Stephen McIntyre (born
c. 1947) is a Canadian mining exploration company director, a former
minerals prospector and semi-retired mining consultant whose work has included
statistical analysis. He is best known as the founder and editor of
Climate Audit
Climate Audit is a blog founded in 2005 by Steve McIntyre.
In November 2009 journalist Andrew Revkin described it in ''The New York Times'' as "a popular skeptics’ blog" run by McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant. In 2010, a ''Nat ...
, a
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is most prominent as a critic of the
temperature record of the past 1000 years
The temperature record of the last 2,000 years is reconstructed using data from climate proxy records in conjunction with the modern instrumental temperature record which only covers the last 170 years at a global scale. Large-scale reconstructi ...
and the data quality of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is a laboratory in the Earth Sciences Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center affiliated with the Columbia University Earth Institute.
The institute is located at Columbia University in N ...
. He is known in particular for his statistical critique, with economist
Ross McKitrick
Ross McKitrick (born 1965) is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis. He is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.
McKitrick has authored wor ...
, of the
hockey stick graph which shows that the increase in late 20th century global temperatures is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years.
Early life and education
McIntyre, a native of Ontario, attended the
University of Toronto Schools
University of Toronto Schools (UTS) is an independent secondary day school affiliated with the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The school follows a specialized academic curriculum, and admission is determined by competitive ex ...
, a
college-preparatory school
A college-preparatory school (usually shortened to preparatory school or prep school) is a type of secondary school. The term refers to public, private independent or parochial schools primarily designed to prepare students for higher educatio ...
in Toronto, finishing first in the national high school mathematics competition of 1965.
He went on to study
mathematics at the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...
and graduated with a
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...
degree in 1969. McIntyre then obtained a
Commonwealth Scholarship
The Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (CSFP) is an international programme under which Commonwealth governments offer scholarships and fellowships to citizens of other Commonwealth countries.
History
The plan was originally proposed b ...
to read
philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College (formally, Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford; informally abbreviated as Corpus or CCC) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1517, it is the 12t ...
, graduating in 1971.
Although he was offered a graduate scholarship, McIntyre decided not to pursue studies in mathematical economics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
.
Career
McIntyre started work for
Noranda and worked for 30 years in the mineral business,
the last part of these in the hard-rock mineral exploration as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He was the president and founder of Northwest Exploration Company Limited and a director of its parent company, Northwest Explorations Inc. When Northwest Explorations Inc. was taken over in 1998 by CGX Resources Inc. to form the oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy Inc., McIntyre ceased being a director. McIntyre was a strategic advisor for CGX in 2000 through 2003. McIntyre says that during his career his skills in
statistical analysis enabled him to analyse mineral prospecting data and out-bet his rivals.
[Pearce, p. 14.] He also occasionally worked as a government policy analyst, including a period at the federal Anti-Inflation Board.
Prior to 2003 he was an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies. He retired from full-time work, but still sometimes engaged in mining consultancy.
He is an active
squash
Squash may refer to:
Sports
* Squash (sport), the high-speed racquet sport also known as squash racquets
* Squash (professional wrestling), an extremely one-sided match in professional wrestling
* Squash tennis, a game similar to squash but pla ...
player and once won a gold medal in the
World Masters Games
The World Masters Games is an international multi-sport event held every four years which, in terms of competitor numbers, has developed into the largest of its kind. Governed by the International Masters Games Association (IMGA), the World Mas ...
in squash doubles.
In April 2011, Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc. of
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
,
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...
announced the appointment of McIntyre to their board of directors and then later to chairman in June 2011. In September 2011, McIntyre was appointed to the board of directors of Augen Gold Corp., which was shortly acquired by Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc. in November 2011. In October 2011, McIntyre was appointed to the board of directors of Southeast Asia Mining Corp. and later resigned in May 2012. Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc. was acquired by
Iamgold Corporation in June 2012.
Hockey stick graph controversy
In 2002, McIntyre became interested in climate science after a leaflet from the Canadian government warning of the dangers of global warming was delivered to his residence. McIntyre states that he noticed discrepancies in climate science papers that reminded him of the false prospectus that had duped investors involved in the
Bre-X
Bre-X was a group of companies in Canada. Bre-X Minerals Ltd., a major part of Bre-X based in Calgary, was involved in a major gold mining scandal when it reported it was sitting on an enormous gold deposit at , East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Bre-X b ...
gold mining scandal.
The Canadian government pamphlets were based on the
IPCC Third Assessment Report
The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), ''Climate Change 2001'', is an assessment of available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change by the IPCC. Statements of the IPCC or information from the TAR are often used as a referenc ...
section, which prominently displayed the
hockey stick graph based on the 1999 reconstruction by
Mann,
Bradley
Bradley is an English surname derived from a place name meaning "broad wood" or "broad meadow" in Old English.
Like many English surnames Bradley can also be used as a given name and as such has become popular.
It is also an Anglicisation of t ...
and
Hughes
Hughes may refer to:
People
* Hughes (surname)
* Hughes (given name)
Places Antarctica
* Hughes Range (Antarctica), Ross Dependency
* Mount Hughes, Oates Land
* Hughes Basin, Oates Land
* Hughes Bay, Graham Land
* Hughes Bluff, Victoria La ...
(MBH99). McIntyre began studying Mann's research, which had produced the graph, and met
Ross McKitrick
Ross McKitrick (born 1965) is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis. He is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.
