Stephen McIntyre

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Stephen McIntyre is a mining executive, most prominent as a critic of scientific studies of global warming, particularly the work of Mann and his co-authors.

1 Introduction
2 Personal
3 The Hockey Stick Controversy
4 Notes
5 External links

[edit] Introduction

McIntyre has worked in hard-rock mineral exploration[1] for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada [2]. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in pure mathematics from the University of Toronto, though no graduate degree.[3]. Nevertheless, he acquired extensive technical mathematical skills that allowed him to be proficient in testing complex Global warming models. At the University of Toronto he studied algebraic topology, group theory, differential manifolds, linear algebra, and advanced statistical analysis methods. He was offered a graduate scholarship to study mathematical economics at MIT and another one to study politics and economics at Oxford. He opted for Oxford and graduated with a degree in the mentioned subjects in 1971. Upon his graduation, he left London and returned to Toronto.

[edit] Personal

Mr. McIntyre is married with three children and two grandchildren. He is an active squash player and once won a Gold Medal in the World Masters Games in squash doubles.

[edit] The Hockey Stick Controversy

He and Ross McKitrick have published a number of papers in peer-reviewed journals that are critical of some global-warming studies. In 2003, they published "Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series" Energy and Environment 14(6) 751-772. (Energy and Environment is a relatively obscure journal that does not appear in the ISI citation index.[4])

Their later paper, "Hockey Sticks, principal components, and spurious significance", Geophysical Research Letters vol. 32 [12 Feb 2005] was nominated as a journal highlight[5] by the American Geophysical Union, which publishes GRL. This work, which the authors describe as "auditing", attracted international attention [6] for its claims to expose flaws in the reconstructions of past climate. The authors of the reconstructions have acknowledged some of these flaws, but claim that their conclusions are not significantly affected. They also argue that in their paper McIntyre and McKitrick "promote false and specious claims".[7]

In 2006, the U.S. Congress took an interest in the controversy regarding the "hockey stick graph" and the MBH vs M&M controversy specifically. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), Chair of the House Committee on Science, commissioned a study from the National Academy of Sciences, through its National Research Council (NRC). In addition, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, commissioned his own committee to prepare a report, chaired by Prof. Ed Wegman, statistics professor of George Mason University.

The two reports^[1]^[2] were rather different. The NRC committee consisted of 12 scientists from different disciplines, while Wegman and his two co-authors were all statisticians. The NRC looked into the scientific validity of the "hockey-stick" generally, while Wegman et al's report primarily focussed on the statistical analysis used in the MBH paper. (In addition, they looked into the social and research interconnections between MBH and others who may have refereed their original work.) The NRC paper was subject to substantial refereeing and correction, whereas Wegman et al followed a more casual process^[3].

Wegman et al agreed with the technical criticisms that M&M had leveled at MBH. The NRC paper agreed that there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded that they were small in effect, and that "hockey stick" had in any case been corroborated by other researchers using different methodologies. The NRC differed from MBH largely in the strength of their conclusions - the NRC found that there was insufficient data to assert with reasonable certainty (as MBH had) that the last 25 years was the hottest in the last 1000 years - they termed this conclusion merely "plausible".

McIntyre is the primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis of paleo climate data and frequently critical of positions of established scientists in the paleo-climate community. A recurrent topic in the blog is the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated [8] that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at RealClimate, a blog run by a group of climate scientists.

McIntyre commented on how he sees his own role in the global warming debate as follows:[9]

In an emotional debate, I think that there’s an important role for analyzing individual arguments being relied upon. I’ve focused on the multiproxy studies and have come to the conclusion that all the hockey-stick studies are flawed and biased. De-constructing each individual study is very time-consuming. I view this exercise as not dissimilar to that of a pre-war analyst studying proxy evidence for WMD such as aluminum tubes. At the end of the day, an analyst is sometimes obliged to say that maybe an aluminum tube is just an aluminum tube. That does not mean that some other piece of evidence may not be valid - only that the aluminum tube wasn’t.

In response to the criticisms of the hockey stick, the main defence or excuse has been that the hockey stick doesn’t "matter". The concern about 2xCO2 arises from basic physics and the HS could be wrong but still leave us with an important problem. In one sense, I agree. If the HS were wrong, 2xCO2 is still an issue. Then why did IPCC and governments feature the HS so much? I presume that it was for promotional purposes.