Deutsche Bank Aligns Itself With Disgraced ‘Hockey Stick’ Scientist

Deutsche Bank increasingly seems to be in the misinformation business.  Believe it or not, it is now crawling out on a limb that has already broken off, and is trying to defend Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph.  After its recent rose-tinted analysis of the global economy, the incompetent and one-sided report on climate change it has just published hardly inspires confidence in the veracity of anything they say – especially following its failure to come clean on its real sovereign bond exposure.

The hockey stick became an icon – and was central to virtually every government’s argument that something had to be done about global warming.  By ‘reconstructing’ temperatures over the past 1,000 years, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period when temperatures were much higher than today, and showed the earth warming at alarming rate in the 20th century.

But work by economist Ross McKitrick and statistician Steven McIntyre showed that Michael Mann had been cherry picking data to get the result he wanted, as had many others in the scientific community.  A reconstructed temperature series based on tree rings from Siberia – produced by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – was being used in every termperature reconstruction around.  But by replacing Briffa’s 12 selected tree cores with 34 cores from the same area, McIntyre made the sharp uptick in the series at the end of the twentieth century  vanish, leaving a twentieth century apparently without a significant trend (see chart).

Subsequent studies of Mann’s methodology showed that a hockey stick shaped graph would have been produced even if random numbers had been used.  Climategate then provided further evidence of the lengths some scientists were willing to go to to deceive – and thus the hockey stick has become one of the biggest scientific scandals in history.

Which is why, of course, Michael Mann has distanced himself from the hockey stick.  He now says it was a mistake to make it an icon of the global warming movement.  Odd, therefore, that Deutsche Bank now goes out of its way to defend it.

In ‘Climate Change: Addressing the Major Skeptic Arguments,’ Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors attempts to critique the skeptical arguments against climate change.  They say that the soundness of the research and primary conclusions Michael Mann came to were unaffected by any methodological problems!

Never mind its attempt to justify scientific fraud, Deutsche Bank’s report completely fails to properly quote the material it purports to rebut.  This is why Ross McKitrick says it is “shallow and unconvincing” in his ‘Response to Misinformation By Deutsche Bank‘, published by the Science & Public Policy Institute.  It also reflects poorly on Deutsche Bank.