ClimateGate news

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Climate Change Power List

The Financial Post published today what it calls a Climate Change Power List, naming the top 20 people who wield the most influence in Canada. The expected players are there, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper at #1, Kooky Suzuki at #2, the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada at #4, Environment Minister John Baird at #7, and Financial Post editor and climate change skeptic Terence Corcoran at #20.

Here's what they had to say about Dr. Ross McKitrick, who was placed at #9:

Ross McKitrick, Economist, University of Guelph

Sphere of Influence: Climate-change skeptics
Objective: To challenge conventional scientific wisdom on global warming

Ross McKitrick is best-known for his critique of climatologist Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show how global temperatures have spiked in recent decades, after 1,000 years of relative stability. McKitrick argues that the graph — featured prominently in UN reports and the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — is based on faulty data. He says that global warming is not yet a scientific certainty.

A senior fellow at the Fraser Institute think-tank, McKitrick has been widely attacked because he is not a scientist. But he is also a frequent commentator in major media and has appeared before parliamentary committees.

His book Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, co-authored with mathematician Christopher Essex, was runner-up for the 2002 Donner prize in public policy writing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I found the repetition of this spurious claim in the Post article annoying:

“McKitrick has been widely attacked because he is not a scientist.”

Many of the mathematical techniques applied in mathematical economics and econometrics are similar to or the same as those used in the 'hard' sciences. Hence McKitrick was well qualified to analyse ‘scientist’ Mann’s “hockey stick” data and methodology. Arguably he’s far better qualified than Kooky Suzuki the Fruit Fly Guy to engage in climate change science as well as to analyze the potential economic effects of climate change policy.

A Dog Named Kyoto said...

Mann's hockey stick is a fraud. And it was McKitrick and Essex who exposed him.

Anonymous said...

McIntyre and McKitrick actually.

The criticisms of MBH98 that they produced identified inappropriate statistical techniques in the MBH98 paper. They did not attempt to provide an alternative curve to the "hockey stick" because, as they admitted, their expertise was statistics ... not paleoclimatology.

A Dog Named Kyoto said...

Yes, it was McIntyre and McKitrick. Thank you.