Customer Reviews

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds)

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This is a superb review of the story of the hockeystick, the temperature reconstruction which was supposed to show that late 20th century temperatures were unprecedented for at least 1,000 years and which was highlighted in the third IPCC report in 2001. What Montford does in this book is take us through Steven McIntyre's attempt to reproduce the original result of Michael Mann and the controversy that followed. His account is very well written and it reads like a detective story. The technical details of the debate are clearly explained even though there is no heavy mathematics or statistics. He tells the story chronologically and gives a good feel of what people on both sides of the debate actually said at the time (and there are plenty of references as well as judicious quotes from all sides). I have been following this debate for the past five years or so. To my mind this gives as clear an account of the debate as we are likely to see. What is now clear is that the Mann conclusions, far from being based on coherent evidence across a geographical widespread range of proxies all showing similar patterns across the Northern hemisphere, were based on a tiny subset of proxies, bristlecone and foxtail pines, from California whose anomalous 20th century growth was almost certainly not caused by high temperature. The apparently broad evidence was an illusion created by an eccentric implementation of a standard statistical technique called principal components analysis. Mann's version of this (which appears to be his own creation) effectively mined his hundred plus proxies for any which had hockeystick shapes and then gave them huge weight in the analysis. What is worrying about all this is not so much the fact that a paper is wrong. It is the failure to admit this when it is perfectly clear that it is wrong. Montford documents the evasions of debate and the consistent misrepresentation of what McIntyre and McKitrick actually said, as well as multiple refusals of access to data and clear descriptions of what had actually been done. By the time of the 2006 Wegman report it was clear that the hockeystick was broken, but it seems too much had been invested in it for people in paleoclimate to admit outright that it was just wrong. Montford tells this story too and documents the shenanigans surrounding the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. But rather than me attempting to condense the book into a paragraph I urge people to buy and read this excellent account. Note that it was largely written before the emails from CRU became public, though there is a final chapter dealing quickly with them. What is remarkable is how much of the story was already known to people who had been following the debate, but also the lengths people were prepared to go to try and stifle proper debate. For me the cover-up of the story has been a bigger influence in turning me sceptical than the mere fact of the hockey stick being wrong.

Yes, there are hundreds of other books on this subject, but read The Hockey Stick Illusion anyway. It is an exciting story of fraud in climate science. The hero of the book is Steve McIntyre, a mining consultant who's an expert in statistics. With the help of a few other climate skeptics, he takes on the climate science establishment. The villain in The Hockey Stick Illusion is Michael Mann, a climatologist who he thinks is manipulating date to prove the 20th century was uniquely warm. Whatever your opinion is on global warming (I firmly believe it's real), you should be upset about climate scientists manipulating data in the service of a political agenda. Montford also has a interesting take on peer review, which he argues is not as useful or important as most people think.

The "Bishop Hill" blog was well-respected, but not particularly remarkable until the posting of "Caspar and the Jesus paper" in August 2008. With this posting, we learned that the esteemed Bishop (now also revealed as Andrew Montford), the author of this new book, had a talent for putting scattered bits and pieces of information into a highly coherent presentation. It was remarkable enough that he was able to take myriad blog postings and figure out what they all added up to, and further remarkable that he was able to map this understanding into writing. Would it be possible to achieve this Casper-style in a more encompassing work? Too much to ask for? Well, HERE it is!

The narrative is highly readable, not mathematical, except that Montford does specifically give the official names of things. Instead of saying something like "they blew the math" he tells you how data were improperly normalized, or the use of SVD, and the consequences. In addition to describing the ill-advised technical issues, he describes appearance of the poor science (seeing what you want to see), other more common human foibles such as possible (or likely) "cherry-picking", and the suppression of contradicting evidence, all of which are not supposed to be in science.

While it would not be difficult, based on his blog perhaps, to discern the Bishop's views on AGW and its politics, the current book is basically impartial, except as it relates to the poor science and the overriding political motives of the AGW advocates. It deals rationally and fair-mindedly with the (illusion of the) Hockey stick graph. People commenting on the book are advised to direct criticisms, if any, on the basis of what he writes rather than what "camp" they perceive the author to belong to. This does involve actually reading the book however. Expect the usual reflex one star submissions from those who review just the title - and then go on to a few stock comment about the decline in the penguin population at the North Pole.

