The Hockey Stick Illusion by Montford Andrew

Author:Montford, Andrew [Montford, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anglosphere Books
Published: 2015-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

F IGURE 9.1: The average of Mann’s proxies compared to the Hockey Stick

Top : Simple average of Mann’s proxies. Bottom : The Hockey Stick.

Reproduced from McIntyre and McKitrick’s presentation to the NAS panel.

Rumours circulated around the climate blogs as to who had been invited to the hearings. It was said that some climatologists were refusing to attend, which, if true, was a dangerous course to take, since the Whitfield Subcommittee could enforce attendance through a subpoena. A few days later it was announced that the witnesses were to be the heads of the two panels, Gerry North and Ed Wegman, together with four researchers: Thomas Karl and Tom Crowley, who could be expected to speak for the Team, with McIntyre opposing and von Storch occupying his customary position of honest broker. Mann was apparently unavailable, but the Committee had invited him to attend the following week, thus obliging all the other witnesses to come to Washington again. The first hearings were just a week away.

Before the hearings could be held, the newspapers got hold of the details of the Wegman report: an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal which showed that Wegman was going to come out almost entirely on McIntyre and McKitrick’s side of the argument.

The report commissioned by the House Energy Committee, due to be released today, backs up and reinforces that conclusion. The three researchers – Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University – are not climatologists; they’re statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann’s methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann’s papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt. Further, Professor Wegman’s report upholds the finding of Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick that Mr. Mann’s methodology is biased toward producing ‘hockey stick’ shaped graphs. 162

McIntyre had been supplied with a copy of the Wegman report ahead of the hearings, and it was just as supportive as the Wall Street Journal was suggesting.15 Not only did the authors share the NAS panel’s view that Mann’s short-centred PC calculation was biased, but they had also said so in language that eschewed the bureaucratic double-speak adopted by North’s panel.

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of [McIntyre and McKitrick] to be valid and compelling. 15

Wegman had been able to replicate McIntyre’s work completely and had accepted all of his arguments. Wegman and his colleagues had also gone beyond a straightforward analysis of the MBH98 data and methods and had tried to analyse the reasons why a paper as flawed as Mann’s had managed to slip through the peer review process and then had managed to reach a position of such huge importance for the policy-making community. Why was it that it had fallen to a retired minerals consultant and an economist to expose its errors? Why had the paleoclimate community defended

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