I've also uncovered a review of The Hockey Stick Illusion in Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, the Dutch popular science magazine that played such an important part in bring McIntyre and McKitrick's work to prominence. I'm grateful to Marcel Crok for arranging this translation:
Assuming that the climate is changing due to human activities and that quick and substantial global policies are necessary to counter what many scientists characterize as a catastrophically changing climate, one might think that the transparency in climate science has the highest priority. Nothing is further from the truth.
The book The Hockey Stick Illusion of British science writer Andrew Montford, shows a staggering picture of how the "official" climate science is dealing with criticism. The subtitle, “ClimateGate And The Corruption of Science”, was perhaps added at the last possible moment, as was the final chapter about ClimateGate, the leaking of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This institution provided data for the infamous "hockey stick" graph that played a major role in the third report of the UN climate panel IPCC.
The hockey stick is a reconstruction of climate from the year 1000 onwards. The graph shows that until about 1850, the global average temperature had been dropping slightly, then rising sharply afterwards. Many scientists think that it is not likely a coincidence that the temperature has been rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, hence the increase has to be man-made.
However, critics argue that the data have been cherry picked, thereby effectively erasing a very warm period during the Middle Ages, as it were. That warm period, before people began their mass injection of the greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere, would prove that the current warming is part of a series of natural fluctuations.
The leaking of the emails has led to an increasingly mounting pressure on the IPCC has to finally be complete open and disclose how the assessment of the role of humans in climate change has come to be. Montford's book, a skeptic, is a meticulously detailed report of ten years of climate science based on written sources in the style of a webblog. Montford has been given access to the electronic correspondence of, among others, Canadian researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick and U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, the man who was the first to publish the hockey stick graph.
The Canadians were in 2002 among the first to annoyingly follow climate science. Unfortunately we hardly read about the personal motivations of McIntyre himself to dig into the Hockey Stick. It looks a bit like a revenge of a retired mathematician for a missed brilliant academic career when he was younger. The question about his motives is relevant because climate scientists have often argued that skeptics such as McIntyre have ties with the oil industry, although even if it were true, should not detract from the scientific nature of their criticism. Arguments and facts are either correct or incorrect.
Montford was also unable to talk to the climate scientists who are criticized. You would like to hear from scientist like Michael Mann why - if they genuinely believe that they have the science is on their side - they sabotage criticism by refusing to share their data and methods with their critics in order for an independent reproduction of their proof. Such pettiness does not help the credibility of the urgency of "the climate crisis”.
Nevertheless, despite all the investigative journalism, the book does not get to the heart of ‘Climate Gate’. Are we dealing with tunnel vision and fear of reputation damage among climate scientist or with real scientific fraud? Such a book has yet to appear.
Erwin van den Brink