So, by the way, how DO you get to read the book. As of this writing, it does not appear to be widely available on Amazon in the US, and let's hope that will be directly available soon. I got mine from Amazon.UK, which was surprisingly easy - pretty much like this Amazon site. Shipping was about as much as the book, but I think it was only $26 with the shipping, and it arrived in 8 days by "Royal Mail". And it's a beefy book of almost 500 page-turning pages.

This is among the best books I have read on this topic. It is more technical. Yet, it is very easy to read. I knew a lot about Steve McIntyre's investigative work by reading the excellent Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. But, I learned much more.

The Global Warming hypothesis advances that current temperature levels are unprecedented over the past millennium and are caused by the rise in CO2 concentration. Global temperature records go back only to 1850. So, climatologists have reconstructed temperatures over the past millennium using mainly tree rings (lead by Michael Mann). One other scientist, Lonnie Thomson, did it using ice core. They all confirmed the Hockey Stick picture with temperatures remaining flat during the majority of the past millennium (handle of hockey stick) only to spike upward at a sharp angle (blade of hockey stick) during the past century. Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It refers to the very high correlation between the reconstructed temperature histories based on ice cores vs tree rings as irrefutable evidence of Global Warming. He will receive a Nobel Prize and an Oscar Award for his work. So what is wrong with this picture? Sadly, just about everything.

Montford demonstrates through the work of Steve McIntyre, a mathematician, that the scientific method within the climatology community has completely broken down. McIntyre shows that Michael Mann's original Hockey Stick was just the result of flawed decisions Mann made. McIntyre will be able to duplicate Mann's result (a sharp hockey stick) when making the same mistakes. But, when correcting for those mistakes he will get a very different result. Now, the hockey stick disappears. And, the Warm Medieval Period reappears with higher temperatures than at the present.

Mann's mistakes included his short-centring Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methodology. The short-centring resulted in over-weighting any tree ring proxy with a hockey stick shape by a factor of several hundreds to 1 vs other proxies. His repeated PCA methodology generated coefficients going in opposite direction in the 15th century vs the 20th century. Thus, a widening of tree rings corresponded to a decline in temperature in the 15th century but an increase in the 20th! Mann also truncated certain series to 1980 when the current data suggested a downtrend in temperature. He also truncated other series that suggested high temperature level in the 15th century. He also arbitrarily used the most hockey stick like series several times.

Reknown statisticians will confirm Mann's work is flawed. Ian Jolliffe, a statistics professor and reknown expert in PCA confirms that Mann's short-centring repeated PCA methodology is unfit for long term temperature reconstruction. Edward Wegman, a well established statistician, in his Wegman Report written for Congress will confirm that Mann's methodology was statistically inadequate and that Mann's rejection of the R Square validation measure was wrong. Mann did it because the related measure (R Square close to 0) would have rejected his model validity.

The climatology community will react to those rebuttals by hurrying to replicate Mann's Hockey Stick every which way they can. And, their work is as flawed as Mann's. McIntyre will uncover extensive cherry picking, truncating, slicing, infilling, and making up of data. But, none of that is made obvious to the Media or policymakers. Additonally, McIntyre relying on other scientists also documents how both tree rings and ice cores can give temperature signals in opposite direction depending on the era. Yet, the IPCC will vindicate Mann's work as having been replicated independently numerous times by other teams of reputable climatologists.

Edward Wegman in his report shows how insular the climatology community is. It is dominated by 12 climatologists who are all colleagues and co-authors on various hockey stick papers. They peer-review each other's work. On the IPCC they lead the reviews on the chapters that cover their very own work. Wegman even documented that their hockey stick models even share the same main tree ring proxies. Even stranger, the one that could be deemed somewhat independent, Lonnie Thomson, as he used mainly ice cores and not tree rings, let external communication mistakenly replicate Michael Mann's hockey stick and claim it as his own ice core based hockey stick. He never corrected this. As a result, there was an excellent reason why Al Gore found the ice core graph highly correlated with Mann. It was Mann's hockey stick!

