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. Environmental economics is a subfield of economics concerned with environmental issues (other usages of the term are not uncommon). ... The global warming controversy is a debate about the causes of the increase in global average air temperature since the mid-1800s[1], the prediction of additional warming, and the consequences of that warming. ... The temperature record shows the fluctuations of the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans through various spans of time. ... Global mean surface temperatures 1850 to 2006 Mean surface temperature anomalies during the period 1995 to 2004 with respect to the average temperatures from 1940 to 1980 Global warming is the observed increase in the average temperature of the Earths atmosphere and oceans in recent decades and the projected... The University of Guelph is a medium-sized university located in Guelph, Ontario, established in 1964. ... Motto: Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet (Latin: Loyal she began, loyal she remains) Official languages English (de facto) Capital Toronto Largest city Toronto Lieutenant-Governor James K. Bartleman Premier Dalton McGuinty (Liberal) Parliamentary representation  - House seats  - Senate seats 106 24 Area Total  - Land  - Water  (% of total)  Ranked 4th 1,076... The Fraser Institute is a libertarian think tank based in Canada. ... This article is about the institution. ... Kyoto Protocol Opened for signature December 11, 1997 in Kyoto, Japan Entered into force February 16, 2005. ...

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]). 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Canadian public university with its main campus located at Point Grey in the unincorporated Electoral Area A, immediately west of Vancouver, British Columbia. ... The University of Guelph is a medium-sized university located in Guelph, Ontario, established in 1964. ...

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. Taken By Storm is a book about the global warming controversy by by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick. ... The Donner Prize is an award given annually for books considered excellent in regards to the writing of Canadian public policy. ...

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. The temperature record of the past 1000 years describes the reconstruction of temperature for the last 1000 years on the Northern Hemisphere. ... Stephen McIntyre is a former mining executive; prior to 2003 he has been officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies. ... Geophysical Research Letters is one of the scientific magazines dedicated to specialized aspects of geophysics, geology, climate science, and related disciplines. ...

Criticism of IPCC views on global warming

A Tech Central Station article said Tech Central Station (TCS) describes itself as a website where free markets meet technology. TCS publishes daily original commentary, news and analysis, focused on economics, business, foreign affairs, technology, science, environment, trade, and culture. ...

• "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]

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]. Michael Mann Michael Mann is a well-known climatologist, author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. ... Nature is one of the most prominent scientific journals, first published on 4 November 1869. ... July 1 is the 182nd day of the year (183rd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 183 days remaining. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

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. Data analysis is the act of transforming data with the aim of extracting useful information and facilitating conclusions. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Patrick J. Michaels (born February 15, 1950) is a Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. ... A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e. ... In mathematics, the trigonometric functions are functions of an angle, important when studying triangles and modeling periodic phenomena. ... Some common angles, measured in radians. ... Econometrics literally means economic measurement. It is a combination of mathematical economics and statistics. ...

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].

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. Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ... The journal Energy and Environment is a social science journal published by Multi-Science. ... The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. ...

External links

• McKitrick's home page and publications list
• Website for Taken by Storm
• "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) "Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series"
• Ross McKitrick, Asking the Right Questions About Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, Fraser Forum, February 2002
• How the Wall Street Journal and Rep. Barton celebrated a global-warming skeptic, Paul D. Thacker, Environmental Science & Technology (critical of McKitrick and Steven McIntyre)
• Thacker’s “Sources” (Response to Thacker from Steven McIntyre, disputing validity of quotes and sources)
• Sourcewatch entry for Ross McKitrick