Hockey Stick Illusion, The: Climategate and the Corruption of Science [Paperback]

Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion is about the attempt by alarmist client science to prevent independent verification of its claims that current warming is "unprecedented." As such, this book both delights and appalls.

It delights because it is so well-written and such a clear analysis of the history of and problems with the Michael Mann "hockey stick" graph that featured so prominently in the 2001 IPCC report. To present complex science so simply and engagingly is extraordinary. The book appalls because of what it tells us about the corrupt state of "consensus" climate science today.

One of the cornerstones of good science is "replicability." That is, scientists should make it possible for other scientists to try to reproduce their findings by providing all the data that went into an experiment.

Replication is what the "peer reviewers" of Michael Mann et al.'s 1998 "hockey stick" paper in the journal Nature did not do, even though Mann's paper eliminated two major features of the past 1,200 years: the Medieval Warm Period (850-1300) and the Little Ice Age (1350-1850). This elimination should have raised red flags but didn't, in part because Mann's paper told climate alarmists, including the IPCC, what they wanted to hear.

Replication is what Canadian businessman and statistician Steven McIntyre tried to do with Mann's data. The Hockey Stick Illusion is a detailed and even entertaining description of Mann's frantic attempts to avoid having a climate "outsider" examine his findings, of McIntyre's dogged determination to get at the truth, and of how biased and inaccurate Mann's findings actually were. No one reading the Hockey Stick Illusion should be in any doubt that there are serious problems with climate science as practiced by the self-declared "consensus" today.

In short, this book is highly recommended for those who want to know the real truth about climate science today, not the "truth"--the illusion--that the climate "consensus" wants the public to know.

Really awesome book. Well-written and full of details. It totally makes you rethink about what really is going on in this so-called main stream climatology world. The lies... manipulated / distorted data... It's really disgusting to find out these so-called scientists are so hell bent on pushing this "anthropologically driven climate change" idea, they pretty dismissed the whole idea of what science is all about. Just google some of the facts presented in this book and do your own research, and make up your own mind about it, but as far as I could tell just by doing some research on my own...(Especially the whole Climategate affair... They sure tried to downplay it, but it surely didn't clear them of their wrong-doings!), the points, presented in this book, are well away from being "debunked".

This book is a rolicking good read. It tells the story of a handful of scholarly climate science papers, the group of people who produced those papers, and another group of people who've utterly discredited them.

In the process we learn that some of the world's most famous science journals don't enforce their own policies. We learn that the scientific method appears to be an old-fashioned, entirely passé concept to a younger academic generation that nevertheless demands the prestige and respect accorded to genuine scientists. We learn that the scientific establishment has failed repeatedly to demonstrate moral leadership in the face of improper behaviour.

Along the way, we also learn some disturbing things about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2001, those in charge chose to make the hockey stick graph a central icon of the IPCC's latest report even though the graph's findings completely overturned established scientific thought (including the view expressed by the previous IPCC report published six years earlier).

The hockey stick paper's lead author wasn't a scholar with decades of experience whose methods had been thoroughly reviewed, discussed, and generally confirmed by the scientific community. Rather, Michael E. Mann was young. He received his PhD in 1998 - the same year the first hockey stick paper was published.

Well before the scientific community had had an opportunity to digest that paper (which implied that the Earth's surface temperature was rising dramatically), Mann was appointed lead author for an IPCC chapter that subsequently cited 10 papers he'd personally authored or co-authored in order to make its case. As Montford writes:

"...we can only stand back in admiration that someone who had published his PhD a matter of a year or so earlier could be invited to head the team writing one of the most critical chapters in one of the most important scientific reports written for decades - in that position he had a clear conflict of interest in assessing the published literature - he was going to be considering his own work."

So unconcerned was the IPCC regarding Mann's lack of experience, so enamored was it of his hockey stick graph, that when the IPCC's chairman released the results of the 2001 climate bible to the world's media, an enlarged version of the graph was displayed behind him.

And that is only the beginning of the story. This book describes how, when the next version of the IPCC report was being written, a senior bureaucrat threatened to revoke the reviewer status of Steve McIntyre - one of the hockey stick's critics and a Canadian hero.

The text of the chapter McIntyre was spending his own, unpaid time reviewing for the IPCC referred to two unpublished papers. In itself, this should ring alarm bells. Since neither paper had yet been shared with the larger scientific community, it was surely premature to consider them solid pieces of evidence.

McIntyre asked to see the datasets on which the unpublished papers relied, but the lead authors in both cases refused to make the information available. Rather than backing him up, an IPCC official accused McIntyre of behaving improperly - and threatened to ban him as an IPCC reviewer if he didn't cease his data pursuit.

In a sane world there is no way the IPCC would rely on yet-unpublished scientific papers in a report that influences trillion-dollar decisions. In a sane world, the fact that the authors had declined to share their data should have automatically disqualified their papers from IPCC consideration.

But as this excellent book reveals, this isn't a sane world. It's climate science.