Steve McIntyre

For the English software engineer, see Steve McIntyre.

Stephen McIntyre is the editor of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is most prominent as a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Career

McIntyre attended the University of Toronto Schools, a university-preparatory school in Toronto, finishing first in the national high school mathematics competition of 1965. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Toronto and graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 1969. McIntyre then obtained a Commonwealth Scholarship to read philosophy, politics and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 1971. Although he was offered a graduate scholarship, McIntyre decided not to pursue studies in mathematical economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

McIntyre worked for 30 years in the mineral business, the last part of these in the hard-rock mineral exploration as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada. He was the president and founder of Northwest Exploration Company Limited and a director of its parent company, Northwest Explorations Inc. When Northwest Explorations Inc. was taken over in 1998 by CGX Resources Inc. to form the oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy Inc., McIntyre ceased being a director. McIntyre was a strategic advisor for CGX in 2000 through 2003.

Prior to 2003 he was an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies. He is an active squash player and once won a gold medal in the World Masters Games in squash doubles.

The Hockey stick controversy

Main article: Hockey stick controversy

With Ross McKitrick, McIntyre co-authored two papers questioning the validity of the "hockey stick" graph first presented in a 1998 journal article by Michael E. Mann and co-authors. These claims were investigated by the US National Academy of Sciences, which issued a report in 2006 that affirmed the hockey stick graph while acknowledging statistical shortcomings of the original Mann et al. analysis. A 2006 report to Congress by a team of statisticians led by Edward Wegman found the criticisms of the hockey stick graph by McIntyre and McKitrick to be "valid and compelling."

ClimateAudit.org

McIntyre's blog has as a recurrent topic the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at the climatology blog RealClimate. An earlier website, Climate2003, provided additional information for papers co-written by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, including raw data and source code. Climate Audit was co-winner of a 2007 Weblog Award for "Best Science Blog", receiving 20,000 votes in the online poll.

Auditing

In 2007, McIntyre started auditing the various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the urban heat island effect. He discovered a discontinuity in some U.S. records in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and "thank[ed] Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000". The adjustment caused the average temperatures for the continental United States to be reduced about 0.15 °C during the years 2000-2006. Changes in other portions of the record did not exceed 0.03 °C; it made no discernible difference to the global mean anomalies.

McIntyre later commented:

My original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of “fixing” bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming. According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and [United States Historical Climate Network]) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined.

The instrumental temperature record

McIntyre has supported the efforts of Anthony Watts and SurfaceStations.org to document the quality of weather stations in the US. McIntyre was investigating the ability of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) software to fix data problems due to poor quality stations.

Role in the Climatic Research Unit controversy

See also: Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident‎

Colby Cosh, writing for Maclean's magazine, believes McIntyre's criticisms of climate science are at the heart of the controversy over the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident in November-December 2009. McIntyre is mentioned over 100 times in the hacked emails. In the emails, one climate researcher dismisses him as a "bozo", and others speculate over his funding, and argue about whether to ignore or counterattack him—although, according to Cosh, some unnamed scientists acknowledge that his criticisms have merit.

The Associated Press analysis of the CRU e-mails stated: "Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him. McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. 'Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith,' he said."

See also

• Global warming controversy
• Instrumental temperature record#Calculating the global temperature

External links

McIntyre's websites and publications

• ClimateAudit — McIntyre's blog
• Publications by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (at McKitrick's site).
• Article detailing the Wegman and North Reports with links and summarization
• McIntyre's biography (.doc file, last updated in 2003)
• The M&M Project: Replication Analysis of the Mann et al. Hockey Stick at McKitrick's website
• "The IPCC, the 'Hockey Stick' Curve, and the Illusion of Experience by McIntyre and McKitrick, Marshall Institute, 18 November 2003
• Publications by McIntyre at the Marshall Institute's website
• McIntyre's interview on BBC

Articles about McIntyre and responses

• "Kyoto Protocol Based on Flawed Statistics" by Marcel Crok with English translation by Angela den Tex, Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, February, 2005
• "In Climate Debate, The 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off", Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2005
• "Global-Warming Skeptics under Fire", Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2005.
• Video of talk by Gerald North (head of the NRC committee) regarding their report.
• Global warming? Look at the numbers by Lorne Gunther, National Post, August 13, 2007.
• Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder by Daniel Dale, The Toronto Star, August 14, 2007.
• Nasa climate change error spotted by blogger, Natalie Paris, Daily Telegraph, 16 August 2007.
• New York Times article on the NAS report
• The National Academy of Sciences report: Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (2006)
• "Revenge of the Climate Laymen", Wall Street Journal Europe article on McIntyre & Climate Audit, November 18, 2009.
• "Climate science's PR disaster", Margaret Wente's column for November 30, 2009, The Globe and Mail
• Profile of McIntyre at the Toronto Star, December 12, 2009