Andrew Montford's
The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years...This book deserves to win prizes.
Matt Ridley, Prospect
Andrew Montford tells this detective story in exhilarating style.
Joe Brannan, Geoscientist
For anybody who wants to understand the scientific and psychological background to Climategate, there is no better read than Andrew Montford's new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.
The Hockey Stick Illusion leaves no doubt about Mr. Montford's reporting abilities. He tells a gripping detective story in which the star gumshoe is semi-retired Canadian mining consultant Steve McIntyre. Mr. McIntyre, unfortunately for his opponents, happens to combine mathematical genius with a Terminator-like relentlessness. He also found a brilliant partner in Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph. Their story is one of intellectual determination in the face of Kafkaesque "peer review" and Orwellian "freedom of information."
The Hockey Stick reconstruction was led by an ambitious and aggressive young climatologist named Michael Mann of the University of Massachusetts. It was eagerly seized upon by the IPCC. Its prominence made Prof. Mann an academic star and the recipient of hefty research grants. In 2002, Scientific American named him one of "50 leading visionaries in science."
Mr. Montford concludes that the Hockey Stick affair suggests that "the case for global warming, far from being settled is actually weak and unconvincing. The implications for policymakers are stark. They have granted an effective monopoly on scientific advice to an organization that has proven itself to be corrupt, biased and beset by conflicts of interest. Their advisors on the global-warming issue are essentially a law unto themselves ...."
"It is clear that it would be foolish in the extreme to give the IPCC the benefit of the doubt. Their record is too poor, the stakes too high."
Mr. Montford's book is required reading, but it only scratches the surface of the much bigger scandal. The Hockey Stick graph was used as a promotional tool for a political agenda. --Peter Foster, Financial Post, July 10 2010
You may have heard that the 20th century was the warmest in 1,000 years, or that the 1990s were the warmest decade in at least 600 years. Perhaps you also know that these claims originated in peer-reviewed science, which produced a temperature graph showing a hockey stick shape.
These claims are, in fact, bogus. It was obvious from the start that they were at least dubious, because when professor Michael Mann stated that his studies showed that "there was no Medieval Warm Period," the fact of a MWP had already been established, beyond dispute, by direct observations made by the French social historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.
Why, then, did Mann's hockey stick persuade so many people? A.W. Montford, an English accountant, does not answer that question - except indirectly, by showing that the people persuaded did not look at it carefully - but he does explain, in detail, why the hockey stick was junk science.
Improbably, the story reads like a murder mystery, a combination of locked room puzzler (how did Mann and his associates get a hockey stick where it could not have existed?) and courtroom drama (as Sherlock Montford presents the forensic deconstruction of the trick).
Montford, who conducts a blog mostly about climate, called Bishop Hill and used his accounting skills of patience and precision in dealing with heaps of data to tell a connected and, often, thrilling story.
Although the Hockey Team did, and is still doing, its best to keep its data secret, the persuasive advantage that Montford has is that all his claims are based on documents, many of which are reproduced in his book.
"The Hockey Stick Illusion" deserves space on the shelf of classic books about science fraud like Peter Medawar's "The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice." Montford, though not a scientist, is a good choice to tell this story, for, as Medawar said, "There is poetry in science but also a lot of bookkeeping." --HARRY EAGAR, Staff Writer The Maui News July 11 2010
