Many reviewers have commented that "The Hockey Stick Illusion" is a real page-turner, and it is, however improbable that might sound. I was concerned, while waiting for several months for my copy to make its slow way from Britain to Hawaii, that this enthusiasm for A.W. Montford's readableness might have come at the expense of accuracy or completeness.
Not to worry. This is a forensic classic.
You may have heard that the 20th century was the warmest in a thousand years, or that the 1990s were the warmest decade in at least 600 years. Perhaps you also know that these claims originated in (or at least were backed up by) 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.
The out for Mann and his allies, who called themselves "The Team" until their critics began using the term disparagingly, was that conclusions by Le Roy Laurie (and similar results based on indirect observations by, among others, Reid Bryson) revealed, if anything, only a regional warming. However, since Mann had no direct observations to use and his proxies represented a portion of the globe no larger than Le Roy Ladurie's, this claim made no sense.
Why, then, did Mann's hockey stick persuade so many people? 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. 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 Montford presents the forensic deconstruction of the trick).
It began with a question, by Dutch scientist Hans Erren, on a blog. A retired Canadian statistics expert, Steven McIntyre, undertook to examine the statistical underpinnings of the claim: Mann's report was based not on any straightforward report of field data but on abstruse, mysterious statistical manipulations of secret data.
McIntyre, whose profession had required him to analyze data for mining prospectuses that had to be defensible, otherwise people could have gone to jail, was puzzled and alarmed by the apparent fact that the usual safeguards used by mine boomers had not been used by these scientists.
Upon looking into it, over a period of, so far, eight years, he discovered statistical malfeasance, faking of data, manipulation of results, shading of reports: The climatological equivalent of salting a mine. (McIntyre himself, on his blog Climate Audit, is careful to refrain from using words like "fake" or "fraud" and scolds commenters who do, but as we shall see, fakery is what it was.)
McIntyre wasn't alone. A growing band of experts in engineering,statistics, computing and climate fields contributed bits and pieces to reconstructing the obscurities of the stick.
Little that is new appears in "The Hockey Stick Illusion," but the documentation had been spread in crazy quilt fashion over the Internet. Montford, who conducts a blog, mostly about climate, called Bishop Hill, used his accounting skills of patience and precision in dealing with heaps of data to tell a connected and, often, thrilling story.
As he was finishing his manuscript late last year, the Climate Research Unit correspondence and computer codes were leaked (or stolen, nobody knows which), and Montford threw in a short selection of some of the more interesting revelations. This is part of, but not a necessary part of, the hockey stick story, but it is unfortunate that "Climategate" was selected for the book's subtitle. There is confusion enough, especially among McIntyre's critics, about what was going on. The two centers of junk climate science are related, but they committed different ethical (and in the case of CRU, legal) crimes and made different blunders, and it would be just as well to keep them separate in mind.
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.
When he says that Mann faked data to expand his Gaspe proxy, there's no question that he did fake it. People could quarrel about what effect that had on the hockey stick, but the fakery is not in doubt.
Caltech's David Goodstein, who was that school's scientific fraud cop for a decade, in his recent book "On Fact and Fraud," lays out strict criteria for meeting the definition of scientific fraud. In my review of his book, I contended that he was too strict, that climatology has introduced a new kind of shell-game fraud on the public. As I write, Penn State's investigation into Mann's conduct has just issued a blanket exoneration, based evidently on a Goodsteinian view of things (and, also, an inept method of questioning).
This was unfortunate, because Montford shows that the Team was guilty of something worse than sharp practice, but it's worse than that, because even by the narrow rules proposed by Goodstein, Mann et al. are guilty of scientific fraud, by faking data.
There are numerous examples, but let's stick with Gaspe, since it is not only blatant but significant to Mann's outcome.
In extending his proxy series back, Mann chose to use a "stepwise" gate, because the number of proxies available drops as you go back. Gaspe (which should not have been used on technical grounds, but that is another story) presented Mann (and his co-authors, Bradley and Hughes) with a problem: It goes back only to the year 1404.
Now, the Team wanted to use Gaspe in the worst way (in every meaning of that word), but their stepwise method allocated proxies to blocks beginning with the European conventional centuries. If a proxy did not extend to the year 1400, it was not supposed to be used.
I can think of a couple of honest ways to work around this problem.
The Team could have said, since Gaspe comes so close to the period we want to examine, and because a start date of 1400 is arbitrary in any physical sense, we choose to assign the start date to 1404, then 1504, 1604 . . . . This would not have looked very scientific, but it wouldn't have been any more arbitrary than the start date they did use, and readers could have taken the argument for what it was worth.
Or they could have said, because Gaspe is part of such a scarce record and therefore so potentially valuable, we choose to include it. Put an asterisk next to it, the way baseball did with Roger Maris's home run record, but consider it.
The Team didn't do either. They faked data by extended the Gaspe record by using the 1404 value also for 1400, 1401, 1402 and 1403. And not disclosing that.
In other words, they reported data that had not been observed -- a clear violation of even Goodstein's rule -- of a tree (these were tree-ring proxies) that did not even exist. (Climate alarmists routinely invent observations, not only in paleoclimate studies but in current temperature observations. Nasa's James Hansen has even automated the production of imaginary readings.)
The outcome of this padding on the statistical result wasn't much, but it does reveal how honest the Team was about data and methods.
The Gaspe fraud was central to inventing the blade of the stick, and all the mischief that has since flowed from that, but it is not nearly the worst of the scientific sins committed by the team. The worst, and most blatant, were in the verification statistics.
When the statistical methods used don't show proper verification statistics, and Mann's did not, then everything has to stop, period. There is the real scandal. Not only did Mann try pull a fast one, but the scientific community that should have spotted the con and blown the whistle was silent.
"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."
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