The Hockey Stick Graph: Scientific Malfeasance?

Ross McKitrick is professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Guelph. He has been studying the arguments in favour of global warming for well over a decade. He says the data used to create arguments for global warming such as the Mann "hockey stick" are either "flawed, misleading or simply non-existent."

McKitrick has written an impressive opinion piece in Friday's Financial Post.

The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.

And this:

I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws. Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again.

I like that last bit. Read the whole thing here.