Ross McKitrick

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Ross McKitrick is a Canadian environmental economist and global warming skeptic, best known for his statistical reviews of temperature record reconstructions that purport to show dramatic recent global warming relative to history. 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 free-market policy think tank that opposes the Kyoto Protocol.

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 [2]).

McKitrick co-wrote the 2002 book Taken By Storm [3] 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.

McKitrick 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", Geophysical Research Letters Vol 32(3), Feb 12 2005, which was nominated as a journal highlight [4]. He continues to publish research in economics, often in the area of environmental policy.

1 Criticism of IPCC views on global warming
2 Criticism of Mann et al
3 Criticism of a McKitrick paper
4 Does a global temperature exist?
5 Publications
6 External links

[edit] Criticism of IPCC views on global warming

A Tech Central Station article said

"McKitrick, an economist, was initially piqued by what several climatologists had noted as a curiosity in both the U.N. and satellite records: statistically speaking, the greater the GDP of a nation, the more it warms. The research showed that somewhere around one-half of the warming in the U.N. surface record was explained by economic factors, which can be changes in land use, quality of instrumentation, or upkeep of records. This worldwide study added fuel to a fire started a year earlier by the University of Maryland's Eugenia Kalnay, who calculated a similar 50 percent bias due to economic factors in the U.S. records." [5]

This study was shown to contain errors. Tim Lambert observed

"His analysis included a variable cosablat, which was supposed to be the cosine of absolute latitude. Trouble is, the software he used expects angles to be measured in radians, his data has latitude in degrees, and he didn’t convert from degrees to radians. Consequently, every single number he calculates is wrong. I corrected the error and reran his regressions. The sizes of the “economic” signals were greatly reduced. They no longer “explain” half of the surface warming trend. Removing the effects of the economic variables now just reduces the warming trend for his sample from 0.27 degrees/decade to 0.18 degrees/decade, which is very close to the warming trend for the whole globe. "[6]

[edit] Criticism of Mann et al

McKitrick and McIntyre have reviewed work by Michael Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH), especially their 1998 paper, "Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries", (Nature Vol. 392, pp. 779–787) with the result Mann et al. published a corrigendum (on July 1, 2004) which does not affect the previously published results. M&M disagree and say it failed to address some of their methodological concerns [7]. However, Nature rejected M&M's submission [8].

[edit] Criticism of a McKitrick paper

Tim Lambert has 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 claim that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected. Yet, after Lambert ran the regressions using the correct angle measurments, he claimed to have found that they "no longer 'explain' half of the surface warming trend McKitrick has pointed out." McKitrick also states 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, as is usual in econometrics but rare in climate reconstructions.

[edit] Does a global temperature exist?

In 2007 McKitrick was co-author on a paper in 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 [9]. The paper has been praised by some [10] and disputed by others [11], [12].

[edit] Publications

McKitrick has (1997-2005) authored or coauthored 16 peer-reviewed articles in economics journals, and four in science journals [13] (as well as two in Energy and Environment, which does not appear in the ISI citation index). Outside academia, in addition to co-authoring Taken by Storm he has also written a number of opinion pieces in newspapers.