Ross McKitrick

Ross McKitrick is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis. McKitrick gained his doctorate in economics 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, Ontario. He has been an Associate Professor since 2001 and since 2002 Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market public policy think tank.

McKitrick co-wrote the 2002 book Taken By Storm with Christopher Essex. It was a runner-up to the Donner Prize 2002 as the Best Canadian Book on Public Policy. He has since published further research on palaeoclimate reconstruction. Some of these papers were cowritten with Stephen McIntyre, including "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance." He continues to publish research in economics, usually in the area of environmental policy.

Publications

McKitrick has (1997-2005) authored or coauthored 16 peer-reviewed articles in economics journals, and four in science journals (as well as two in Energy and Environment). Outside academia, in addition to co-authoring Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming he has also written a number of opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines, many of which have also written about McKitrick. In his latest work, he is lead author of "Stationarity of Global Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions:Implications for Global Warming Scenarios." along with Mark Strazicich.

Global warming related activities

Being active in the field of environmental economics and policy analysis, in addition to his role as a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and co-authorship of Taken By Storm, has involved McKitrick in the debate over the subject of global warming. Below are some of the more contentious issues that have received attention, on a national scale in the mass media or involving government agencies and panels.

Criticism of Mann et al 1998

Main article: Hockey stick controversy

From a statistical perspecitve, McKitrick and McIntyre (MM) in the 2003 paper "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) "Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series" examined the Michael E. Mann, Ray Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (MBH) 1998 paper, "Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries." As a result Mann et al. published a corrigendum[2]. McIntyre and McKitrick say the corrigendum failed to address some of their methodological concerns, and the two claim that Nature responded to their concerns about the corrigendum in an unsatisfactory way.[3]

A panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) endorsed, with a few reservations, the MBH paper. One of the panel's reservations was that "...a statistical method used in the 1999 study was not the best and that some uncertainties in the work 'have been underestimated,' and it particularly challenged the authors' conclusion that the decade of the 1990s was probably the warmest in a millennium." However, they also said that "'an array of evidence' supported the main thrust of the paper", leading to even more confusion on the situation.[4]

A subsequent investigation, undertaken at the request of Republican Senator Joe Barton and headed by prominent statistics professor and NAS member Edward Wegman of George Mason University [5] supported the statistical criticisms by McKitrick and McIntyre, saying "It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the paper. We found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling."[6]

The subject of the meaning and impact of the issue is still being debated in multiple blogs on the Internet.

Criticism of a McKitrick paper

Tim Lambert, a a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales, has criticized McKitrick's own data analysis in a 2004 paper with Patrick Michaels. Among other things, Lambert found a bug in which the input to a cosine function was in degrees instead of radians. The authors have acknowledged the error and published a corrected version. They claimed that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected. McKitrick has stated that Lambert was only able to spot the bug because the data and code used in the paper were put on a website upon publication,[7] as is usual in econometrics but rare in the natural sciences.

Does a global temperature exist?

In 2007 McKitrick was co-author on a paper in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics arguing that "Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming".[8]

T3 Tax proposal

In June 2007, McKitrick suggested "a climate policy that could, in principle, get equal support from all sides": a "T3" tax on carbon emissions tied to a three-year moving average of tropospheric temperature change, starting at a low rate. If global warming occurs, the tax would climb quickly and "could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources."[9]

External links

• McKitrick's home page
• Website for Taken by Storm
• The Wegman and North Reports for Newbies, by Steve McIntyre
• Ross McKitrick, Asking the Right Questions About Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, Fraser Forum, February 2002
• What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?, by Ross McKitrick
• "Statisticians Blast Hockey Stick", an Op-Ed by McKitrick and McIntyre in the National Post, August 23, 2006