MOST scientific sceptics have been dismissive of the various reconstructions of temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest year of the past millennium. Our case has been significantly bolstered over the last week with statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting access to data used by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Phil Jones to support the idea that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures over the last hundred years – the infamous hockey stick graph.
Mr McIntyre’s analysis of the data – which he had been asking for since 2003 – suggests that scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the Hadley Centre associated with the UK Met. Office have been using only a small subset of the available data to make their claims that recent years have been the hottest of the last millennium. When the entire data set is used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears completely. [1]
Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics behind the ‘hockey stick’. But scientists at the Climate Research Centre (CRU), in particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an artifact of the methodology used – as claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these same scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data. Recently they were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – a journal which unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it enforces. [Read more…] about Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.