Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:21, 27 September 2010

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science

Author	A.W. Montford
Language	English
Subject	Climate change
Publisher	Stacey International
Publication date	2010
Publication place	United Kingdom
Pages	482
ISBN	978-1-906768-35-5

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science is a book written by Andrew Montford and published by Stacey International in 2010. Montford, an accountant and science publisher who publishes a blog which is sceptical of human induced climate change, provides his analysis of the history of the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures for the last 1000 years and the controversy surrounding the research which produced the graph. The book describes the history of the graph from its inception to the beginning of the Climategate Controversy.

Since its release, the book has received a mixture of positive and negative reviews; The Guardian referred to it as "Montford's entertaining conspiracy yarn", while The Spectator described it as a "a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing" and The Sunday Telegraph described it as "Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story".

Background

According to Montford, in 2005 he followed a link from a British political blog to the Climate Audit website. While perusing the site, Montford noticed that new readers often asked if there was an introduction to the site and the story of the hockey stick controversy. In 2008, after the story of Caspar Ammann's "purported" replication of the hockey stick became public, Montford wrote his own summary of the controversy.

Montford published the summary on his Bishop Hill blog and called it Caspar and the Jesus paper. Montford states that word of his paper caused the traffic to his blog to surge from several hundred hits a day to to 30,000 in just three days. Montford adds that there was also an attempt to use his paper as a source in Misplaced Pages. After Montford saw the hockey stick graph used in a science book manuscript he was reviewing, he decided to expand his paper into book form.

Synopsis

The Hockey Stick Illusion relates the story of Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes' "hockey stick graph" starting from when it first appeared in Nature. The book describes how Steve McIntyre first became interested in the graph and his subsequent struggle to replicate the results of "MBH98" (the original 1998 study) and the refusal of Mann to release his source code and filtered dataset. It details the publication of a paper by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in 2003 which criticized MBH98, and follows with Mann and his associates' rebuttals. The book recounts reactions to the dispute over the graph, including investigations by the National Academy of Science and Edward Wegman and hearings held on the graph before the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Efforts taken by other scientists to verify Mann's work and McIntyre's and others' responses to those efforts are described.

The last chapter of the book deals with what the book calls "Climategate". Here, the author compares several e-mails to the evidence he presents in The Hockey Stick Illusion. Montford focuses on those e-mails dealing with the peer review process and how these pertained to Stephen McIntyre's efforts to obtain the data and methodology from Mann's and other paleoclimatologists' published works.

Reception

Many reviews have praised the book for its writing style and accessibility. Writing in the Geological Society of London's magazine Geoscientist, Joe Brannan wrote that "Andrew Montford tells this detective story in exhilarating style. He has assembled an impressive case that the consensus view on recent climate history started as poor science and was corrupted when climate scientists became embroiled in IPCC politics." He ends his review with "Montford’s book ends on what is perhaps an inevitable low note, because the Hockey Team has not conceded that its temperature reconstructions are seriously flawed. However, if The Hockey Stick Illusion provokes a truly independent review of the evidence it will have served its purpose". Among those also praising the book was climatologist Fred Singer, who called it "probably the best book about the Hockey Stick." Numerous other newspaper and magazine articles have praised the book, including reviews in Quadrant, The Telegraph, The Spectator , The Courier, and the National Post.

However, a handful of reviews have criticized the book for what they perceive as a poor understanding of the science. Alastair McIntosh, writing in the Scottish Review of Books, criticised the book as only being able to "cut the mustard with tabloid intellectuals but not with most scientists." Noting that Montford has not made any relevant scientific contributions, he commented that the book "might serve a psychological need in those who can't face their own complicity in climate change, but at the end of the day it's exactly what it says on the box: a write-up of somebody else's blog" and criticised it as "at worst, ... a yapping terrier worrying the bull; it cripples action, potentially costing lives and livelihoods." Montford's book was also reviewed unfavorably for similar reasons by Bob Ward in The Guardian and Richard Joyner, a Professor at Nottingham Trent University, in Prospect magazine.

See also

• Climatic Research Unit email controversy
• Historical climatology
• Hockey stick controversy
• Medieval warm period
• Global warming controversy

References

1. ^ Matt Ridley (2010-02-03). "The global warming guerrillas". The Spectator (spectator.co.uk). Retrieved 2010-04-09.
2. ^ Bob Ward. "Did climate sceptics mislead the public over the significance of the hacked emails?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2010-08-25. Retrieved 2010-08-19. Montford's entertaining conspiracy yarn reaches two apparently devastating conclusions about the work of climate scientists, partly based on his analysis of the hacked email messages.
3. ^ Booker, Christopher (2010-01-30). "Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures". The Sunday Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2010-08-26. Retrieved 2010-05-14. Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story.
4. ^ Montford, Andrew (2010). "1". The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 13. ISBN 1906768358.
5. Montford, Andrew (2010). "1". The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 30. ISBN 1906768358.
6. Montford, Andrew (2010). "3". The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 57. ISBN 1906768358.
7. Montford, Andrew (2010). "6–11". The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 402. ISBN 1906768358.
8. Montford, Andrew (2010). "17". The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 402. ISBN 1906768358.
9. Brannan, Joe, "The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of science", Geoscientist, August 2010.
10. Brannan, Joe (August 2010). "The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of science" (PDF). Geoscientist. 20 (8). THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY,: 9. In 1998 a graph, which was to become famous as the 'Hockey Stick', made its debut in the pages of the prestigious journal Nature.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
11. http://www.rightsidenews.com/2010091511627/life-and-science/energy-and-environment/book-review-the-hockey-stick-illusion-climategate-and-the-corruption-of-science.html
12. Dawson, John, "Science: The Tree Ring Circus", Quadrant, July 29, 2010, Volume LIV Number 7-8.
13. Christopher Booker (2010-07-04). "Kidnap - as sponsored by the state". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 31. Retrieved 2010-07-14.
14. Matt Ridley (2010-03-10). "The case against the hockey stick". Prospect (prospectmagazine.co.uk). Retrieved 2010-04-03.
15. Robbins, Bruce (2 April 2010). "Bishop Hill: the blogger putting climate science to test". The Courier. The Courier. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
16. Foster, Peter, "Peter Foster: Checking the hockey team", National Post, July 9, 2010.
17. McIntosh, Alastair (2010). "Reviews - The Hockey Stick Illusion". Scottish Review of Books. 6 (3).
18. Joyner, Richard (2010-08-23). "Mean-spirited scepticism".

Further reading

• Booker, Christopher (2009). The Real Global Warming Disaster. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. ISBN 1441110526.
• Montford, Andrew (2008-08-11). "Caspar and the Jesus paper". Retrieved 2010-04-01.

External links

• An interview with Andrew Montford at The Register

• Environmental skepticism
• Climate change books