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A.W. Montford
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The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds) Paperback – 23 Feb. 2010

by A.W. Montford (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 283 ratings
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From Steve McIntyre's earliest attempts to reproduce 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.
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  1. Print length
    482 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Stacey International
  4. Publication date
    23 Feb. 2010
  5. Dimensions
    13.34 x 3.18 x 20.32 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1906768358
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1906768355
  8. See all details
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Product description

Review

A rattling good detective story and a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing. --Matt Ridley, The Spectator

....one of the best science books in years....deserves to win prizes --Prospect Magazine

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all - the notorious 'hockey stick' graph......For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph

About the Author

The author studied chemistry at St Andrews University. He is a respected blogger at Bishop Hill (http://bishophill.squarespace.com) 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

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Stacey International; Later Printing edition (23 Feb. 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 482 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1906768358
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1906768355
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 3.18 x 20.32 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 283 ratings

About the author

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A.W. Montford

A.W. Montford

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
283 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book contains one of the clearest lay explanations of PCA and its application. They also describe the narrative as riveting, frightening, and eye opening.

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Technical accuracyNarrative
30 customers mention ‘Technical accuracy’26 positive4 negative

Customers find the book contains one of the clearest lay explanations of PCA and its application. They also say it's highly technical, informative, and well-written. Readers also mention the editing is first-class and the organisation of the book is exemplary. They say the trail of evidence is incredible and the historical narrative works well.

"...of this tumultuous deluge. By adding a very helpful and well-written commentary to previously published exchanges of emails between critical..." Read more

"...an illusion (not to say: outright fraud); (2) it is a historical narrative very clearly explaining the sequence of events and their connections;..." Read more

"...The trail of evidence is incredible,the Global Warming crew are proven again and again to be not just mistaken but to be LIARS,and bloody bad ones..." Read more

"...has gone to great lengths to document the factual details in an easily readable and riveting story. A real eye opener." Read more

9 customers mention ‘Narrative’9 positive0 negative

Customers find the narrative riveting, shocking, and thought-provoking. They also say the book exposes the weird.

"...It is a gripping story, attractively and intelligently presented...." Read more

"...This is an historically ordered narrative told by a gifted author who, while taking no position on the reality of AGW, sets out the heroes and..." Read more

"...lengths to document the factual details in an easily readable and riveting story. A real eye opener." Read more

"...The twists and turns were often breathtaking...." Read more

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Grumpy Old Don
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant scientific detective story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 April 2010
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The 'hockey stick' is a graph showing how the average temperature in the northern hemisphere has varied over the last thousand years or so: bumbling along steadily, apart from the odd wiggle, until in about 1900 it started shooting up at an unprecedented rate. It was invented by Michael Mann and his colleagues in the late 1990s, and it acquired a huge prominence within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was, and remains, greatly favoured by the most vociferous advocates of the idea that the global climate is going to hell in a handcart as a result of human activity.

Is it correct though? It's certainly a bit of a surprise if you accept the medieval warm period and the little ice age, for which there is plenty of evidence. Palaeoclimatic reconstructions depend on the use of statistical methods, and one thing that becomes abundantly clear early on in this superb book is that Michael Mann isn't very good at statistics. (It seems to be a bit of a failing in the climate research community in fact - the Oxburgh panel investigating the leak of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in Norwich (the so-called 'Climategate') expressed surprise that their research had 'not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.') Mann's methods were flawed and his input data (mostly from tree rings) were biased. How do we know that? Largely because of the dedicated detective work of Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian engineer with a much better grasp of statistics than Mann.

The subtitle of this book is 'Climategate and the corruption of science'. In fact, it doesn't have so much to say about Climategate, but what it reveals about the closing of ranks, sharp practice, and sloppy attention to evidence and detail, in parts of the scientific community and in the interfaces between science and policy (especially the IPCC) is truly shocking. It is a gripping story, attractively and intelligently presented. For me, the detailed discussion of short-centred principal components analysis was a bonus (one of my favourite topics), but it isn't necessary to understand anything about statistics to appreciate this book.
13 people found this helpful
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Occasional Thinker
5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and important
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2010
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The flood of blogs and blog-postings on climate threatens to overwhelm the concerned citizen wanting to deepen his or her understanding of climate topics and policies. This book is just what is required to keep one's head above the surface in at least one corner (?) of this tumultuous deluge. By adding a very helpful and well-written commentary to previously published exchanges of emails between critical commentators and climate conspirators (an emotive description, my choice, but readily justified by the CRU emails and software code exposed towards the end of last year), as well as blogposts and articles published in the regular media. Some more extended sections help explain technicalities, not least statistical concepts such as R2 and PC analysis. An important feature of the book is the naming of names, indeed there is a 'dramatis personae' at the start of the main participants, but others such as the chap who became the conspirators friend by censoring Wikipedia articles on climate (not mentioned in the book) are given passing mention. The roles of the two blogs 'RealClimate' and 'Climate Audit' are well covered. The former was lavishly funded by a leftwing PR agency, the latter was created by self-funded commentators and analysts taking an independent and refreshingly critical view of the statistical and other assertions of what I would be inclined to call 'professional climate alarmists'. All in all, a heartening piece of work. Heartening to see ordinary, albeit talented, people questioning the sermons, admonitions, analyses, and alarums of a remarkably influential coterie of climate scientists and political agitators who managed through the IPCC to have an impact utterly disproportionate to the merits of their case or of their morals.
65 people found this helpful
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P. Bartl
5.0 out of 5 stars A model of science journalism and history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 February 2010
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I will start this review by saying what this book is *not*. It is *not* primarily about "Climategate" ie the e-mails published last November. Despite the book's subtitle, only towards the last 10% or so of the book does it even get into the issue of Climategate's e-mails - apparently an update to a book that was essentially ready by the time the e-mails became public.

