The Hockey Stick Illusion

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The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
AuthorA.W. Montford
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectClimate change
PublisherStacey International
Publication date
2010
Pages482
ISBN978-1-906768-35-5

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,[1] 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",[2] in a later amended article,[3] while The Spectator described it as a "a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing"[1] and The Sunday Telegraph described it as "Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story".[4]

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.[5]

Montford published the summary on his Bishop Hill blog and called it Caspar and the Jesus paper[6]. 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 Wikipedia. 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.[5]

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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

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.[10]

Reception

Many reviews have praised the book for its content, writing style and accessibility. Climatologist Judith Curry called The Hockey Stick Illusion "a well documented and well written book on the subject of the “hockey [stick] wars.” It is required reading for anyone wanting to understand the blogosphere climate skeptics and particularly the climate auditors," such as Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. She wrote that the book "presents a well reasoned and well documented argument". [11] Among those also praising the book was S. Fred Singer, who called it "probably the best book about the Hockey Stick."[12] A number of other newspaper and magazine articles have praised the book, including reviews in Geoscientist [13], Quadrant[14], The Telegraph[4][15], The Spectator [1], Prospect magazine [16], The Courier[17], and the National Post.[18] Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in his resignation letter to the President of the American Physical Society, says "the global warming scam... is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare," and notes parenthetically that "Montford’s book organizes the facts very well."[19]

However, several reviewers 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 the book as "at worst, ... a yapping terrier worrying the bull; it cripples action, potentially costing lives and livelihoods."[20] Montford's book was also reviewed unfavorably for similar reasons by Bob Ward in The Guardian [2] and in a second Prospect review.[21]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Matt Ridley (2010-02-03). "The global warming guerrillas". The Spectator (spectator.co.uk). Retrieved 2010-04-09.
  2. ^ a b Bob Ward (2010-08-19). "Did climate sceptics mislead the public over the significance of the hacked emails?". The Guardian. London. 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. ^ Bob Ward (2010-08-19). "Did climate sceptics mislead the public over the significance of the hacked emails?". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 2010-08-26. Retrieved 2010-08-19. This article was amended on 20 August 2010 following a complaint from Andrew Montford to make it clear that we did not mean to imply that Andrew Montford deliberately published false information in order to support the arguments made in his book. We apologise if such a false impression was given.
  4. ^ a b Booker, Christopher (2010-01-30). "Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures". London: 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.
  5. ^ a b Montford 2010, p. 13
  6. ^ Montford 2008
  7. ^ Montford 2010, p. 30
  8. ^ Montford 2010, p. 57
  9. ^ Montford 2010, p. 151—401
  10. ^ Montford 2010, p. 402—49
  11. ^ "Climate book shelf by Judith Curry, September 25, 2010.
  12. ^ http://www.rightsidenews.com/2010091511627/life-and-science/energy-and-environment/book-review-the-hockey-stick-illusion-climategate-and-the-corruption-of-science.html
  13. ^ Brannan, Joe, "The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of science", Geoscientist, August 2010.
  14. ^ Dawson, John, "Science: The Tree Ring Circus", Quadrant, July 29, 2010, Volume LIV Number 7-8.
  15. ^ Christopher Booker (2010-07-04). "Kidnap - as sponsored by the state". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 31. Retrieved 2010-07-14.
  16. ^ Matt Ridley (2010-03-10). "The case against the hockey stick". Prospect (prospectmagazine.co.uk). Retrieved 2010-04-03.
  17. ^ Robbins, Bruce (2 April 2010). "Bishop Hill: the blogger putting climate science to test". The Courier. The Courier. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  18. ^ Foster, Peter, "Peter Foster: Checking the hockey team", National Post, July 9, 2010.
  19. ^ "Professor Emeritus Hal Lewis Resigns from American Physical Society". 2010-10-12. Retrieved 2010-10-12.
  20. ^ McIntosh, Alastair (2010). "Reviews - The Hockey Stick Illusion". Scottish Review of Books. 6 (3).
  21. ^ Joyner, Richard (2010-08-23). "Mean-spirited scepticism".

Bibliography and further reading

External links

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