McKitrick has authored wor ...
.
McIntyre has remarked on how his suspicions of this graph were aroused: "In financial circles, we talk about a hockey stick curve when some investor presents you with a nice, steep curve in the hope of palming something off on you."
McIntyre & McKittrick's papers were cited by Senator
Jim Inhofe
James Mountain Inhofe ( ; born November 17, 1934) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Oklahoma, a seat he was first elected to in 1994. A member of the Republican Party, he chaired the U.S. Senate Committ ...
and Representative
Joe Barton
Joseph Linus Barton (born September 15, 1949) is an American politician who represented in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1985 to 2019. The district included Arlington, part of Fort Worth, and several small towns and rural areas south ...
to support their political criticisms of the MBH studies, and Representative
Sherwood Boehlert
Sherwood Louis Boehlert (September 28, 1936September 20, 2021) was an American politician from New York. He represented a large swath of central New York in the United States House of Representatives from 1983 until 2007. Boehlert, a Republican, ...
requested the
National Academy of Sciences in the United States to arrange an investigation. The outcome was the
North Report The North Report was a 2006 report evaluating reconstructions of the Temperature record of the past 1000 years, temperature record of the past two millennia, providing an overview of the state of the science and the implications for understanding of ...
, published in 2006, which endorsed the MBH studies with a few reservations. The principal component analysis method criticised by McIntyre & McKittrick had a small tendency to bias results so was not recommended, but it had little influence on the final reconstructions, and other methods produced similar results.
ClimateAudit.org
McIntyre's blog has as a recurrent topic the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at the climatology blog
RealClimate
''RealClimate'' is a commentary site (blog) on climatology. The site's contributors include climate scientists whose goal is to provide a response to developing stories and a context they feel is sometimes missing in mainstream commentary o ...
. An earlier website, Climate2003, provided additional information for papers co-written by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, including raw data and source code, and comments by McIntyre. On 26 October 2004 McIntyre commented on climate2003.com, "Maybe I'll start blogging some odds and ends that I'm working on. I'm going to post up some more observations on some of the blog criticisms." On 1 December Mann and nine other scientists launched the RealClimate website. On 2 February McIntyre set up his Climate Audit blog, having found difficulties with posting comments on the climate2003.com layout.
Climate Audit was co-winner of a 2007
Weblog Award for "Best Science Blog", receiving 20,000 votes in the online poll.
Auditing
Stephen McIntyre has been highlighted by the press, including ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
''.
In 2007, McIntyre started auditing the various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the
urban heat island
An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparen ...
effect. He discovered a discontinuity in some U.S. records in the
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is a laboratory in the Earth Sciences Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center affiliated with the Columbia University Earth Institute.
The institute is located at Columbia University in N ...
(GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and thanked McIntyre for "bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000". The adjustment reduced the average temperatures for the continental United States by about 0.15
°C
The degree Celsius is the unit of temperature on the Celsius scale (originally known as the centigrade scale outside Sweden), one of two temperature scales used in the International System of Units (SI), the other being the Kelvin scale. The ...
during the years 2000-2006. Changes in other portions of the record did not exceed 0.03 °C; it made no discernible difference to the global mean anomalies.
McIntyre later commented:
My original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of "fixing" bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming. According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined.
Role in the Climatic Research Unit controversy
Colby Cosh, writing for ''
Maclean's
''Maclean's'', founded in 1905, is a Canadian news magazine reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events. Its founder, publisher John Bayne Maclean, established the magazine to provide a uniquely Canadian persp ...
'' magazine, believes McIntyre's criticisms of
climate science
Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of stu ...
are at the heart of the
Climatic Research Unit email controversy
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as "Climategate") began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousa ...
in November–December 2009. McIntyre is mentioned over 100 times in the hacked
Climatic Research Unit
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
With a staff of some thirty research scientists and s ...
(CRU) emails. In the emails, one climate researcher dismisses him as a "bozo". Others speculate over his funding, and argue about whether to ignore or counterattack him, although, according to Cosh, some unnamed scientists acknowledge that his criticisms have merit.
The
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...
analysis of the CRU e-mails stated: "Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him. McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. 'Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith,' he said." The independent Science Assessment Panel's chair,
Lord Oxburgh, said at a press conference that the repeated Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by Steve McIntyre and others could have amounted to a campaign of harassment, and the issue of how FOI laws should be applied in an academic context remained unresolved.
In May 2010
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
wrote that McIntyre "arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit — but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input." In March McIntyre had submitted evidence to the Independent Climate Change Email Review (chaired by Sir
), and points he raised were discussed in the Review report published on 7 July 2010. ''
'' named McIntyre as 32nd of its "50 People Who Matter 2010", citing his role in the email controversy. It said "The influence might not be positive, but there's no doubt he has shaped the debate."
nbsp;— McIntyre's compilation of Papers, Presentations etc.
(at McKitrick's site).
by Marcel Crok with English translation by Angela den Tex, ''Natuurwetenschap & Techniek'', February 2005
'', 26 October 2005.
(head of the NRC committee) regarding their report.
by Lorne Gunther, ''National Post'', 13 August 2007.
'', 14 August 2007.
'', 16 August 2007.
'' Europe article on McIntyre & Climate Audit, 18 November 2009.
by Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter, ''Spiegel Online International'', 1 April 2010.
{{DEFAULTSORT:McIntyre, Stephen