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

A.W MONTFORD (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2010 | Series: Independent Minds

Here is the definitive exposé of the distorted science behind the iconic global warming graph centrally responsible for the global panic about climate change.

From Steve McIntyre's earliest attempts to reproduce the Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph, to the explosive publication of his work and the launch of a congressional inquiry, The Hockey Stick Illusion is a remarkable tale of scientific misconduct and amateur sleuthing. It explains the complex science of this most controversial of temperature reconstructions in layperson's language and lays bare the remarkable extent to which climatologists have been willing to break their own rules in order to defend climate science's most famous finding.

The book also covers the recent leak of the email archives of the Climatic Research Unit which has led to the resignation of its Director, Professor Phil Jones, and exposed the degree to which climate scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have hidden and manipulated data to support their claims.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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. --HARRY EAGAR, Staff Writer The Maui News July 11 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

About the Author

Andrew Montford - The author studied chemistry at St Andrews University. He is a respected blogger at Bishop Hill where his layperson's explanations of the Hockey Stick debate have won wide acclaim. He lives in rural Scotland with his wife and three children.

Product Details

• Paperback: 482 pages
• Publisher: Stacey International (March 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1906768358
• ISBN-13: 978-1906768355
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.3 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #311,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

227 of 288 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars hockey story January 25, 2010

By M. PHELPS

Format:Paperback

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.

111 of 157 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 500 Wonderful Pages of "Caspar" from the Bishop! February 6, 2010

By B. Hutchins

Format:Paperback

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.

79 of 113 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Colombo's Verdict: GW Perpetrated by a Hockey Stick in the Library February 24, 2010

By George Gilder

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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