The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption
of Science by A.W. Montford
Stacey International, 2010, ISBN
978-1-906768-35-5, £10.99, 482pp.
Review by Alastair McIntosh for the
Scottish Review
of Books, Vol 6, Issue 3, 14 August 2010
This
700-word review
is also available on the
Scottish Review of Books website at this link
along with a crop of near-identical responses suggesting that I had not read
Andrew Montford's book. Readers of this might also be interested in
my review of "Chill" by climate change contrarian Peter Taylor
which, as of summer 2010, is the subject of a
public
debate between me and Taylor on the website of ECOS - the journal of the
British Association of Nature Conservationists. [Update
2019: I'm sorry folks, the SRB and the public debate links above have
now gone defunct in website revamps. The review text is below, and note that
there's no point searching for the original elsewhere on Google because all
the links on 3rd party sites revert to the SRB's current home page. The
Taylor debate is lost, though if anybody badly needs it for research
purposes I'll probably have the files somewhere in my system].
Also on this
page are:
a)
Response to the backlash provoked by this review on
Montford's blog and in Wikipedia's discussion
b)
Response to Montford on the RealClimate scientists' blog
c)
Responses from Monbiot, Ward and Abbess to the
"Bishop Hill" bloggers
d)
A partial list of web references used in writing this
review (may be useful to others researching this issue)
The Review
The “hockey stick”
is a graph showing the Earth’s temperature relatively constant for the past
thousand years but then, like a hockey stick’s blade, rising sharply from about
1900 when human-induced greenhouse gas emissions seriously kicked in.
But according to
A.W. Montford’s “definitive exposé”, it’s just not true.
The captain of
Montford’s “Hockey Team” is the renowned American climatologist, Michael Mann,
and at least forty-two named co-conspirators from amongst acclaimed scientists.
Their motivation?
To keep the hockey-stick’s handle long and flat. Why? Because “the flatter the
representation [before the upward swing] … the scarier were the conclusions” (p. 27).
To generate the
scare, and with it, win grant-grubbing political prestige, required massaging
out the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) – an epoch that lasted 300 years until 1250,
when Vikings swashbuckled Greenland and wine from home-grown grapes swilled the
manor halls of England.
Had the MWP been
left in, claims Montford, the temperature curve for the past millennium would
look more U-shaped. This would have diminished the case for human-induced global
warming, obviating the urgency to discomfort ourselves by cutting CO2
emissions.
Montford claims
that the MWP was airbrushed out by cherry-picking and statistically
steamrollering tree-ring data – one of the proxies used to reconstruct past
planetary temperatures. Leaked East Anglia emails clinch the case. Bottom line:
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).
But who is Montford,
and what his sources?
Andrew Montford, a
chartered accountant with a BSc in chemistry from St Andrews University, is
better known as the pseudonymous blogger, Bishop Hill - self-described as
“the dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought.”
His book’s opening
paragraph tells how he learned the intricacies of climate science by reading
Climate Audit – the blog of Canadian mining consultant, Steve McIntyre. He
relates: “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” (p. 13).
After posting a
summary to Bishop Hill “my sleepy and relatively obscure website
[turned] 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 McIntyre’s attack on Mann is
strongly contested. A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
concluded that McIntyre had overplayed his hand. A German appraisal picked up “a
glitch” but “found this glitch to be of very minor significance.” An
investigation by the US National Academy of Sciences, according to a report in
Nature, “essentially upholds Mann’s findings.” And a review this year by
Mann’s own university exonerated him, not necessarily of all error (which is
inevitable in fast-evolving scientific fields), but of “any wrongdoing”.
Even if Mann were guilty as charged
by the climate change contrarians the hockey stick has been replicated by at
least a dozen other studies. Above all, the MWP is probably a red herring. Its
warming effect was probably more regional than global. A parallel would be our
past winter which was exceptionally cold regionally in Europe, but globally the
hottest that NASA has ever recorded.
Montford’s analysis might cut the
mustard with tabloid intellectuals but not with most scientists. Credibility
counts. Mann has published over a hundred relevant contributions to scholarly
journals compared, seemingly, with McIntyre, three, and Montford, nil.
Meanwhile, Mann and his colleagues get on with refining their methods and
datasets, publishing in such world-renowned journals such as Nature and
Science.
The Hockey Stick
Illusion might serve a psychological need in those who can’t face their own
complicity in climate change, but at the end of the day it’s exactly what it
says on the box: a write-up of somebody else’s blog.
At best it will
help to keep already-overstretched scientists “on their toes”. At worst, it’s a
yapping terrier worrying the bull; a spinning ball that cripples action,
potentially costing lives and livelihoods.
