Talk:Stephen McIntyre

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This article was nominated for deletion on 2 Apr 2005. The result of the discussion was Keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.

There is a proposed Stephen McIntyre/new_draft of the article.

Contents 1 Changes made 28-Mar-2006 2 Changes made 16th April 2006 3 Changes made 06-Jun-2006 4 Graduate Degree 5 "Largely or wholely" 6 Please note WP:BLP 7 Real Climate

[edit] Changes made 28-Mar-2006

I added a sentence about why SM started ClimateAudit, User:William M. Connolley edited my work and now I've edited his. Let me explain my last edit.

• In an article about a Canadian, we should probably use North American spelling ("paleo") instead of English ("palaeo"). (In Australia, we follow British spelling, but I'd never seen the word (prefix?) spelt that way before.) How small a nit is that to pick?
• I'd italicised the blog names in my first edit today; I've "de-italicised" them because they are links and should look like links.
• WMC must have not noticed that he deleted the link to RealClimate; I've made the other occurrence into a link.
• I felt we should say something about why SM would care about RealClimate, so I've said that it's "a blog run by Michael Mann and other scientists", seeing we've mentioned Prof Mann earlier.
• I've changed "McIntyre asserts in a blog comment" to "McIntyre has stated", which is shorter and (IMO) less hostile.

As always, edits and comments are welcome. —Chris Chittleborough 23:41, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes made 16th April 2006

Additional changes made to this article:

• The fact that Energy and Environment is "a forum where climate skeptics publish studies that cannot pass scientific peer-review" is clearly a viewpoint expressed by Environmental Science and Technology, not a fact, and should be expressed as such.
• The GRL article is far more noteworthy than the E&E article, and should be included, plus the fact it was nominated as a journal highlight deserves a mention.
• Not a change, but my opinion: McIntyre's papers are very technical in their nature, and the ES&T response is really more an opinion piece. It would be nice to represent the counter technical viewpoint in the main text, rather than the opinion piece. I haven't made a change in this respect because I'm not the best person to do it, I kind of feel it could be better though. Just a thought. S. 16 April 2006

[edit] Changes made 06-Jun-2006

Added two external links to realclimate.org criticism of McIntyre's 2003 & 2004 papers. C Wu

[edit] Graduate Degree

The fact that McIntyre doesn't have a graduate degree was added to the article, with the explanation that "I think since he is known for commenting in a technical way on scientific matters, the lack of an advanced degree is worth explictly noting". I respectfully disagree. Should An Inconvenient Truth include the fact that Gore doesn't have an advanced degree (he has a BA)? Should Mann state that he is not a statistician, since his most well known paper was largely an exercise in the statistical handling of existing data? I'm certain that both of these would be deleted as POV, as the implication is that this makes their views somewhat inferior. --Spiffy sperry 11:18, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Spiffy sperry, Al Gore doesn't claim to be making a technical contribution to the debate; he is an expositor not a scientist. Michael Mann has a PhD from Yale in Geology and Geophysics; he doubtless had serious training in statistics and applied math as part of that. McIntyre's CV mentions coursework in group theory, algebraic topology and differential manifolds (areas which have no connection to statistics). I'm guessing he must have taken at least a course or two in analysis (the area of pure math closest to statistics), but the point is he has very little formal training that is directly relevant. Ultimately, of course his arguments stand or fall (radians vs. degrees anyone?) on their own merits, but still his qualifications are highly unusual for someone in McIntyre's situation and therefore worthy of note. Crust 13:46, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

