Ross McKitrick

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Ross McKitrick is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis. McKitrick gained his doctorate in economics in 1996 from the University of British Columbia, and in the same year was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario. He has been an Associate Professor since 2001 and since 2002 Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market public policy think tank. ^[1].

McKitrick co-wrote the 2002 book Taken By Storm with Christopher Essex. It was a runner-up to the Donner Prize 2002 as the Best Canadian Book on Public Policy.^[2] He has since published further research on palaeoclimate reconstruction. Some of these papers were cowritten with Stephen McIntyre, including "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance."^[3] He continues to publish research in economics, usually in the area of environmental policy.

1 Publications
2 Global warming related activities
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Publications

McKitrick has (1997-2005) authored or coauthored 16 peer-reviewed articles in economics journals, and four in science journals (as well as two in Energy and Environment). Outside academia, in addition to co-authoring Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming he has also written a number of opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines, many of which have also written about McKitrick.^[4] In his latest work, he is lead author of "Stationarity of Global Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions:Implications for Global Warming Scenarios." along with Mark Strazicich.^[5]

[edit] Global warming related activities

Being active in the field of environmental economics and policy analysis, in addition to his role as a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and co-authorship of Taken By Storm, has involved McKitrick in the debate over the subject of global warming. Below are some of the more contentious issues that have received attention, on a national scale in the mass media or involving government agencies and panels.

[edit] Criticism of Mann et al 1998

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Main article: Hockey stick controversy

From a statistical perspecitve, McKitrick and McIntyre (MM) in the 2003 article "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) "Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series"^[6] examined the Michael Mann, Ray Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (MBH) 1998 paper, "Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries."^[7] As a result Mann et al. published a corrigendum that did not affect the previously published results [2]. McIntyre and McKitrick say the corrigendum failed to address some of their methodological concerns. Nature rejected McIntyre and McKitrick's submission,and the two believe that Nature responded to their concerns about the Mann et al. corrigendum in an unsatisfactory way.[3]

A panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) endorsed, with a few reservations the work of Mann and others.[4] One of the panel's reservations was that "...a statistical method used in the 1999 study was not the best and that some uncertainties in the work 'have been underestimated,'..." However, from a climate perspective, the panel concluded "Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming."^[8]

A subsequent investigation, undertaken at the request of Republican Senator Joe Barton and headed by prominent statistics professor and NAS member Edward Wegman of George Mason University [5] supported the statistical criticisms by McKitrick and McIntyre, saying "It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the [Mann] paper. We found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling." and "We have been to Michael Mann’s University of Virginia website and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 materials. We have been able to reproduce the results of McIntyre and McKitrick"[6]

The subject of the meaning and impact of the issue is still being debated in multiple blogs on the Internet.

[edit] Criticism of a McKitrick paper

Tim Lambert, a blogger, has criticized McKitrick's own data analysis in a 2004 paper with Patrick Michaels. Among other things, Lambert found a bug in which the input to a cosine function was in degrees instead of radians. The authors have acknowledged the error and published a corrected version. They claimed that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected. McKitrick has stated that Lambert was only able to spot the bug because the data and code used in the paper were put on a website upon publication,[7] as is usual in econometrics but rare in the natural sciences.

[edit] Does a global temperature exist?

In 2007 McKitrick was co-author on a paper in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics arguing that "Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming".[8]

[edit] T3 Tax proposal

In June 2007, McKitrick suggested "a climate policy that could, in principle, get equal support from all sides": a "T3" tax on carbon emissions tied to a three-year moving average of tropospheric temperature change, starting at a low rate. If global warming occurs, the tax would climb quickly and "could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources."[9]