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.
Response to the backlash to this review
I was invited to
write this review by the Scottish Review of Books as a Scottish writer with a
published record on climate change issues. Following its appearance there has been a
huge backlash
on Andrew Montford's blog, where he represents himself as "Bishop Hill", signs
himself off with a Gothic cross, and is referred to by readers by such titles as
"Yer Grace". All good fun, I agree, but serious science? See
here (for responses to Montford's alert about the review) and
here (for followers responding to Montford's pondering as to how he
might respond to my review).
The review has also set off debate
amongst the editors of "The Hockey Stick Illusion" entry on Wikipedia, which can be read
in the "Discussion" to that entry.
I have input to this one because, within a day of the review being published on
14 Aug 2010, there had been several pages of debate about its suitability for
use in Wikipedia. Some editors considered it an important review - apparently it
is the first critical one - and wanted to use it as a basis for re-writing the
entry. Others, and Mark Nutley in particular, persisted in insisting that the
review failed to meet Wikipedia criteria because, he tried to make out, a) the
Scottish Review of Books is a one-man self-published show (as distinct from
being the leading Scottish literary review paper that it is), and b) there was,
he maintained, no evidence that I was the Alastair McIntosh I appeared to be. On
this basis Nutley attempted to have all reference to my criticism of Andrew Montford removed from Wikipedia.
I put the record straight in the hope of averting not the usual identity theft, but identity denial.
Meanwhile, what had blown up into an editorial dispute was referred to the
Wikipedia arbitration process and the entry for "The Hockey Stick Illusion" was
frozen from having changes made until the matter is resolved.
The main thrust of
my critics on the Montford / Bishop Hill blog site, in the responses that some
of them (I suspect, mostly the same people) have made on the SRB's comments
section (at the foot of their book reviews page), and in the Wikipedia
discussion, is a presumption that I have not read the book, but have pre-judged
it and made an ad hominen (against the person rather than against the argument)
attack on Montford. There anger is, to paraphrase one respondent, is that I have
attempted to knock their knight off his steed rather than addressing the issues
that he has raised. These issues, they consider, are substantial because they
discredit not only the IPCC climate scientist Michael Mann, but also his "Hockey
Team" of 42 other climate change scientists that Montford connects together in a
web diagram (p. 254), and it all ties in with the supposed University of East
Anglia leaked-emails debate around the "hockey stick". My personal ethos is to
try and go "gentle on the people; heavy on the issues," but sometimes it is the
people who are the issue, as I have suggested in my response to the Wikipedia
discussion, as follows:
Response by review author, Alastair McIntosh
Hello ... this is Alastair McIntosh speaking - the one who wrote
the review in Scottish Review of Books. It is not fitting for me to
comment on most of this debate. Suffice to say that I am delighted
to see the rigour with which it is being conducted. It is, however,
fitting for me to say that I am indeed the Alastair McIntosh that
your links have identified. Also, that the Scottish Review of Books
is Scotland's leading such journal and is not a self-published work
or a blog. It is distributed in the Herald newspaper, one of
Scotland's two newspapers of record, and this particular edition is
also being distributed in some sort of link with the Edinburgh
International Book Festival. Alan Taylor may be the overall editor,
but he is not the staff member who commissioned the review from me.
May I comment on the proposals to use what I have said towards a
summary of what Mr Montford's book is about? I think it would be
fair to draw on my material as a partial source, but my review, for
which I only had 700 words, does not attempt to be a comprehensive
summary of his arguments. Instead, I used most of my space to
demonstrate that Mr Montford is a non-starter as far as I am
concerned because he, and for the mostpart, the people whose blogs
he is using as his source material, are not peer reviewed in this
area of science. My review is therefore more about what constitutes
science than it is about what Montford actually says. It's bottom
line is that while the book might represent Mr Montford's opinion,
it does not represent science, and therefore I'm not interested in
engaging very deeply with his arguments even if I were suitably
qualified so to do, which, as a human ecologist, I am not.
I was alerted to this discussion happening by Mark Nutley's
comment on Montford's blog, "Bishop Hill", where he wrote on 15th
Aug: "Martin A, i hate to have to tell you this but they are
delighted at this review over at wiki. One user has stated he will
use it to rewrite the synopsis and also use it to call Andrew a
conspiracy theorist, this sadly is honey for the worker bee`s over
at wiki :( ". It was either on that blog or in the SRB's comments
section that I noted somebody questioning whether I would have been
paid for writing this review. For the sake of transparency, let me
answer "yes." I get paid the standard book review fee that, as I
understand it, the SRB as a literary journal offers to all its
reviewers.
