Key Global Warming Study May Have Bad Mathematics

An anonymous reader writes "Berkeley physics professor Richard A. Muller writes that a key study showing a sudden 'hockey stick shape' increase in global temperature may be flawed from bad mathematics. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick say that Michael Mann's computer program handled data normalization incorrectly and exaggerated data with a hockey stick shape." Update: 10/18 18:26 GMT by J : Alas for the environment, it looks like McKitrick and McIntyre have been refuted. "In previous rounds of the debate, Lambert has shown that McKitrick messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations, showed he knew almost nothing about climate, flunked basic thermodynamics, couldn't handle missing values correctly and invented his own temperature scale. But Tim's latest discovery really takes the cake."

Comments

Oddly enough...

[slowhand]

I posted this on Friday Oct 15 when it was "fresh" news.
I, for one welcome our "Slashdot article-rejection Overlords" and thank them for dropping my karma.
============== My submission ====================
Please check this article at MIT Tech Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/0 4/10/wo_ muller101504.asp?trk=nl

It describes a very "interesting" problem with the "hockey stick" global warming plot published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann. The journal "Nature" reviewed a study of the Mann Principal Component Study methodology and software analysis which performed by Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. Nature's referrees were unwilling to undertake the research involved in validating the analysis performed by McIntyre/McKitrick. They chose to publish their research here at
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html .