Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (8975)	1/14/2007 7:22:40 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are a joke. You are clinging to straws. Those guys are biased as hell, as are most of the climate skeptics. They are no more able to present a balanced argument then Philip Morris is on smoking tobacco causes an increase of lung cancer. "It has been refuted throughly" -LOL- I'll listen to a real argument, but not some baloney from guys who deliberatley dinker with the figures. undoit.org /snippet... A paper published in 2003 by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, claiming to be an audit of a study by Mann et al. (1998), used data from a corrupted electronic file, arbitrarily omitted 80% of the data before 1600, and replaced certain data with incompatible data, artificially resulting in temperatures during the 1400s that were warmer than during the late 1900s (Rutherford et al., in press, 2005). A paper published in 2005 by McIntyre and McKitrick claims that the hockey stick pattern is an artificial result of the method used by Mann et al. rather than an unbiased compilation of the data. Mann et al. used a version of a method known as principal components analysis, which basically boils a large amount of data down to its main features, or “principal components.” One main problem with McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique is that they misunderstand why Mann et al. used principal components analysis—Mann et al. used it to summarize all the important features of the data, not to extract only the one chief feature. The reason McIntyre and McKitrick’s version of the data doesn’t have a hockey stick pattern is that they display only the first principal component, omitting other critical principal components. In addition, scientists have shown that the hockey stick pattern emerges regardless of what version of principal components analysis is used or even whether principal components analysis is used (Rutherford et al., in press, 2005). Recently, von Storch et al. (2004) argued validly that the method used in Mann et al. and some other temperature reconstruction studies may underestimate the magnitude of past climate changes, particularly the longer-lasting, centuryscale changes such as during the Medieval Warm Period. But this paper provides no definitive answer as to how large the underestimates are (Osborn and Briffa 2004). Also, the temperature reconstruction of Moberg et al. (2005), which avoids the method criticized by von Storch et al., still provides no indication that there were any periods in the past 2,000 years that were warmer than the 1990s. //end snippet.