M&M honoured by CEI

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have been honoured with this year's Julian Simon Memorial Award by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The Hockey Stick Illusion gets a mention in the press release too.

Anthony Watts has the story.

IAC notices McKitrick

It looks as though the pressure has paid off. Ross McKitrick has emailed to say that he has now been invited to submit to the Interacademies Council inquiry into the IPCC.

Better late than never, I suppose.

I've also had an email from Marcel Crok, who has also been speaking to the IAC. Marcel's information seems to suggest that McIntyre will be contacted too, so this may well turn out to represent a small step forward.

IAC blanks M&M

The Interacademies Panel - the one that is investigating IPCC process and procedures as a result of Climategate - is going to be holding hearings in Montreal.

Great, I hear you say. That means that they'll be able to invite McIntyre and McKitrick.

'fraid not.

The invited speakers do include a sceptic, in the shape of John Christy. They are even flying in Bob Watson from the UK and Hans von Storch from Germany. But will they invite the two people who have been at the centre of criticisms of the IPCC, who know more about the breaches of rules and procedure that went on ahead of Climategate, and who live, if not just round the corner, then at least handily close?

Don't be silly.

The IAC is inviting comments on its website. I think this omission is worthy of (polite) comment, don't you?

More radio

I've just returned from Edinburgh where I did an interview for the Newshour show on the World Service. Listeners in the UK should be able to hear it again on the iPlayer shortly. They are also going to use a clip on the 1800 news too (presumably Radio 4).

The interview went much better than the last time. I made the point that the scope of the panel missed key allegations and cited Ross McKitrick's point that Jones had inserted baseless statements into the IPCC reports.

The interviewer came back asking whether sceptics would ever be satisified. I said that we would, if presented with evidence that the allegations were false. For example I pointed out that Ross McK had listed the evidence that would have to be produced to disprove the allegation that Jones had fabricated parts of the IPCC report.

At this point they cut me off, which was a pity, because I wanted to point out that the panel's point that the IPCC had misrepresented CRU science was risible, the IPCC authors in question being CRU people anyway.

Still, all in all, I'm not too unhappy with my performance.

Keep on gatekeeping

Ross McKitrick shows plainly that, despite the furore over the emails and the frantic issuing of denials, mainstream climatologists, are still determined to keep sceptic views out of the literature.

This is the story of how I spent 2 years trying to publish a paper that refutes an important claim in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The claim in question is not just wrong, but based on fabricated evidence. Showing that the claim is fabricated is easy: it suffices merely to quote the section of the report, since no supporting evidence is given. But unsupported guesses may turn out to be true. Showing the IPCC claim is also false took some mundane statistical work, but the results were clear. Once the numbers were crunched and the paper was written up, I began sending it to science journals. That is when the runaround began. Having published several against-the-flow papers in climatology journals I did not expect a smooth ride, but the process eventually became surreal.

This is simply astonishing stuff. Read the whole thing.

Big Oil forgets to bribe McKitrick

Hans von Storch reports that Edinburgh University's Tom Crowley has been doing some auditing himself, writing to Ross McKitrick to find out how much loot the Canadian is receiving from Big Oil.

Unfortunately it appears that the well-organised denier movement forgot to fund one of the most prominent sceptics of all.

Which prompts a question:

Are the Hockey Team conspiracy theorists?

Discuss.

McKitrick on Channel 4 news

Ross McKitrick was just on Channel 4 News here in the UK, up against Bob Watson of UEA. It came over to me as a substantial victory for McKitrick.

Back when I was an auditor, I used to come across bureaucrats whose books didn't balance. They had many of the same mannerisms that Watson displayed.

I'll add an link to video if I can find it.

Bluff calling

I'm just off out to the school board meeting, but before I go here's an ingenious solution to global warming, penned by Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph. 

Both warmers and skeptics agree that if there is going to be any warming it will be seen first in the troposphere. Because of this consensus (a real consensus this time) a tax on carbon, linked to the temperature of the troposphere should be supported by both sides of the debate. The tax would initially be quite low. But if the temperature rises, as predicted by the warmers, then the tax goes up. If it falls, or is stable, which is what the skeptics think might happen, then the tax remains relatively trivial.

A rather neat idea, in that it calls the bluff of both sides.  

Is there such a thing as a global temperature?

This is the question asked in a paper by Essex, McKitrick and Andresen in a fascinating paper which can be found here. (Mathematics alert!). This is my understanding of it - I haven't done any maths since university days, so if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will put me right.

Some quantities, like weight, can be added and therefore averaged. If you take an 2oz mass and a 1 oz mass you can say with certainty that their total mass is 3oz. Because the sum of the two masses means something, you can calculate an avarage of 1.5oz and this figure has a useful meaning also. These kinds of measures are called extensive variables. Pressure, on the other hand, can't be treated in this way. If you add a system at 2 atmospheres to one at 1 atmosphere you don't get a system at 3 atmospheres. Because the sum of the two pressures has no meaning, the average likewise is meaningless. These are called intensive variables.

Temperature, as you might suspect, is an intensive measure. This means that when you add two temperatures together, the answer cannot be a temperature. It's meaningless. As the authors point out, dividing this meaningless sum by the number of components cannot give you an answer which has a meaning.

If the average of temperatures is not a temperature, then perhaps it's an index - a number which tracks whatever it is that drives the climate? If this is the case, then it is presumably necessary to describe how the average of temperatures - a statistic - is driven by the underlying climate driver, or at least to show some correlation between the two. They also need to demonstrate that the statistical measure they have chosen is better than any other measure they could have chosen. These alternative measures might well demonstrate a completely different trend to the average.

A third alternative is that the average is neither a temperature or an index, but a proxy for energy. But unfortunately there appear to be problems with this argument too. For a start, to do so is to use an intensive measure as a proxy for an extensive one. Secondly, the relationship between energy and climate is not understood. How then is it possible to know that the average of temperatures is a valid proxy?

It's not instantly obvious to the lay reader, but there are lots of different kinds of means. We're used to dealing with arithmetical means ("averages") but you can also have geometric means, harmonic means and any number of other means. For some systems, physics suggests which is the correct one to use. But, alas, this is not the case for global temperature.

As if to rub this point in, the paper demonstrates that there are in fact an infinite number of different means for global temperature. Which, they ask, is the correct one? Why has the scientific community alighted on the mean it has? They go on to show that, for the same set of data, different means can show a rising trend or a falling one. In other words, if a different averaging method to the one used in climate science had been chosen, we might now be having a crisis about global cooling... again.

It's a fascinating piece of work, some of which is beyond my understanding. If you are mathematically inclined, do take a look and tell me what you think.