There's a new review of the Hockey Stick Illusion at Prospect Magazine's blog. Two reviews from the same magazine!
This one is a critique, by Professor Richard Joyner of Nottingham Trent University. He hasn't really got anything to say apart from saying he doesn't like it. It's good though to see that he has no issues with the facts as presented, just like several of the other critiques. I think we can probably say that there is now a "consensus" that the facts are accurately presented in the book.
This bit is good:
The real wickedness of Montford’s book is his use of innuendo.
In a week where I have been referred to as a "denialist machine lackey", having my book called wicked is fairly mild. I imagine the next review will refer to me as a "capitalist running dog" or some such.
As for innuendo, Prof Joyner actually turns out to be something of an adept at this himself, closing his review off with lots of references to politicians and big business trying to misrepresent scientific results.
Anyway, what Prof Joyner calls "innuendo" may well be what others refer to as "letting the facts speak for themselves". It's hard to tell because the Prof is not actually able to provide any examples of this alleged innuendo. (His review doesn't contain any quotes from the book). All he says to support this particular criticism is this:
Consistently and without evidence he queries the actions and motives of those with whom he disagrees.
This is most peculiar. I mean, there are 270 references in the book. That's really quite a lot of evidence. And Prof Joyner may have heard of the Climategate emails, heavily sourced in Chapter 17. What are these if not evidence?
What else is there? Well, he says I should have referred to Steve M's failure to publish his tree ring research. In a book in which one of the themes is the difficulty sceptics have in getting published, this seems a rather bizarre position for Prof Joyner to take. And it's actually even odder than that, since the data has been freely available since it came out of the dendro lab.
They're still struggling aren't they?