The existence of the Warm Medieval Period around 1000 to 1400 AD, when temperatures were warmer than now, is associated with a convergence of evidence. It was corroborated with the historical records including the Vikings colonizing Greenland (called that way because you could grow stuff there back then) around 1000 AD. This warm period was followed by the "Little Ice Age" that was equally well established. This period saw the Vikings leaving Greenland in the 15th century, and the freezing of the Golden Horn in the 17th century. All those temperature patterns were also confirmed by several geoscientists using borehole studies. McIntyre showed those were also confirmed by a good deal of the data sets the climatologists advocating Global Warming used. But, they invariably cherry-picked the data until their models could flatten the problematic Warm Medieval Period.

The most troubling aspect of this story is the behavior of the climatology community. Climatologists don't believe their models should be submitted to replication. They don't willingly share any data or computer code to facilitate replication. They don't defer to statisticians on statistics issues. Surprisingly, their behavior is tolerated by the National Academy of Sciences and encouraged by the IPCC. The IPCC had even threatened to fire McIntyre as a reviewer if he kept asking for data. Stephen Schneider, who passed away recently, was an eminent climatologist. In his book: Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate he depicts Michael Mann, who essentially committed scientific fraud, as a victim of harassment. And, he describes McIntyre as a villain worthy of the Spanish Inquisition.

The last section on the hacked emails is a confirmation of the lead climatologists bad behavior. Michael Mann is most frequently quoted. His emails documents his efforts to censor McIntyre papers and get editors of journals fired for publishing such papers. He also states to his colleagues that certain journals such as 'Climate Research' and 'Energy and Environment' should be boycotted and not mentioned in scientific references due to their publishing contrarian papers. Mann and Briffa share how to get rid of the troublesome Medieval Warm Period. In another email, Jones pleads the editors of 'Climate Change' not to cause Mann to release his data as requested by McIntyre because it would set a "VERY dangerous precedent."

Mr. Montford has written an extremely important and interesting book. The topic is scientific fraud, one of the biggest such frauds in the history of humanity. The fraud is the hockey stick assertion that the earth in the late twentieth century experienced unprecedented global warming and higher temperatures, at least for the past two thousand years. If this fraud had remained not refuted humanity would been subject to restrictions that would greatly reduce living standards and freedom. There is a lot a stake with the hockey stick hoax.

Mr. Montford describes in great detail how two courageous, persistent, and heroic Canadian researchers managed to refute the hockey stick hoax. Mr. Montford writes about how these Canadians managed to obtain the data and publish their work. Mr. Montford also goes into great detail about the misuse of data and poor methodology that characterized the hockey stick assertion. He provides a lot of information about the statistical principle components method and how this method was misused to derive the hockey stick shape for the world temperatures over the last thousand years. He also discusses the tree ring data and how such data that was represented to be a proxy for world temperature often was not. The book is encyclopedic in its discussion of the hockey stick hoax. Yet the book is very well written and understandable.

Mr. Montford also points out the hockey stick instigators and the climate journals they wrote for very often refused to provide independent researchers with the data and/or methodology for the articles in support of the hockey stick. Independent researchers had to put much time and effort into their efforts to replicate or at least partially replicate the statistical results of the hockey stick purveyors. Mr. Montford explains that this is not science. Real science demands that the data and other material pertaining to the experimental results be available for independent verification. This data and methodology was not easily or graciously provided by the hockey stick team, if the items were provided at all.

The book also goes into some detail about Al Gore's use of the hockey stick. Despite some of Al Gore's claims he used in his works the hockey stick of pseudo scientist Michael Mann.

The book demonstrates the scientific dogmatism and fraud is not just a past problem of Galileo's era. The potential for scientific fraud can exist any time establishment dogma and special interests exist. Only eternal vigilance can expose and halt this fraud.

