Barbara Hollingsworth
Washington Examiner
8/18/2010
An academic paper soon to be published in the Annals of Applied Statistics by Northwestern statistician Blakeley McShane and the University of Pennsylvania’s Abraham Wyner completely demolishes Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph, cited by environmental activists as “scientific proof” of man-made global warming.
Statistician William Briggs has the best (and funniest) explanation of the pair’s devastating analysis (“A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstruction of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?”): “Statistically speaking, McShane and Wyner emulate [Gordie] Howe by applying a forearm check to the throat to Mann’s proxy reconstruction of temperature, cracking his hockey stick irreparably.” Briggs goes on to explain how the paper “hip checks” Mann and gives him a “high stick to the chops” before “leaving his models sprawling on the ice.”
McShane and Wyner not only destroy Mann’s argument, they unambiguously reject the statistical methods used by other paleoclimatologists to reconstruct past temperature data…
