Ross McKitrick succeeds Henderson

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”.

Thingummydoodle noodle

Brandon Shollenberger has a lovely post up looking at some recent comments by Skeptical Science insider Tom Curtis and Anders Thingummydoodle from the "And Then There's Physics" blog. Readers will remember Anders as the chap who berated me about one of my posts on Doug Keenan's work, saying that it was a physical model you needed in order to understand what was causing global warming. This despite my having said almost precisely that in the blog post.

Anyway, Anders has been sounding off about the Hockey Stick, accusing McIntyre and McKitrick of all manner of sins and demonstrating in the process that he has absolutely no idea of how Mann got from his raw data through to his final reconstruction. His allegations are therefore completely and utterly wrong.

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Ye olde techniques - Josh 273

 

I thought the National Review article, posted here of course, was worth a cartoon. H/t Rick Cina in the comments for the peer-reviewed critiques of Mann's hockey sticks.

Cartoons by Josh

Ague peak

Ross McKitrick has a new paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, examining reasons for the eradication of malaria in some countries but not in others. You'll never guess what isn't a factor.

Malaria has disappeared in some countries but not others, and an explanation for the eradication pattern has been elusive. We show that the probability of malaria eradication jumps sharply when average household size in a country drops below four persons. Part of the effect commonly attributed to income growth is likely due to declining household size. The effect of DDT usage is difficult to isolate but we only identify a weak role for it. Warmer temperatures are not associated with increased malaria prevalence. We propose that household size matters because malaria is transmitted indoors at night, so the fewer people are sleeping in the same room, the lower the probability of transmission of the parasite to a new victim. We test this hypothesis by contrasting malaria incidence with dengue fever, another mosquito-borne illness spread mainly by daytime outdoor contact.

There's a discussion of the new paper here and the full paper can be seen here.

McKitrick explains the models

Ross McKitrick has a must-read article in the Financial Post, looking at climate models and their environmentalist-like divergence from reality:

The IPCC must take everybody for fools. Its own graph shows that observed temperatures are not within the uncertainty range of projections; they have fallen below the bottom of the entire span. Nor do models simulate surface warming trends accurately; instead they grossly exaggerate them. (Nor do they match them on regional scales, where the fit is typically no better than random numbers.)

Ross responds

Ross McKitrick has responded (in considerable detail) to some of the criticisms of his T3 tax proposal in a paper posted at his website.

Ross McKitrick: an evidence-based approach to pricing CO2 emissions - cartoon notes by Josh

Here are my cartoon notes of a paper presented today by Prof Ross McKitrick, hosted by The GWPF in one of the committee rooms in the House of Lords, Westminster, London, UK. The title is "An evidence-based approach to pricing CO2 emissions". It was intellectually stretching, intriguing and elegant. Ross' brilliance is that he makes the complicated sound simple.

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The T3 tax redux

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has issued a paper in which Ross McKitrick sets out his idea of a carbon tax calibrated to temperatures in the tropical troposphere. The press release is as follows.

London, 3 July: A new paper, published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, proposes a radical new climate policy approach that offers to be the most cost-effective means of curbing CO2 emissions, while automatically adjusting the stringency of the policy to the severity of the problem.

The paper 'An Evidence-Based Approach To Pricing CO2 Emissions' written by Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Canada) proposes to link the level of a tax on CO2 emissions to temperatures in the tropical troposphere, and to create a 30-year futures market for tax-exemption certificates. Investors would then have long term certainty about the carbon price, and the future tax rates would incorporate all known evidence of the likely path of global warming.

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Fix it or fold it

With timing that can either be seen as perfect or perfectly awful, Ross McKitrick has published a report on the IPCC under the auspices of the GWPF.

I am pleased to announce the publication of a report I have written that provides systematic detail on the procedures of the IPCC and makes the case for reforming them. My study, called What is Wrong With the IPCC? A Proposal for Radical Reform, was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the U.K., and includes a foreword by the Hon. John Howard, former prime minister of Australia.

I haven't read the report - lots to read at the moment - but, as the headline suggests, McKitrick's case is that doing nothing is not an option.

McKitrick has an op-ed in the Financial Post, which includes a link to the full report.

Two new tweeps

Twitter users may be interested in two new members of the Twitterati:

@RossMcKitrick

@MichaelEMann

Another confounding factor?

This is a week or so old now, but this Mother Jones article looks at a new paper which reports the effect of livestock on tree rings. The study is focused on birch, so it's not directly relevant to the paleo studies, but the McIntyre and McKitrick paper in E&E in 2005 discussed the possibility of the introduction of livestock having brought about the twentieth century spike in bristlecone growth that underpins the hockey-stick shape of so many of the millennial temperature reconstructions.

Interestingly, the new paper's conclusion is that livestock can reduce tree ring widths by a factor of three or so, but according to the press release, "past densities of herbivores can be estimated from historic records, and from the fossilised remains of spores from fungi that live on dung". In other words, you can control for the effect. As the paper's authors say in their press release:

This study does not mean that using tree rings to infer past climate is flawed as we can still see the effect of temperatures on the rings, and in lowland regions tree rings are less likely to have been affected by herbivores because they can grow out of reach faster.

Somebody needs to repeat this study on the bristlecones.

Speechless

Some of you may remember Deutche Bank's amusing attempt to address "major sceptic arguments". I posted something on this back at the start of September.

Ross McKitrick has now posted up a back and forth between himself and the authors, Mary-Elena Carr, Kate Brash, and Robert Anderson. These three were joined by a fourth author, Madeleine Rubenstein, for the subsequent responses to McKitrick. McKitrick uses the shorthand "CABR" to refer to the four, and I've adopted the same style here.

• Ross's reply to the Deutsche Bank paper.
• CABR's response - Part 1, Part 2.
• Ross's subsequent response.

There's quite a bit of reading, but it's certainly worth investing the time. The work of the CABR team is, quite frankly, extraordinary. It is so bad I'm going to refrain from further comment.

McKitrick on the Hockey Stick

This was posted in the comments on WUWT. I'm not sure if it's recent or not, but it hasn't been on YouTube for long. I've never seen it before.

Does Ross McKitrick sleep?

Ross McKitrick has been getting through a power of work. In recent weeks we've had a paper on the quality of the surface temperature record, and now there's the forthcoming paper on the trend in  tropospheric temperatures. The latter looks as though it may drive a coach and horses through the IPCC's position on fingerprinting studies.

And now there's this, a detailed report on the UK inquiries into Climategate. I'm not sure I can keep up.

The sole solar paper

In 2007, Ross McKitrick wrote a paper on the Fourth Assessment Report which included a short section on the IPCC's use of Judith Lean's paper:

The IPCC acknowledges that solar activity is high, and possibly exceptionally high, compared to the last 8,000 years. The two most prominent proxy-based reconstructions (from teams led by Solanki and Muescheler, respectively), differ on whether an interval in the 1700s included a spike comparable to today’s but both agree that today’s solar output is very high compared to most of the current interglacial era.

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