Ross McKitrick

Ross McKitrick is a Canadian environmental economist. He is known for his work on global warming. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario (since 2001^[1]) and, since 2002, Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian policy think tank that opposes the Kyoto Protocol.

McKitrick co-wrote the 2002 book Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming with Christopher Essex. It was runner-up for the Donner Prize as the Best Canadian Book on Public Policy, and finalist for the Canadian Science Writers' Association Book Prize.

Criticism of Mann et al

McKitrick has recently (since approximately 2002) worked on global warming, concerning which he is a sceptic. His best-known work is Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series, coauthored with Stephen McIntyre. This presented an "audit" of work by Michael Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH); it appeared in Energy and Environment in 2003. The matter was later referred to Nature, following which Mann et al. published a corrigendum, including a re-statement of their data and methods, which appeared on July 1 2004. The corrigendum did not affect the results, however. Mann et al. have replied [2]; Ammann and Wahl have replicated MBH [3].

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick claim to have found further errors in the MBH approach [4]. A paper claiming to show this was rejected by Nature. Richard A. Muller has promoted their claims [5], but the claims are disputed [6]. The essence of their claim is that the statistical techniques used by MBH has a built-in tendency to produce an upward trend over the last century as an artefact of the data-processing. MBH deny this.

In February 2005, the article "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance" [7] by McIntyre and McKitrick was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Criticism of McKitrick

McKitrick's own data analysis has been criticised, in particular by Tim Lambert, who has written on his web page about what he considers serious flaws in a publication of McKitrick and Patrick Michaels which is unrelated to the critique of MBH. One such flaw is a programming error with regard to radians and degrees which Lambert claimed invalidates the conclusions of one of McKitrick's papers. The authors' response acknowledges the error – describing it as "a small mistake" – but asserts that the effects were "very small" and that the correction "improved the overall fit", and demonstrates how their overall conclusion was unaffected [8] [9].

Papers

• Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance McIntyre S, McKitrick R GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 32 (3): art. no. L03710 FEB 12 2005 (times cited: 0)
• A test of corrections for extraneous signals in gridded surface temperature data McKitrick R, Michaels PJ, CLIMATE RESEARCH 26 (2): 159-173 MAY 25 2004 (times cited: 2)
• The existence and uniqueness of optimal pollution policy in the presence of victim defense measures McKitrick R, Collinge RA, JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT 44 (1): 106-122 JUL 2002 (times cited: 0)
• The design of regulations expressed as ratios or percentage quotas McKitrick R, JOURNAL OF REGULATORY ECONOMICS 19 (3): 295-305 2001 (times cited: 0)
• Linear Pigovian taxes and the optimal size of a polluting industry, McKitrick R, Collinge RA CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS-REVUE CANADIENNE D ECONOMIQUE 33 (4): 1106-1119 NOV 2000 (times cited: 0)

Notes

1. ^ McKitrick gained his doctorate 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 [10]).

See also

• Temperature record of the past 1000 years

External links

• McKitrick's home page
• home page for Taken by Storm
• "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) "Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series"
• home page of his coauthor Stephen McIntyre
• Sourcewatch entry for Ross McKitrick