Most of the bloggers attacking the review (over 50 on the Bishop
Hill site so far) are making the assumption that I did not read the
book. On the contrary, it took me a week's work to read it, check
out Montford's arguments without attempting to judge them beyond
what the peer reviewed science supports, and write the piece. This
need to write with extreme caution is why, I think, you have been
finding that most serious climate change researchers just ignore the
contrarians - to engage with them is costly in time, unproductive of
results, and potentially risky on the legal front if they happen to
say something in error. I have engaged with both Montford and Peter
Taylor (author of Chill) because I have been concerned at how parts
of the media have amplified their arguments, but it is not a form of
engagement that I intend to make my hobby, and forgive me if I do
not engage with the ongoing discussion on this fascinating page.
Best wishes,Alastair
McIntosh (talk)
21:48, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
The problem that is
perceived in my position, and which can make it feel very disempowering to those
may not have a scientific education and proven themselves credible in a
given field, is that science is not democratic. Its logic requires a person to
make up their own mind within parameters that demand epistemological humility -
that is to say, humility as to what you think you know, and don't know, and how
you judge the difference. Such humility even requires an unfashionable respect
for the "authority" (i.e. the authorship, and authenticity) of those who have
previously proven their competence - thus the importance of peer review, of
professional accreditation, and degrees of learning.
Let me illustrate
this with a hypothetical example. Imagine that you require brain surgery.
Andrew Montford might come to you saying, as he has said in his book about climate
change, that he has read a blog about brain surgery and together with other
material that he has self-studied, this qualifies him to rival the brain surgery
skills offered by those "elitist" fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons.
People who are frightened, desperate or merely gullible, might be taken in by
this. The annals of "quack" medicine are full of such examples. But are we
seriously obliged to take such a claim seriously? Should such a voice be given
commensurate space "for balance" in public discourse? And if we happen to be a
qualified brain surgeon, should we devote our time debating with such quacks? Or
should we tell them: "You may have a valid point, or you may be just a
self-inflated poseur who punches above their weight. But the matter is easily
resolved. Either pass your bullets on to somebody who is more credible than you
are to have them taken seriously. There are many bright young PhDs looking to
make their name by overturning the status quo. Or, go out and get yourself
credibly qualified in brain surgery and then publish your ideas in a
peer-reviewed journal where it can be fully subjected to research scrutiny. Then
we might take you seriously. As for your criticism that there's no point in so
doing because, you claim, we've got the whole show fraudulently stitched up ...
well, at the end of the day we conduct our affairs under political scrutiny via
parliamentary committees, the National Health Service, public research councils,
etc., so if you think that we are corrupt, write to your Member of Parliament;
and if you think your MP is also part of the conspiracy, it's a free country, so
stand for election yourself ... and then you might achieve a public mandate to
set up your own commission of enquiry. Otherwise, please leave us to get on with
our work of trying to save lives."
In short, then, I
acknowledge the frustration of those who may not be qualified to take on the
weight of peer reviewed consensus science, but I am not sympathetic towards that
frustration. We all have to learn to live within our limitations, and we can all
work to overcome those. It is crucial that the general public engage with, and
set the acceptable frameworks for, the values through which science is
expressed. But part of that expression requires the holding in place of
accountable structures, such as peer review, by which the facts and hypotheses
of science can be expertly weighed and not simply put on vox pop trial by
blog. I think that a lot of the problem that led to "Climategate" is the tension
between work that is continually in progress, especially in a competitive
bidding funding environment, and transparency, especially in contexts of highly
charged political debate such as reached its climax with climate change when
world leaders met in Copenhagen in 2009. These tensions between expert science
and public policy go far beyond climate science and will rightly be the subject
of much policy and academic debate in years to come.
Note that a
detailed scientific rebuttal of Montford's book, now with nearly 600 responses
from the scientific community attached to it, is on the website of RealClimate -
see
The Montford Delusion.
Finally... the responses on Montford's Bishop Hill blog (as per the
links above) make for quite a study of the psychology of climate change
contrarianism. To summarise, using actual quotes except where interpolated in
square brackets:
I had a hard
time understanding the review as it is not written in any language I know...
