The Ohio State University

Abstract:
In 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told us that the 1990s were: The “warmest decade of the millennium”; and that 1998 was the “warmest year”. In 2007, they updated this, stating that the last half of the 20th. century was the warmest 50-year period in the past 1300 years.
  But how do we know that it’s warmer now than in the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings settled in Greenland? 
  Stephen McIntyre first asked this question in 2003; and asking the question set off a tremendous controversy. His journal articles in 2005 with co-author Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph, were reported in news articles by Nature and Science, and the controversy was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. In 2006, the House Science Committee then commissioned a National Academy of Sciences panel to investigate the controversy, and the House Energy and Committee held hearings on the matter.
  The answer to this question is based on a wide range of factors in physics and engineering.  This is the focus of this Seminar and the speaker will discuss the statistical and scientific problems involved in trying to compare the two periods with any confidence and to reach acceptable answers.
 
Bio:
     Stephen McIntyre has worked in mineral exploration for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada. McIntyre first majored in pure mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he was a prizewinning student, graduating in 1969, and followed by studies at Oxford University where he obtained a B.A. in economics. He was then offered PhD scholarships at, both, MIT and Harvard, but instead, as noted, went into the mining and mineral exploration business, with two stints in government in the 1970s. From 1986 to 2003, he worked on financing mineral exploration companies which involved making business decisions based on imperfect scientific (geological) information in an environment where there were important obligations of disclosure and due diligence. This gave him an unusual and perhaps unique perspective on modern day climate science, and also the controversies in translating science into policy that is particularly prevalent in the Global Warming controversies.