First, McIntyre doesn't claim to have a graduate degree. So to mention it in this way is POV. (Although it is ambiguous. I think it's interesting that someone without an advanced degree can find errors in a peer-reviewed paper, but that's POV too.) Second, I am not one to assume what Mann knows about statistics. [1] Third, your remark about radians vs. degrees reveals alot. You do know that McIntyre had nothing to do with that, don't you?[2] Finally, you are correct that McIntyre's arguments stand or fall on their own, and that's why there's no need to point out that he doesn't have a graduate degree or a PhD or whatever. It's clear by listing only a BS that he doesn't have a graduate degree. --Spiffy sperry 23:52, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Spiffy sperry, no one is stating or implying that McIntyre lied and claimed to have a graduate degree. Nice try, though. The point is just that McIntyre's qualifications are highly unusual for someone contributing to the scientific debate and therefore worth pointing out. On my parenthetical snark about the degrees v. radians error, it looks like that was actually in a paper by McIntyre's coauthor McKitrick but not McIntyre himself (McKitrick and Michaels not McKitrick and McIntyre);[3] my mistake. If you want to start a debate about what Mann might or might not have meant by the "I am not a statistician" quote you link to, I would think the appropriate place would be the Mann talk page. Since you don't reply on Gore, I assume we both agree that Gore is not a scientist and that example isn't relevant in this context. Glad we agree on something. ;) Crust 14:41, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Largely or wholely"

I don't think it's fair to say that the NAS and the House Committee "largely or wholely" supported M&M. I think it's fair to say that the NAS actually acknowledged some of M&M's technical criticisms, but concluded that the hockey stick graph was largely correct, at least back to AD 900. "Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than at any period of comparable length since AD 900."

As for the House Committee: there was a report commissioned by the committee written by a statistician named Wegman, but there was also a great deal of testimony taken, and some of it strongly disputed the conclusions of Wegman's report. It would be less POV to say that Wegman's report supported M&M, but not the House Committee (which in any case is not a relevant body to participate in a technical debate). :::Mitch Golden

The NAS report upheld just about every criticism M&M had of MBH. As for back to AD 900, the report only said that it was "plausible" that the hockey stick was correct for the Northern Hemisphere. Additionally, M&M did not claim that the hockey stick itself was wrong; what they claimed is that the derivation of the hockey stick was wrong (i.e. perhaps another, correct, derivation of the stick exists).

Some critics of McIntyre have claimed that M&M proposed temperature reconstructions of their own. This is false, as McIntyre has said several times on his blog. The Wegman report also makes this point (n.8, p.48): "We comment that [M&M] were attempting to draw attention to the deficiencies of the MBH98-type methodologies and were not trying to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstructions". (The article should probably make this point clear.)

Regarding testimony before the subcommittee, the transcripts don't seem to be available yet. I have seen summaries, and also watched part of the second hearing on TV (CSPAN). I don't know of anything that disputed Wegman's confirmation of the statistical problems with MBH that were claimed by McIntyre, and I don't believe there was anything. Other aspects of the report were disputed, but not even Michael Mann stood by the original MBH98/MBH99 analyses. (Mann did stand by the MBH conclusions, claiming other "independent" studies confirmed the hockey stick; Wegman disputed their independence; ....)

As for what the Wegman report should be called, I really just copied this term from the article Hockey stick graph. I have no real view on what the report should be called (most people seem to refer to it as "the Wegman report", at least colloquially). I think that the two articles should use the same term. And, I see that using the same logic, this article should use the term NRC rather than NAS; okay, that's fixed.

—Daphne A 02:16, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I too disagree. Also the NRC and Wegman reports were rather different. William M. Connolley 20:04, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

The Wegman report wholly supported McIntyre. If you "disagree", please give evidence. If you think that the NRC report did not largely support McIntyre, please state why. Here is a quote from Wegman at the hearings:

“Where we have commonality, I believe our report and the [NRC] panel essentially agree.…We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the ‘centering’ issue off the table. [Mann’s] decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics…

—Daphne A 20:20, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

First, lets be clear that the NRC report has far greater credibility than the Wegman report - the latter did indeed largely parrot M&M's criticisms (this http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/house06/RitsonWegmanRequests.pdf is also rather interesting...). However the NRC report didn't. For example the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al or http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2006/06/nrc_report_not_as_interesting.php for Nature and Science William M. Connolley 09:28, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that citing these blogs is very useful. These are advocacy positions, and I think that there is any need to cite blogs or statements outside the peer-reviewed literature.

