McIntyre is a mathematician. He's an expert with statistics. That makes him eminently more qualified to determine the validity of Michael Mann's statistical algorithms than you or Michael Mann himself. The National Science Foundation confirmed McIntyre's analysis of Mann's Hockey Stick fraud.
I thought you believed in consulting experts.
I read about the National Science Foundation's opinion. You are almost completely misrepresenting it.
Have I?
Here are some excerpts from the report:
The debate over Dr. Mann’s principal components methodology has been going on for nearly three years. When we got involved, there was no evidence that a single issue was resolved or even nearing resolution. Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org website said that all of the Mr. McIntyre and Dr. McKitrick claims had been ‘discredited’. UCAR had issued a news release saying that all their claims were ‘unfounded’. Mr. McIntyre replied on the ClimateAudit.org website. The climate science community seemed unable to either refute McIntyre’s claims or accept them. The situation was ripe for a third-party review of the types that we and Dr. North’s NRC panel have done.
While the work of Michael Mann and colleagues presents what appears to be compelling evidence of global temperature change, the criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as those of other authors mentioned are indeed valid.
“Where we have commonality, I believe our report and the [NAS] panel essentially agree. We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the ‘centering’ issue off the table. [Mann's] decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics …. I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.
The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these reconstructions.
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.
Overall, our committee believes that MannÂ’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
[The] fact that their paper fit some policy agendas has greatly enhanced their paper’s visibility. ,,,The “ ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’ prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of [principal components analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position.
We have been to Michael MannÂ’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
Generally speaking, the paleoclimatology community has not recognized the validity of the [McIntyre and McKitrick] papers and has tended dismiss their results as being developed by biased amateurs. The paleoclimatology community seems to be tightly coupled as indicated by our social network analysis, has rallied around the [Mann] position, and has issued an extensive series of alternative assessments most of which appear to support the conclusions of MBH98/99.
Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘“independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.
Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on [Mann's work]. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.
It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications.”
“We note that the American Meteorological Society has a Committee on Probability and Statistics. I believe it is amazing for a committee whose focus is on statistics and probability that of the nine members only two are also members of the American Statistical Association, the premier statistical association in the United States, and one of those is a recent Ph. D. with an assistant professor appointment in a medical school. The American Meteorological Association recently held the 18th Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences.. Of the 62 presenters at a conference with a focus on statistics and probability, only 8 … are members of the American Statistical Association. I believe that these two communities should be more engaged and if nothing else our report should highlight to both communities a need for additional cross-disciplinary ties."
Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.”
Here's what Wikipedia says.
In the hockey stick controversy, the data and methods used in reconstructions of the temperature record of the past 1000 years have been disputed by those opposed to action on global warming. Reconstructions have consistently shown that the rise in the instrumental temperature record of the past 150 years is not matched in earlier centuries, and the name "hockey stick graph" was coined for figures showing a long term decline followed by an abrupt rise in temperatures. These graphs were publicised to explain the scientific findings of climatology, and in addition to scientific debate over the reconstructions, they have been the topic of political dispute. The issue is part of the global warming controversy and has been one focus of political responses to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Arguments over the reconstructions have been taken up by fossil fuel industry funded lobbying groups attempting to cast doubt on climate science.[1]
The use of proxy indicators to get quantitative estimates of the temperature record of past centuries was developed from the 1990s onwards, and found indications that recent warming was exceptional. The Bradley & Jones 1993 reconstruction introduced the "Composite Plus Scaling" (CPS) method used by most later large scale reconstructions,[2][3] and its findings were disputed by Pat Michaels at the United States House Committee on Science.
In 1998 Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes developed new statistical techniques to produce Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 (MBH98), the first eigenvector-based climate field reconstruction (CFR). This showed global patterns of annual surface temperature, and included a graph of average hemispheric temperatures back to 1400.[4] In Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999 (MBH99) the methodology was extended back to 1000.[5][6] The term hockey stick was coined by the climatologist Jerry Mahlman, to describe the pattern this showed, envisaging a graph that is relatively flat to 1900 as forming an Ice hockey stick's "shaft", followed by a sharp increase corresponding to the "blade".[7][8] A version of this graph was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), along with four other reconstructions supporting the same conclusion.[6] The graph was publicised, and became a focus of dispute for those opposed to the strengthening scientific consensus that late 20th century warmth was exceptional.[9]
Those disputing the graph included Pat Michaels, the fossil fuel funded George C. Marshall Institute and Fred Singer. A paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas claiming greater medieval warmth was used by the Bush administration chief of staff Philip Cooney to justify altering the first Environmental Protection Agency Report on the Environment The paper was quickly dismissed by scientists in the Soon and Baliunas controversy, but on July 28, Republican Jim Inhofe spoke in the Senate speech citing it to claim "that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".[10]
Later in 2003, a paper by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick disputing the data used in MBH98 paper was publicised by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In 2004 Hans von Storch published criticism of the statistical techniques as tending to underplay variations in earlier parts of the graph, though this was disputed and he later accepted that the effect was very small.[11] In 2005 McIntyre and McKitrick published criticisms of the principal components analysis methodology as used in MBH98 and MBH99. Their analysis in was subsequently disputed by published papers including Huybers 2005 and Wahl & Ammann 2007 which pointed to errors in the McIntyre and McKitrick methodology. In June 2005 Rep. Joe Barton launched what Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, called a "misguided and illegitimate investigation" into the data, methods and personal information of Mann, Bradley and Hughes. At Boehlert's request a panel of scientists convened by the National Research Council was set up, which reported in 2006 supporting Mann's findings with some qualifications, including agreeing that there were some statistical failings but these had little effect on the result.[12] Barton and U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield requested Edward Wegman to set up a team of statisticians to investigate, and they supported McIntyre and McKitrick's view that there were statistical failings, although they did not quantify whether there was any significant effect. They also produced an extensive network analysis which has been discredited by expert opinion and found to have issues of plagiarism. Arguments against the MBH studies were reintroduced as part of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, but dismissed by eight independent investigations.
More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph, with variations in how flat the pre-20th century "shaft" appears.[12][13] The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report cited 14 reconstructions, 10 of which covered 1,000 years or longer, to support its strengthened conclusion that it was likely that Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the 20th century were the highest in at least the past 1,300 years.[14] Ten or more subsequent reconstructions, including Mann et al. 2008, have supported these general conclusions.
