 Crucial evidence based climate dynamite - if verified, 2010-06-19
Does the "publish or perish" syndrome and the huge research grants for climate research really motivate the academics? Is the climate apocalypse theme necessary to sell journals and, therefore, influence science journal editors? Does the Precautionary Principle dominate civil servants and politicians thinking above everything?
How else do you explain the consistent theme of withholding data and computer code from independent evaluation, the systematic abuse of climate skeptics as some kind of heretics, and the adherence to preconceived notions, irrespective of the evidence or the validity of the statistical techniques, portrayed by Mountford's devastating depiction of climate research?
In my innocence I believed that a system of publishing of scientific research in serious climate journals based on peer review and vigorous debate led to conclusions based on best available evidence. This book undermines that belief. The validity of peer review, which only became modus operandi in the 1950's, is questioned. The standards and procedures in climate research are depicted as shambolic and amateur when compared with medical research or even econometrics.
Montford really puts forward two hypotheses. Firstly that the Hockey Stick interpretation of climate change is the pillar on which the IPCC bases all its carbon reduction recommendations to governments throughout the world. Michael Mann's Hockey Stick is claimed to be fundamental to the IPCC's argument. Secondly that the weight of the evidence supporting that interpretation is not just exaggerated but fundamentally wrong. Bearing in mind the staggering cost of all of the carbon reduction targets being adopted, this is dynamite.
This is the first book I have read that examines the evidence and the statistical analysis in such a rigorous way. It is clear in the battle between Michael Mann's proposition of the Hockey Stick interpretation of world climate change and Steve McIntyre and Prof Ross McKitrick's forensic hatchet job on the Hockey Stick where Montford's sympathies lie.
The question the uninformed have to ask is if McIntyre and McKitrick's systematic and rigorous reconstruction is valid, why is there not more support in the independent scientific community and among the supposedly independent scientific journals and press? Do the series of articles published by respected academics in leading climate journals supporting Mann's Hockey Stick theory really depend upon the same flawed data sources and do they cherry pick the data to fit their belief in exponential climate warming and ignore glaring deficiencies in statistical analysis?
The IPCC is portrayed as populated by scientists and civil servants with preconceived prejudices.
Unfortunately my estimation of the mass hysteria that scientists and politicians have generated in the recent past in response to salmonella in eggs, to listeria in cheese, dioxins in poultry, DDT, the millenium bugs infecting computers at the turn of the century, nitrate's in water, vitamin B6, lead in petrol, passive smoking, SARS, and asbestos and especially BSE in 1996 which was feared would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from vCJD, makes Mountford's analysis only too plausible. But the devastating consequences of this climate scare, if climate scare it is, makes these experiences pale into insignificance.
I wait with baited breath for the evidence to emerge.
A real page turner, 2010-05-26
Very well written and thoroughly enjoyable to read.
I was concerned it wouldn't be worth buying this book since much of the info is already on the web - but the author does a great job of telling the story and explaining the technical issues in a clear way.
An excellent read, 2010-07-29
For anyone with any doubts about the certainty of the theory of man-made global warming, this book is excellent. Unlike some other writers on the subject, no wild claims are made. It is just logical, methodical analysis of the data, presented in an engaging format.
Lucid, thorough and convincing, 2010-06-19
If there was a contest to be the number one emblem of runaway catastrophic man-made climate change, Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph would be a major contender.
The Hockey Stick Illusion, by Andrew Montford, is about the story behind the graph, and about the efforts of one man in particular - semi-retired Canadian mining consultant Steve McIntyre - to uncover its flaws. Published at the beginning of 2010, it follows the trail of events which started with the publication of Mann's papers MBH98 and MBH99, and with McIntyre's initial 2003 request for information regarding the original datasets for these studies. As the chapters unfold, a complex tale of scientific bungling, whitewash and obfuscation begins to emerge.
Put baldly like that, the book is in danger of sounding just a little dull, but this is actually not the case at all. It reads, if anything, rather like a good detective novel - specifically a police procedural, where the protagonist leaves no stone unturned in his long quest for the truth. Along the way, there's no shortage of statistical detail (which is where the devil is, as they say) but thankfully, for readers who like myself are more comfortable with words than numbers, the author has managed to explain statistical arcana, such as principal components analysis and "short centring", in terms that the layman can readily grasp but without dumbing down the subject matter. Andrew Montford has managed to tell this complex story with a spareness and a clarity that in other circumstances would merit a Crystal Mark from the Plain English Campaign.
This is an important book, I believe, and one which will grow in importance. Not because the Hockey Stick graph is, by itself, crucial to the scientific case for catastrophic man-made global warming - it isn't. The Hockey Stick Illusion is important because it anatomises the modus operandi of the scientists whose work has been used to sound the alarm on global warming and justify the rushing through of ill-conceived changes to the way we all live. And where we would have expected to find scientific rigour and thoroughness, we find (or rather, Steve McIntyre found) laziness, secrecy and corner-cutting instead. It is rather like taking the cover off a shiny new stereo to discover a rat's nest of malfunctioning components and badly soldered wiring underneath.
The Hockey Stick Illusion is a book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the climate debate. Even for those convinced of the case that man-made climate change is a potential threat to civilisation (and this is a category which, I believe, includes Steve McIntyre himself) there is enough here, surely, to lead to some deep misgivings about the way climate science has thus far been conducted. To quote Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if that evidence is revealed to be sketchy, badly-documented and error-ridden, it does not inspire confidence.
 Not really up to it, 2010-07-29
I looked forward to reading this book and was very disappointed. Montford clearly does not understand the statistics and from some of his comments, it is clear that he got these mistakes from McIntyre. It is not possible, in this post, to explain the errors to readers with no statistical knowledge, but I can point out matters of fact. McIntyre is stated to be dubious about Mann's use of the beta coefficient (p. 66) which he states to be a new statistic which is not well understood. The beta coefficient is around 100 years old, is probably the main statistic discussed in thousands of papers annually and is very well understood. I'm not sure where the confusions about principle components analysis come from. Montford may have misunderstood McIntyre. As I read on I came across more problems and in the end decided I could not trust the author and it was a waste of time reading the book. It may not be dishonesty, just foolishness. But these people are not really equipped to criticise the work of the scientists, one of whom they seem to have driven out of his job.
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