The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [203]
p. 334 ‘previous warm episodes’. The famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that seemed to prove that the Medieval Warm Period never happened has since been comprehensively discredited. It relied far too heavily on two sets of samples from bristlecone pine trees and Siberian larch trees that have since been shown to be highly unreliable; it spliced together proxies and real thermometer data in a selective way, obscuring the fact that the proxies did not mirror modern temperatures, and it used statistical techniques that made a hockey stick out of red noise. Subsequent nontree-ring proxies have emphatically reinstated the Medieval Warm Period as warmer than today. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168. Holland, D. 2007. Bias and concealment in the IPCC process: the ‘hockey-stick’ affair and its implications. Energy and Environment 18:951–83; http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf; www.climateaudit.org/?p=4866#more-4866; http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/steve-mcintyres-iccc09-presentation-with-notes/#more-6315; http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168. See also Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies. Energy and Environment 18:1049–58; and Moberg, A., Sonechkin, D.M., Holmgren, K., Datsenko, N.M. and Karlén, W, 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature 433:613–17. For papers on the Holocene warm period, between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago, see http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/dont-panic-the-arctic-has-survived-warmer-temperatures-in-thepast/; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F; and http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/EGU2009-13045.pdf; and http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq.html#summer_ice.
p. 334 ‘the net population at risk of water shortage by 2100 falls under all their scenarios’. Goklany, I. 2009. Is climate change the defining challenge of our age? Energy and Environment 20:279–302.
p. 335 ‘no increase in either the number or the maximum wind speed of Atlantic hurricanes making landfall’. Pielke, R.A., Jr., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M.A. and Muslin, R, 2008: Normalized hurricane damage in the United States: 1900–2005. Natural Hazard Review 9:29–42.
p. 335 ‘death rate from weather-related natural disasters has declined by a remarkable 99 per cent’. Goklany, I. 2007. Deaths and death rates due to extreme weather events. Civil Society Report on Climate Change. International Policy Network.
p. 335 ‘cold weather continues to exceed the number of excess deaths during heatwaves by a large margin’. Lomborg, B. 2007. Cool It. Marshall Cavendish.
p. 336 ‘malaria is not limited by climate’. Reiter, P. 2008. Global warming and malaria: knowing the horse before hitching the cart. Malaria Journal 7 (supplement 1):S3.
p. 336 ‘says Paul Reiter, a malaria expert’. Reiter, P. 2007. Human ecology and human behavior. Civil Society Report on Climate Change. International Policy Network.
p. 336 ‘the possibility that global warming might increase that number by 30,000’. Goklany, I. 2004. Climate change and malaria. Science 306:56–7. The treatment of Paul Reiter, an expert on malaria, by the IPCC is a strange tale: ‘The IPCC rejected Professor Reiter’s nomination to write the malaria segment of the health chapter of its 2007 Climate Assessment Report first by pretending he had not been nominated and then by pretending that it had not received the four copies of the nomination papers that he had sent to separate officials. The two lead authors of that segment, unlike Professor Reiter, were not experts on malaria, and had published only one paper on the subject between them. One was not a scientist but an environmental campaigner.’ From http://scienceand publicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/scarewatch/scarewatch_agw_spread_malaria.pdf.