What this book is: a prime example of journalism, and historical narrative, when applied to a very specific scientific issue. I firmly believe this book will be studied by historians for generations to come when they try to understand the bizarre episode of the hockey stick graph. I think the book works at three levels: (1) it is a highly technical, and fully referenced - yet still easily accessible - explanation of the scientific (or would-be scientific) background of the hockey stick and its successors, and of why it was ultimately an illusion (not to say: outright fraud); (2) it is a historical narrative very clearly explaining the sequence of events and their connections; and (3) at another level, it is the history of how one retired mining consultant, Steve McIntyre, with few resources apart from his brain, his free time, and his computer managed to take on an entire "scientific" establishment (more accurately, scientific-political) and emerge vindicated despite all attempts to ignore or even ridicule or villify him.

The only criticism I will make of this book (not enough to make me give it less than 5 stars) is that it could have been edited better. For instance, US Representative Joe Barton is referred to as "Senator" at least once, and references to "see page xy" are occasionally incorrect. Such errors are, however, very rare and in no way prevent the reader from following the book's arguments.
35 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Mumi
5.0 out of 5 stars Paleoclimate science not to be trusted
Reviewed in Germany on 16 March 2023
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I have almost finished this book. My takeaways are:
The paleoclimatologists mentioned in this book are dishonest
They use datasets that are not sound
They massage the data to prove their preconceived conclusions. That is not science.
They use non-standard statistical methods that have not been proven by real statisticians.
They hide their data so that other scientists cannot replicate their methods and results. They stonewal all reequests for their data, methodologies and computer programs. A big no-no in science.
The scientific journals do not enforce their own publishing policies, like having data archived and methodolgies and computer programs available to be checked. Peer review is totally inadequate.
They have an agenda and are not in it for the science.
Their funding and professional existence relies on selling the climate change porn.
They are vain, have super egos and cannot accept legitimate criticism.

I would like to hear(/read what they have to say. But there are only circkets
2 people found this helpful
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Flavio Juarez Feijo
5.0 out of 5 stars Denunciando a pseudo-ciência
Reviewed in Brazil on 30 January 2019
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O livro mostra como incrivelmente uma análise cheia de falhas e de manipulações estatísticas serve como base para políticas de meio ambiente pelas Nações Unidas e dezenas de governos.
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EVRARD
5.0 out of 5 stars Les dérives d'une certaine science climatique
Reviewed in France on 17 January 2020
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Un récit détaillé de tous les rebondissements qui ont accompagnés la découverte par des internautes dotés de compétences statistiques des erreurs, anomalies, défaillances méthodologiques et fraudes qui étaient à la base de la courbe en crosse de hockey de Michael Mann qui a été brandi par le GIEC comme un totem de 2000 à 2008.
Ces découvertes ont été validées comme exactes par le rapport Wegman et le comité NAS (National Academy of Sciences) aux USA et dorénavant on ne trouve quasiment plus de scientifiques pour encore oser défendre cette courbe et les turpitudes de son créateur. C'est aussi une excellent initiation aux dévoiements du GIEC dont les méthodes sortent largement de la rigueur scientifique (Michael Mann - auteur principal de l'AR3 en 2001 - révisant son propre travail et écrivant la partie du rapport qui lui est consacré, documents et études écartés parce qu'ils ne vont dans le sens du RCA, etc...), des revues scientifiques (Nature, Science, GRL, ...) dont les "peer-reviews" sont pilotées par des chercheurs alarmistes et des éditeurs orientés, d'une "clique/mafia" de chercheurs idéologues faisant pression sur le GIEC, les revues scientifiques et les politiques, etc...
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Dr. Andrew L. S. Pattullo
5.0 out of 5 stars If you don't like being lied to and tricked into giving up everything you value for a fraudulent cause you must read this.
Reviewed in Canada on 21 November 2015
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I recently purchased the Kindle version as my hard copy has gone missing, probably as I tend to recommend it and loan it out frequently. This book is both a very capable post mortem of a scientific fraud and a compelling detective story. As a Canadian I am proud that the heroes of the tale are compatriots who on their own time and their own dime dissected the fraudulent hockey stock graph and showed it for what it is.

