The Hockey Stick Illusion

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
Author A.W. Montford
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Subject Climate change
Publisher Stacey International
Publication date
 2010
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 called ‘Bishop Hill’[1] provides his analysis of the history of the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures for the last 1000 years and the controversy promoted by mining exploration company director Steve McIntyre about the research which produced the graph. The book describes the history of the graph from its inception to the beginning of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy ("Climategate").

The book was Amazon UK's second bestselling environment book of 2010.[2]

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.[3]

Montford published the summary on his Bishop Hill blog and called it Caspar and the Jesus paper.[4] Montford states that word of his article caused the traffic to his blog to surge from several hundred hits a day to 30,000 in just three days. Montford adds that there was also an attempt to use his article 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 article into book form.[3]

Synopsis

IPCC FAR 1990 Figure 7.1.c (red) based on Lamb 1965 showing central England temperatures; central England temperatures to 2007 shown from Jones et al. 2009 (green dashed line).[5] The high medieval temperatures contrast with the "hockey stick" MBH99 40 year average (blue, uncertainties omitted) and Moberg et al. 2005 low frequency signal (black).
The original northern hemisphere hockey stick graph of MBH99, smoothed curve shown in blue with its uncertainty range in light blue, overlaid with green dots showing the 30-year global average of the 2013 reconstruction by the PAGES 2k Consortium. The red curve shows measured global mean temperature, according to HadCRUT4 data from 1850 to 2013.

The Hockey Stick Illusion first outlines a brief history of climate change science with particular emphasis on the description of the Medieval Warm Period in the first IPCC report in 1990, with its inclusion of a schematic based on central England temperatures which Montford describes as a representation of common knowledge at that time. He then argues that a need to overturn this "well-embedded paradigm" was met by the 1998 publication by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes' of their "hockey stick graph" in Nature.[6] The book describes how Steve McIntyre first became interested in the graph in 2002 and the difficulties he found in replicating the results of "MBH98" (the original 1998 study) using available datasets, and further data which Mann gave him on request.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9]

Reception

Several reviewers 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.[10] Ross McKitrick wrote that it was the "best place to start when learning about the hockey stick".[11] Matt Ridley discussed it in The Spectator,[1] and in Prospect magazine said the book was "written with grace and flair" and deserved to win prizes, while conceding that he had financial interests in coal mining.[12]

However, other reviewers criticized the book as providing cover for individuals opposing action on climate change. Bob Ward in The Guardian described how "Montford's entertaining conspiracy yarn" presented arguments based on "glaring inaccuracies".[13] In Geoscientist, Ward said Montford's "incredible yarn is based on a misleading and one-sided version of events, littered with inaccuracies".[14] Nick Hewitt in Chemistry World outlined the basic physics of climate change, and said that, unable to dispute this, climate deniers, "(or sceptics as they are disingenuously described in this book) have made sustained attempts to discredit climate scientists and the way they work", concluding that "Readers of Chemistry World will have far better things to do than read this pedantic book."[15] Richard Joyner, writing in Prospect, described it as "a McCarthyite book that uses the full range of smear tactics to peddle climate change denial."[16]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Matt Ridley (2010-02-03). "The global warming guerrillas". The Spectator (spectator.co.uk). Retrieved 2017-01-08.
  2. ↑ Damian Carrington (17 December 2010). "Bestselling green books of the decade". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
  3. 1 2 Montford 2010, p. 13
  4. ↑ Montford 2008
  5. ↑ P. D. Jones et al., The Holocene 19,1 (2009) pp. 3–49, High-resolution palaeoclimatology of the last millennium: a review of current status and future prospects Appendix A
  6. ↑ Montford 2010, pp. 19–30
  7. ↑ Montford 2010, pp. 57–87
  8. ↑ Montford 2010, pp. 151–401
  9. ↑ Montford 2010, pp. 402–49
  10. ↑ "Climate book shelf by Judith Curry, September 25, 2010.
  11. ↑ preprint from Climate Change: The Facts 2014, Institute for Policy Analysis, Australia.
  12. ↑ Matt Ridley (2010-03-10). "The case against the hockey stick". Prospect (prospectmagazine.co.uk). Retrieved 2010-04-03.
  13. ↑ 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.
  14. ↑ Ward, Bob (October 2010). "Not so jolly hockey stick". Geoscientist. Retrieved 8 April 2011.
  15. ↑ Hewitt, Nick (2010), "The hockey stick illusion: climategate and the corruption of science", Chemistry World, 7 (9)
  16. ↑ Joyner, Richard (2010-08-23). "Mean-spirited scepticism".

Bibliography and further reading

  • Booker, Christopher (2009). The Real Global Warming Disaster. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. ISBN 1-4411-1052-6.
  • Montford, Andrew (August 11, 2008). "Caspar and the Jesus paper". Bishop Hill.
  • Montford, Andrew (2010). The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 482. ISBN 1-906768-35-8.
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