The book is incredibly important. The story of the hockey stick hoax must be well known for the welfare of humanity. And this book is the only book so far that is devoted to tell this story. The book is an absolute must for everyone. The book is absolutely vital.

Montford's book is an excellent introduction into the global warming debate - via one of its most controvorsial and equally influential topics, the hockey stick of temperature reconstructions. While the hockey stick is said sometimes to fall in the purview of paleoclimatology, it is perhaps in the case of scientist Michael Mann's 1000-year temperature history, placed more accurately in recent historical times. 'The earth's usual historical trend is a stable, steady course, punctuated by small, undulating ups and downs. And then comes the 20th century increase of atmospheric carbon-dioxide increase and there you see, a steep rising spiraling peak of temperatures.' At once, the narrative was satisfying on so many levels - the stability and balance in nature, disturbed by man, driven by fossil-fuel combustion.

If you feel surrounded by smug newsreaders, activists, neighbors, co-workers and even family members who suddenly sound so self-assured about climate change and global warming, when you *remember* that just a while back it was not at all so, then you should know that a large dose of this certainty and in-your-face attitude on global warming owes its origin in no small part to this one graph.

The book really is the story of Steve McIntyre who analyzed this graph. His blog Climateaudit.org is one of the most viewed climate skeptic blogs today, and the book follows the efforts of McIntyre, Ross McKitrick an economist and the readers of Climateaudit, among which the author was one, as they pursued their efforts to deconstruct Mann's graph and expose its flaws. The end result of their efforts is visible: no longer will you this one graph be waved at your face. Instead you will probably find yourself being told: 'the hockey stick was just from one study, there are other pieces of evidence as well (for human-induced sudden warming)'. One has to pause at this point - the significance of unstated admission behind such a statement is momentous. These 'other pieces of evidence' existed the same ten years ago too, when this single picture became global warming's icon. You will not be shown this graph today (you will be shown others). You can look hard - in the most recent IPCC report, in the recent pronouncements of the scientific academies or pamphlets put out by activist organizations - you wont see it prominently displayed. You can google 'global warming' and check the first twenty links (all of them are popular educational resources, incidentally): you wont find the graph at all. Where did it go? And why? The book is the story of how this came about. The case against the hockey stick at this point is so strong that climate activists actively disown it.

To be sure, a bit of knowledge of mathematics would be useful here. But Montford provides enough context for the reader to follow the story even without getting too much into it. The narrative is well-written, with an easy flow with the just touch of detail. Montford never talks down to his readers even though much of the statistical analyses actually involved is complex even for the trained. The one small quibble that I had, was that the book reaches a point where it becomes obvious that McIntyre's efforts at critiquing the hockey stick papers have reached fruition, but the story veers to how he and his co-authors dealt with sundry criticisms directed at their work. But that is an important part as well, so the overall effect is not disturbed.

Fully recommended.

The plot of the Hockey Stick Illusion will be familiar to any follower of the Colombo shows on television. In each case, we see the humble investigator initially ignored, brushed aside, stonewalled, disdained, doubletalked, waffled, red herringed, and evaded by lofty and complacent Establishment figures, citing their own authority, crowded schedules, sophisticated reasoning, advanced degrees, abstruse mathematics, and exalted ideals.

In this case, the Columbo figure is Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mining consultant. A.W. Montford's book tells the gripping and suspenseful details of McIntyre's pursuit of the self-denominated "hockey team" led by Michael Mann, who wrote the key chapters on his own work for the IPCC, and Phil Jones, who maintains the temperature record used by the IPCC to document the "Hockey Stick": showing unprecedented and anomalous anthropogenic global warming in the Twentieth Century while denying that any comparable or greater warming occurred in the Medieval period.

McIntyre relentlessly replicates and decodes the increasingly desperate devices used by the climatocrats to defend their findings. But parallel to this fascinating story is the amazing tale of the ascent of Mann. From an obscure newly minted PhD in 1998 at the U Mass department of geosciences, he became the Lead Author of the crucial Observed Climate Variability chapter in the IPCC report, contributor to several other chapters, 'Scientific Advisor' to the White House on climate change, pundit on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, BBC, NPR, PBS, and scores of Establishment newspapers and magazines. The ascent culminates in the Nobel Peace Prize for the team and a role as the very incarnation of a Consensus of science requiring the creation of a global apparatus to stigmatize as pollution, regulate and tax the very CO2 that sustains all of plant and animal life.

