Review by Alastair McIntosh
for the Scottish Review of Books
The Hockey Stick Illusion, A.W.
Montford, Stacey International, 2010,
ISBN 978-1-906768-35-5,
£10.99, 482pp.
The “hockey stick” is a graph that suggests the Earth’s temperature was relatively constant for the past thousand years but then, like a hockey stick’s blade, rises sharply from about 1900.
To the vast majority of climate scientists this suggests that the rate at which we’re burning coal and oil is putting the planet at risk. But according to A.W. Montford in this “definitive exposé” of one part of the science, it’s just not true.
The captain of Montford’s “Hockey Team” is the renowned American climatologist Michael Mann. Montford charts out the web that connects him to forty-two other scientists - sinister “links of co-authorship” where “each clique is largely self-contained” (p.254).
The Team conspires to keep Mann’s hockey stick shaped the way it is – flat then rising sharply. This requires weeding from the data evidence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) – an era of Vikings in Greenland and grape-growing in England that lasted some 300 years until 1250.
According to Montford “the flatter the representation … the scarier were the conclusions” (p. 27). If the MWP is not filtered out the hockey stick goes U-shaped. That would hint that maybe today’s global warming could, like the MWP, be down to natural causes. Maybe we don’t need to cut greenhouse gas emissions because they’re not the problem!
Montford’s main case is that Mann’s cronies have covered him as he cherry-picked and statistically steamrollered his data that used tree-rings to estimate past planetary temperatures. Leaked East Anglia emails clinch the case. The bottom line is that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate has “proven itself to be corrupt, biased and beset by conflicts of interest…. There is no conceivable way that politicians can justify this failing to their electorates. They have no choice but to start again” (pp. 390-1).
So much for Montford’s take on Mann and the IPCC. But who is Montford, and what are his seemingly persuasive sources?
Andrew Montford gained a BSc degree in chemistry from St Andrews and then became a chartered accountant. His claim to fame is as the pseudonymous blogger, Bishop Hill - “the dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought.”
In the book’s preface he describes how he learned about climate science from the blog Climate Audit – the work of Canadian mining engineer Steve McIntyre. Montford says: “While some of the statistics was (sic) over my head … I wondered if my newly-found understanding of the debate would enable me to take on … a public duty to make the story more widely known.”
He was rapidly rewarded. Posting a summary to Bishop Hill “briefly turned my sleepy and relatively obscure website … into a hive of activity, with thirty thousand hits being received over the following three days … saying nice things about what I had written [and] even an attempt to use my article as a source document for Wikipedia” (pp. 13-14).
But according to the Wall Street Journal, McIntyre and his cronies are themselves under fire. A German review revealed “a glitch” in Mann’s work (and Mann has conceded as much), but it “found this glitch to be of very minor significance.” Another study, this time from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, concluded that McIntyre had overplayed his hand: “The truth is somewhere in between, but closer to Dr. Mann.” Mann’s own university recently completed a review that exonerated him, not necessarily of error, but of “any wrongdoing”.
Montford’s book is a classic case of the terrier worrying the bull. There is no comparison in their intellectual weight. In contrast to Mann having published more than a hundred relevant contributions to scholarly journals, McIntyre has produced three and Montford, nil.
Even if Mann were guilty as charged the hockey stick rests on far more than his work alone. In particular, the MWP is largely a red herring. Its warming effect was most likely regional, not global. There is little serious scientific doubt about the hockey stick’s validity.
Like most climate change contrarians, Montford writes to persuade an audience that wants to be persuaded. Laying out a seemingly black and white case may flatter the prejudices of some readers. It will serve the psychological needs of those who can’t face their own complicity in climate change.
But at the end of the day, this book is what it says it is: a write-up of somebody else’s blog. Could it be that the author over-rates the forensic utility of his narrowly-informed approach? One has to ask if it amounts to any more than an intellectual conceit.
Alastair McIntosh of the Centre for
Human Ecology is a visiting professor at Strathclyde University and author of
Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition.
References: Not for publication – for my
source back-up only, accessed 14-7-10
Mann’s home page with publications list: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
New Scientist – Hockey Stick not proved wrong: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
Wall Street Journal – heat on Mann’s critics and 2 studies of Mann: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113027943843479277-5reMaU4_37mSf3Us8BhDeHITDyA_20061026.html?mod=blogs,
Medieval warming was regional: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11644-climate-myths-it-was-warmer-during-the-medieval-period-with-vineyards-in-england.html
American Chemical Society’s Environmental News – on McIntyre’s rise to fame (pp. 5-6) - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es053378b
Guardian on Mann cleared of science fraud: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/02/michael-mann-cleared
Penn State Uni announcement on Mann being cleared: http://www.research.psu.edu/news/2010/michael-mann-decision
Penn State Uni full report into Mann: http://live.psu.edu/fullimg/userpics/10026/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf
Virginia Attorney pursues Mann: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/07/the_university_of_virginia_hol.html
Union of Concerned Scientists etc. challenges Attorney’s attack on Mann: http://hamptonroads.com/2010/05/academics-fight-cuccinellis-call-climatechange-records
Uni of Virginia defends Attorney’s attack on Mann – academic freedom - http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/education/article/uva_fights_inquiry_by_cuccinelli/56663/
See Wikipedia – not the main entries, but the “Discussion” or “Talk” sections where editors debate what is acceptable in entries – under Mann, McIntyre, Montford and Hockey Stick Controversy.