick, and many thanks to Professor Henderson and indeed to the entire GWPF. I think they have been very helpful in presenting a reasonable, non-alarmist view of GW.
Excellent news.
Excellent.
It demonstrates the depth of comptence and integrity amongst those who remain rational.
The true believers meanwhile plumb the depths of the oceans and still can't find a single degree to warm them. (No; modelling 0.04⁰C isn't "near enough")
Good news for RM, & I wish DH every success in his future endeavours.
O Canada!
A great appointment.
Are you sure his contribution is immeasurable?
Surely by using a host of very expensive computer models and attributing a very high significance to the amount of ink used whilst carrying out his work at GWPF it should be possible to measure his contribution to within a 95% certainty!
I realise that use of ink is only a small element of David Henderson's work, but it is in fact the control knob on all the output from GWPF.
Whilst we can't use an absolute figure for his contribution, the anomaly is about 0.05% above a long-term average starting from when he just wasn't pulling his weight. Although the start point has been adjusted downwards for no particular reason and he was working extremely hard when he left so we have adjusted the end values upwards.
Either way, we are all doomed!
I wish them both good fortune , Happpy Christmas and a Good New Year. They are both heroes.
An excellent chairman stepping aside will be, as the saying goes, a hard act to follow. But Ross McKitrick is surely a great choice to take up the challenge. And what a fine committee he will be working with:
Adrian Berry
Sir Samuel Brittan
Sir Ian Byatt
Professor Robert Carter
Professor Vincent Courtillot
Professor Freeman Dyson
Professor Christopher Essex
Christian Gerondeau
Dr Indur Goklany
Professor William Happer
Professor Terence Kealey
Professor Deepak Lal
Professor Richard Lindzen
Professor Robert Mendelsohn
Professor Ian Plimer
Professor Paul Reiter
Dr Matt Ridley
Sir Alan Rudge
Professor Nir Shaviv
Professor Philip Stott
Professor Henrik Svensmark
Professor Richard Tol
Dr David Whitehouse
Three cheers for them all, and for the GWPF itself!
John Shade has it. Well said John, really - I couldn't have put it better myself.....
;-)!
That is a very respectable list John Shade. Thanks for listing it.
The good thing is Ross will be keenly aware of the venom coming his way...given he should already be used to it through his association with the anti-christ (St Steve McIntyre)!
Mailman
@John Shade ... Hear! Hear! And I would say this even if Ross was not a fellow Canadian ;-)
May the GWPF continue to go (and grow) from strength to strength!
John Shade, Send the list to the BBC to remind them that if they need scientific advice on climate issues, there are alternatives to Greenpeace and WWF and the Met Office!
David Henderson is elderly now - but he has always been a free-thinking economist. I recall that in the 1970s (he was at UCL then, I believe) he attacked the notion of Government-backed big projects - because so many of them turned into disasters. Such as the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor programme, which yielded huge sums to GEC, and Concorde - which soaked up all the finance available for new aircraft projects and proved a total commercial disaster (not a single copy of Concorde was sold, the Air France and British Airways batch of 9 were given to them - free).
David Henderson was one of the few economists who pointed out the nonsense of these massive projects. At the time there was another one developing - BT's System X project which funded GEC and others to design a new generation of telephone exchanges. Even when it was obvious that the large exchange simply could not be made to work, that is was a software impossibility, hundreds of millions were still being shelled out on a cost-plus basis to the telecoms companies. Lord Weinstock fought fiercely to defend his baby.
As Henderson said - and it applies right now to "projects" like climate change - Whitehall often invests its beliefs in such ideas, often regardless of the evidence and the facts. The projects are like steamrollers - little or nil forward progress, but their huge mass means they have virtually unstoppable momentum. Too many careers are involved.
Fot that single insight I would have thought that David Henderson deserved a Nobel Prize for economics. But he may be regarded as too flighty - by pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.
We must all wish David Henderson all the best for the future.