The Hockey Stick Illusion: Difference between revisions

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 blogger 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] while The Spectator described it as a "a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing"^[1] and The Sunday Telegraph described it as "a remarkable scientific detective story".^[3]

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.^[4]

Montford published the summary on his Bishop Hill blog and called it Caspar and the Jesus paper^[5]. 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.^[4]

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.^[6] 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.^[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]

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". ^[10] Among those also praising the book was S. Fred Singer, who called it "probably the best book about the Hockey Stick."^[11] A number of other newspaper and magazine articles have praised the book, including reviews in Geoscientist ^[12], Quadrant^[13], The Telegraph^[3][14], The Spectator ^[1], Prospect magazine ^[15], The Courier^[16], and the National Post.^[17]

However, several reviewers 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."^[18] Montford's book was also reviewed unfavorably for similar reasons by Bob Ward in The Guardian,^[2] Chemistry World^[19] and in a second Prospect review.^[20]

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

• Booker, Christopher (2009). The Real Global Warming Disaster. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. ISBN 1441110526.
• Montford, Andrew (August 11, 2008). "Caspar and the Jesus paper". Bishop Hill. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Montford, Andrew (2010). The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International. p. 482. ISBN 1906768358.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

• An interview with Andrew Montford at The Register