Anybody who uses the word epistomology [sic] is immediately suspect....Some
of the Warmists at Wiki are trying to replace the current entry on HSI with
a "synopsis" drawn from the McIntosh review - essentially casting Your Grace
as a conspiracy-theory nutter... Hate to sound like DeepClimate, but I
think it would be more interesting to figure out where Alistair got that
review ... [But] know who you are dealing with. Professor Alastair McIntosh,
Centre for Human Ecology is very much part of Big Environment (he and his
eco-chums are in it for the money)... The guy seems to be a bit of an Uber
tree hugger ... reminiscent of the proto-green Blood and Soil movement in
Germany... Another one of these weird Highlanders who seem to dominate
Scotland ... but don't expect any sense from inclusive, sustainable green
Scotland.... been out on the moors too long ... there is more to life than
living in a highland croft with only sheep for friends... Alastair, just
keep tossing off your caber... His beliefs are threatened by the cogent
facts in your book and he doesn't want anyone to read it... a person
incapable of any real inquiry ... If he's prepared to publish a review of a
book he hasn't read, then he deserves a kicking ... he is an imbecile of the
highest order.... He is an enemy of the people and the state and is declared
anathema.... Adopt a lordly disdain and ignore him... You could always
return the favour by reviewing his book [on Amazon] ... you get the
picture... Or better, deploy heavy ad hominem artillery to characterize the
estimable Alistaire McIntosh, b'gosh, as a "coprophagic proctocranial." What
ho, when they lifted the lid!... Rightness is irrelevant. Just keep humour
and lightness of touch.
George
Monbiot's response to the above was "Welcome to my world! Good work - someone
had to do it." Bob Ward of the LSE's climate change unit put an email out on the
Crisis Forum list to say it had prompted him to write
this for the Guardian on Montford having been asked to review Climategate
for Lord (Nigel) Lawson's organisation - "Andrew Montford who is conducting an
investigation into the UEA inquiry has a history of omitting evidence to suit
his arguments." And the fittingly named campaigner, Jo Abbess, has issued
a challenge to "Bishop Hill" to come and debate his views round the campfire
with the Climate Camp protestors currently in Edinburgh.
Some web references, accessed
July 2010 in writing this review
A.W. Montford's Bishop Hill website:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/
Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit site
(McIntyre is Montford's primary source):
http://climateaudit.org/
Steve McIntyre profile on SourceWatch:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_McIntyre
Ross McKitrick's home page (McKitrick
is McIntyre's co-author as cited by Montford):
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/ross.html
Ross McKitrick on SourceWatch:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ross_McKitrick
Mann’s home page with publications
list (Mann is :
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
Mann’s 2009 Science paper on
the Medieval Warming Period:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/articles/articles.html
RealClimate on “The Montford
Delusion” (appeared just after I submitted my piece):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/
New Scientist – Hockey Stick not
proved wrong:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
Nature on “Academy affirms
hockey-stick graph” (this is pay-to-view):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/4411032a.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
Fred Pearce in Guardian on Hockey
Stick/Mann:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hockey-stick-graph-climate-change
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/
Various other useful links, not all
consulted:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/07/muir-russell-emails-climategate-vindicates-climate-science-cru/
http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/01/michael-mann-hockey-stick-exonerated-penn-state/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/national-academies-synthesis-report/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/what-we-can-learn-from-studying-the-last-millennium-or-so/
Also, see Wikipedia – not the
main entries which can be of questionable provenance, but the “Discussion” or
“Talk” sections to these entries, where editors debate what is acceptable in
terms of Wikipedia’s criteria of probity – see under Mann, McIntyre, Montford, Hockey Stick
Controversy and, especially, The Hockey Stick Illusion. This was the only context that I found
on the web where both
sides of this debate really thrashed it out with each other with the proviso
that they are, of course, debating as Wikipedia gatekeepers, and not as experts
in climate change.
Internet Users Please Note:
The material on this page is original text as submitted to
the publication stated beneath the title. As the editing process means that some
parts may have been cut, altered or corrected after it left my hands, or I might
have made minor subsequent amendments, or scanned material may contain scanning
errors, please specify in citation "internet version from
www.AlastairMcIntosh.com" as well as citing the place of first publication.
Note that author particulars, including contact address(es) and organisational
affiliations may have changed since first publication.
This material is © Alastair McIntosh and any co-authors and/or first
publishers. However (and without prejudice to any legal rights of co-authors or
the original or subsequent publishers), I give my permission for it to be freely
copied for non-commercial educational purposes provided that due acknowledgement
is given. Please advise of any uses that might particularly interest me. For
commercial enquires, please contact original publishers and/or email me, mail@AlastairMcIntosh.com.
Thanks, folks, and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!
To RETURN to any sub-index from which you approached this page, click BACK on
your web browser. To return to my homepage, click "Home" above.
www.AlastairMcIntosh.com
14 August 2010

|