Look again. I'm not citing the second blog (which is my own; I assume that was obvious). I'm using it to point to comments in Nature and Science, which I hope are respectable enough for you, albeit they are rather minor journals ;-). Pielke is also a respectable figure, and by no means in the Mann camp William M. Connolley 21:00, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

My concern is that Daphne A appears to be overstating what the NAS report said. The relevant discussion from the NRC report is on page 87 ( see http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309102251/html/87.html ). Reading page 87, I get the impression that the NAS is also accepting the points made by Huybers, who is saying ( see http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Comment.pdf ) that M&M have exaggerated the importance of the issue that they are bringing up.

As I read it, they acknowledge the technical points made by M&M, but it doesn't seem that it's fair to say that they "largely or wholely" endorse them. The specific quotes Daphne A is using don't address the *specific* points at issue, even if the NAS found Mann et al to be entirely wrong, that doesn't necessarily imply that they are endorsing M&M.

OK, I agree with you there. They acknolwedge the points, but say they don't matter too much (which is also Manns position) William M. Connolley 21:00, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

At any rate, the NRC showed several other hockey-stick graphs in their introduction, ( see http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309102251/html/2.html ) and the relevant quote from the report, it seems to me is "The basic conclusion of Mann et al (1998,1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere was unprecidented during the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been confirmed by an array of evidence..." I believe that it is seriously misquoting them if you want to use the NRC report to call the scientific validity of the hockey-stick into question.

All that being said, I don't believe that the current discussion on the page, characterizing the NRC as "ambiguous", is acceptable either. They did accept the technical points made by M&M, and they encourage greater caution in the use of the data, but they left the hockey-stick intact.

Ambiguous was my word. Its a short word to carry a lot of meaning... I'd be happy for you to rephrase/expand on it William M. Connolley 21:00, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Lastly, regarding Wegman - I believe it's fine to say that his report was commissioned by Congress, but to give it the imprimatur of Congress is incorrect. Congress was not in any position to review his work, and so it's properly characterized as the Wegman Report, commissioned by Congress. — Mitch Golden Sept 4, 2006

Or simply commissioned by Barton? In practice it was, whatever official designation it may have William M. Connolley 21:00, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I have greatly expanded the discussion on the two reports. I feel that it is appropriate to have this discussion here, since the M&M paper and its validity is really McIntyre's main claim to have an entry in Wikipedia at all. I believe I have correctly summarized the conclusions both papers had with respect to the M&M work.

I have included a link to Gerald North's talk at Texas A&M. It is very informative to the attitude of the NRC report. (I don't recall where I found it.) I am concerned that this video may eventually go away, but perhaps we can find a written, and more permanent version of it.

Hopefully, this is acceptable to everyone.

— Mitch Golden Sept 4, 2006

Seems fair. According to the report, though [4] Boehlert commissioned it William M. Connolley 08:22, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Interesting, though, that in the video, Gerald North claims that Barton agreed with Boehlert to have the report commissioned. I will leave it as it is, it's not important. — Mitch Golden Sept 5, 2006

Presumably the written report itself trumps video William M. Connolley 15:44, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I changed the paragraph to indicate who Boehlert and Barton are. — Mitch Golden Sept 5, 2006

[edit] Please note WP:BLP

Please note that Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons applies to this article, and is a policy (not just a guideline). Cheers, CWC(talk) 01:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Real Climate

About the link; it is not external! We need to make a reference to it because the subject of the article himself stated that there were attacks coming from realclimate. Now, the link is to a wikipedia article about a blog (that meets the Wikipedia standards), but not to a blog. Thus, by adding the link we simply give the reader better ability to compile relevant information that is already in wikipedia. Therefore, there is no problem. Brusegadi 18:12, 9 September 2006 (UTC)