Explaining the science in detail, Montford's narrative climaxes with the dissolution of the hockey stick, the discomfiture of the Hockey Team, the eruption of Climategate, and the quiet and total victory of the humble mining engineer. The reader should know that the supposed email "scandal" is in fact rather trivial and defensible. Few people are at their best in emails. But the hockey stick's science is shoddy beyond easy belief. The hockey stick chart mostly reflects a defective algorithm that extends and inflates a few deceptive signals from as few as 20 cherry-picked trees in Colorado and Russia into a tendentiously rising graph that is replicated repeatedly through reshuffles of the same or similar defective and factitious data. These people apparently had no plausible case and were pressed by their political sponsors to contrive a series of Potemkin charts.

Make no mistake. This argument is conclusive: if temperatures were warmer in the pre-industrial Medieval period, the entire global warming case for CO2 suppression collapses. Don't miss this definitive book.

GG

I just finished the HSI this morning and highly recommend this book, even to those who are opposed to the skeptical viewpoint. One of the key insights of this book is how complicated the determination of historical global temperatures is and the potential pitfalls (and maybe impossibility) of reconstruction. The McIntyre McKittrick (M&M) critique of the Mann 1998 hockey stick paper identified questionable statistical techniques used to generate the HS, followed by interminable stonewalling of data requests by Mann et al. I deal with data in my work and I know how easy it is to make data mistakes, even with no political or professional issues. Data and computer programs must be available along with papers in order that other scientists can confirm/replicate results - what were Mann et al hiding? Careers and funding are highly dependent on the correct viewpoint on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and skeptics are definitely not welcome. When you consider how Michael Mann's career and status are dependent on that 1998 paper and its successors, you understand how a scientist can be locked into a position.

This excellent book operates on two levels. First, it details the tangled web of deception that made "the hockey stick illusion" the iconic image of the monstrous "Anthropogenic Global Warming" fraud.
Montford makes generally understandable the arcane issues of statistical manipulation that lie at the heart of the false "science." He does so in a narrative that is clear, riveting and horrifying. As a result of the duplicity of the Hockey Team and the IPCC, billions have been spent and we have no idea whether or how human beings may affect climate change. We are at square one.
Second, Montford uses this saga as a case study for the need to require transparency and access to all data and code that underpin scientific claims, especially the research that is used to support government policies.
Clearly so many people were fooled for so long by this particular statistical legerdemain because, without access to the underlying data and code, the effort required to replicate and find the flaws in Mann's Hockey Stick was almost impossible.
Thank Heaven for a retired mathematician - Steve McIntyre - who undertook the thousands of hours (and dollars) required to find and prove the flaws in this duplicitous artifact of NOT Science.
What is needed is a very intense investigation of how the public interest can be protected from such frauds - whether in climate science, financial derivatives, medical policies, etc. To err is human - but to really mess up, it takes a computer! Bravo to A.W. Montford who made the whole story understandable to a mathematically impaired reader like me.

Author A W Montford is one of those painstakingly patient people with a passion for the truth, and the intellectual and organizational tools to put together the story of the biggest scientific fraud since Piltdown Man.

Strong words? Yes! As Montford takes you through the emails, blog posts, and official records tracing the history of the infamous "Hockey Stick" graph, you start to see how we have been led astray by some of the world's foremost climate scientists as they use sloppy mathematics, felonious tree ring data, and a public relations effort rivaled only in political campaigns. They managed to convince the populace and political establishment that the warming of the earth in the 20th century was unprecedented, and the world was in great danger of catastrophic weather events and rising sea levels which would kill millions or cause massive destruction.

Montford does not present new data. His value is in telling the story of a world-wide scientific conspiracy in a style which keeps you turning page, after page, after page.