In his letter “The jig is up for climate deniers,” the writer selected Michael Mann’s famous 1999 Proxy Reconstruction (MBH99) to support the climate alarmist position (June 23, aspentimes.com). If you dig a little deeper than Wikipedia, you will find that this study has been totally discredited. Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre famously demonstrated that they could throw any random numbers into Mann’s algorithm and get a hockey stick to appear. Further, you do not have to have a PhD to understand that tree rings are a terrible proxy for determining small changes in temperature. That’s why Mann had to jettison the tree ring approach for the “blade” part of the reconstruction.
An entire book, “A Disgrace to the Profession,” has been written about this study in which even many non-skeptics explain Mann’s work was a huge black eye for science. Some assert this study to be the biggest scientific malfeasance since Soviet biologist Lysenko’s infamous work. One last note: Michael Mann has claimed to be a Nobel Prize Winner even though he is not. Who does that?
Edward Collum
Basalt