They irrefutably demonstrate that the data on which it relies to show late 20th warming as unprecedented is a few strip bark pines in the U.S. the tree ring structure of which has been shown to be a poor marker of temperature (confirmed by the scientists who originally harvested the samples). They demonstrate that the makers of the hockey stick fiddled their graph by tacking high resolution temperature measures on to the end of a low resolution composite of poorly temperature representative proxies. They further demonstrate that the proxy composite was created using inappropriate statistical manipulation which preferentially selects for the vey shape the authors wanted to find, and further that random trended data fed into the hockey stick creators' statistical black box would produce a hockey stick indistinguishable from that which they published. Finally they showed that authors of the hockey stick had truncated their own proxy temperature reconstruction in the late 20th century without admitting so, for the very obvious reason that it inconveniently depicted cooling rather than warming.

One cannot over emphasize the impact of this fraud in launching the world on a course to destroy the very energy structures that created the massive human progress of the last few centuries. The hockey stick was the central prop in Al Gore's "science fiction masterpiece" An Inconveneinient Truth, and it was used repeatedly in earlier versions of the IPCC reports to support claims of catastrophic human caused global warming, but subsequently dropped when it became evident to all that it was in fact a fiction.

Andrew Montford has done a superb job of describing the math and science for the lay reader and spinning it into a highly entertaining tale worthy of Agatha Christie. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the fundamentals of how a massive, well funded, rogue scientific and political movement is trying to justify the destruction of the modern energy economy based on a fictitious threat.
2 people found this helpful
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Canman
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Account Demolishes Mann's Hockey Stick
Reviewed in the United States on 15 August 2013
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I first found out about this book by reading Matt Ridley's Angus Miller Lecture (1), which has to be the best concise description of climate skeptics out there. In it, he recommends this book, saying that the hockey stick has been "utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick". I thought "utterly debunked" sounded a bit strong, considering how vigorously its proponents defend it. I understood the "hidden decline" or divergence problem, but I never got a handle on the validity of the long straight handle. So I read this book and some of the reviews of it for comparison. I even rechecked Michael Mann's book out of the library. I've concluded that Mann's hockey stick is indeed debunked and that, while I don't like to sound like a conspiracy theorist, the paleoclimate community, the science journals and the National Academy of Science are all complicit in covering for this bad science.

Now I want to make it clear what I mean by "debunked". It does not mean that the hockey stick's long straight handle of flat temperatures without a Medieval Warm Period is not true. It means that the flawed science in Mann's papers does not show it to be true. This point is important, because Mann's defenders often use a diversionary argument that other papers get the same result or that his critics haven't presented a different result. If Mann had chosen his proxies by flipping a coin, it would still be bad science regardless of the results.

The book provides a good narrative of Steve McIntyre's quest to understand and replicate the hockey stick and does a good job of explaining arcane statistical concepts. I have found three main arguments against the hockey stick, but there are plenty of other minor issues such as data series being extended, truncated or having gaps filled in. McIntyre is constantly thwarted in his requests for data and not just by Mann, but by the journals themselves.

The first main issue is the over-reliance on Bristlecone pines. The NAS Panel, which Mann praises as exonerating him, concludes that Bristlecones should not be used in paleoclimate reconstructions. The NAS Panel was also critical about the second main issue. This is the nonstandard method of centering series in Principle Component Analysis by only using the mean value for the twentieth century. This is dubbed "short centering" (Mann calls it "modern centering"). When fed random "red noise", it almost always produces hockey sticks! When a Mann defender who calls himself Tamino defended this by invoking an expert named Ian Jolliffe, he was rebuffed and was asked for an apology. How does the NAS Panel exonerate Mann and yet find these flaws? The panel's head, Gerald North, says they "just winged it".

The third issue is the failure of the hockey stick to pass a verification test involving a well known computed value called R2 and Mann's refusal to disclose it. IMO this is the most serious issue where one might reasonably accuse him of fraud. Mann is suing Marc Steyn of National Review Online for calling his hockey stick "fraudulent"(2). His paper says R2 was determined and his Fortran code had commands for computing it. He told journalist Marcel Crok that the hockey stick had passed it, but when John Christy of the NAS Panel asked if he computed it, Mann says "We didn't calculate it. That would be silly and incorrect reasoning." The two statisticians on the panel did not pursue it. I'll have to admit that I didn't grok all of the details on a first reading but fortunately, the author has a post(3) on his blog that concisely summarizes it in infuriating detail.

Interested readers might want to check out the aforementioned Tamino's review(4) on Real Climate. Don't miss Judith Curry's comments #74, #107, #168, #185, #290, #380, and more plus the mayhem that ensues. Steve McIntyre also has a YouTube presentation(5)(6)(7) that summarizes some of the material.

Numbered notes refer to non-Amazon links listed in the first comment.
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