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That danged hockey stick makes another appearance

September 8th, 2008 2 comments

Hockey-stick artist Michael Mann is back, along with the rest of his team from Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, with his hockey stick, this time supported by more proxy data.  

Although McIntyre and McKitrick had some valid criticisms of Mann’s initial work, the National Academy of Sciences and others have essentially supported him, both with respect to the blade of the hockey stick and the longer-term handle.

Unlike Mann’s initial paper, which was based on temperature reconstructions from tree-ring data, Mann’s latest version of the “hockey stick” has been upgraded by a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes and recently updated instrumental data, and has been extended to cover temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 1,700 years.  

The results?  As the Christian Science Monitor notes:  

And the graph illustrating the take-home message? It still looks a lot like the much-battered, but still rink-ready stick of 1998. Today the handle reaches further back and it’s a bit more gnarly. But the blade at the business end tells the same story.

The latest hockey stick paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (the revised hockey stick chart appears as Figure 3).

The relative sharpness of the hockey stick blade is even more apparent in a 10,000 year view of temperature changes.

A discussion of the relevance of the temperature reconstructions is here.

Does Cordato favor carbon taxes? McKitrick’s "innovative carbon tax proposal"

December 10th, 2007 4 comments

[Snark level – medium] 

[update below]

Austrian economist Roy Cordato is playing at collectivism by bringing favorable attention to Ross McKitrick’s “T3” carbon tax proposal on Cordato’s blog, Environment NC (hosted by the John Locke Foundation, where he is Vice President for Research & Resident Scholar). 

Says Dr. Cordato:

“Canadian economist/statistician Ross McKitrick has a good article in the Christian Science Monitor describing his innovative carbon tax proposal. The tax is tied to actual temperatures as measured in the tropical troposphere. It is an interesting approach in that it does not involve betting on the science coming from either side of debate.”

 McKitrick raised his intriguing carbon tax idea six months ago at the Financial Post

Steve McIntyre put the proposal up at the Climate Audit blog – in a post which is apparently still open for comment.  This tax was discussed on ealier on the Mises blog here. Some comments by yours truly litter both sites.

I’m not sure Dr. Cordato fully understands what he is up to – give the misanthropic enviros, “alternative energy” rent-seekers and their political gatekeepers an inch, and they’re guaranteed to take a mile.  If McKitrick’s idea gets any play at all, it’s probably to the effect that, despite his criticism of some scientific work, McKitrick thinks that climate change IS something to be taken seriously and that TAXES are an appropriate policy tool. 

Dr. Cordato seems determined to help move the Overton Window further in the direction of the Warmers.  Is he intentionally yielding ground?

[update:

I note that Austrians who oppose environmental measures that involve the coercive machnery of the state would probably dismiss such measures as “faux environmentalism”.  Here, the T3 proposal of McKitrick and favorably commented on by Dr. Cordato is an example of such “faux environmentalism”.  I guess that makes ME the “faux environmentalist” for drawing our dear readers’ attention to Dr. Cordato’s post.  My humble apologies!]

Categories: climate, cordato, enviros, mcintyre, mckitrick, tax Tags: