Carry on up the charts

The Prospect review seems to have done the trick, with the Hockey Stick Illusion up around 1000 places in the Amazon UK chart to around the 400 mark.  Unfortunately it looks as though Prospect are only going to publish the review online, which is a bit of a blow. It's still nice to be noticed though.

First print review of HSI

Prospect magazine is the first print media outlet to publish a proper review of The Hockey Stick Illusion.  Hooray!

Montford’s book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.

McIntyre and Harrison

One of my favourite political bloggers, "Tom Paine", says some nice things about the Hockey Stick Illusion in an interesting essay charting the parallels between Steve McIntyre's experiences at the hands of the scientific establishment and those of John Harrison, the man who solved the problem of longitude.

Timmy in the Express

Tim Worstall has a piece on the economics of climate change in the Daily Express, which is excellent and not just because he manages to squeeze in a reference to the Hockey Stick Illusion in passing.

Reiner Grundmann on the Hockey Stick Illusion

Reiner Grundmann reviews The Hockey Stick Illusion at Die Klimazweibel.

Michael Meacher on the Hockey Stick

The left wing Labour MP Michael Meacher has posted an article about problems with the Freedom of Information Act and makes a passing allusion to the Hockey Stick affair.

It is dreadful that the FOI requests made to the scientists at the UEA climactic research unit were so disgracefully blocked (albeit that some of the climate change sceptics demanding the information may have been obsessive and partisan themselves). Some of the data, for example concerning the location of 42 rural Chinese weather stations or the width of annual growth rings of trees in frozen Siberian bogs, might be arcane and of minute relevance to fundamental climate change questions, but it should still have been made readily available. The evidence about the 'hockey stick' is much more serious and should certainly have been provided in full. Scientific data should be a free resource to all who seek it. But that of course applies much more widely than just to contentions about climate change.

Amen to that. I wonder if he has read my book?

Interview in El Reg

There's an interview with one A.W. Montford Esq just gone up at the Register.

Climategate book reviews

Reviews of the Climategate books - Montford, Mosher and Fuller, Booker and Costella - by the Bit Tooth Energy blog.

Hockey Stick Illusion - US availability

I note that the Hockey Stick Illusion is now available on Amazon.com. The price is highish, but no longer silly.

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds)

Flipping bizarre

An interesting little development on one of the story lines from The Hockey Stick Illusion. In Chapter 14, I tell the story of one of Michael Mann's later attempts at creating a hockey stick shaped temperature curve - Mann 2008. This paper is not as well-known as the Hockey Stick itself, of course, but has become fairly notorious because of an oddity in Mann's algorithm. Because of the way it works, the algorithm is unable to detect the orientation of the proxy series in a dataset and in the case of Mann 2008, this failing had some unfortunate consequences, namely that some of the series ended up upside-down, with what would normally have been read as declining temperatures flipped over so that they looked like warming.

This error was picked up extremely quickly by Climate Audit readers, and McIntyre included this point in a formal comment on the paper. The correction didn't, however, prevent an identical error being made in a later paper, Kaufman 2009, which was written by some of the same authors as Mann 2008 (although not the HockeyStickMeister himself).

Click to read more ...

Spectator article now online

Matt Ridley's piece in the Spectator is available here.

Cited by Booker

Christopher Booker cites The Hockey Stick Illusion in his column this weekend, the first time it's made an appearance in a broadsheet.

The centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report was Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick", the graph purporting to show temperatures in the late 20th century soaring at an unprecedented rate – later exposed as a statistical artefact. Another new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion by A W Montford, brilliantly tells the bizarre tale of how Mann's colleagues, calling themselves "the Hockey Team" and now at the heart of the IPCC, managed to resurrect the discredited graph for inclusion in its 2007 report. Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story. And of course, it was incriminating leaked emails between members of the Hockey Team that were at the centre of the recent "Climategate" scandal at the University of East Anglia.

Most disturbing of all are the glimpses the story gives of the inner workings of the IPCC, an institution now so discredited and scientifically corrupted that only those determined to shut their eyes could possibly defend it. This is now compounded by the recent revelations by Dr North and myself in these pages of how its chairman, Dr Pachauri, has built a worldwide network of business links which provide his Delhi institute with a sizeable income.

Reprinting

Just had word from the publisher that The Hockey Stick Illusion is reprinting. Pretty chuffed.

Talking to Brian Micklethwait

If you click here, you can catch a longish interview I did with Brian Micklethwait. For those who don't know of Brian, he is best known as a libertarian thinker, working for the Libertarian Alliance and writing regularly at Samizdata, the biggest UK libertarian blog, as well as his own site. 

We cover a lot of ground, and there is some background on me, for those of you who are interested in such things. (Heaven forbid I should ever gain a public persona). I haven't dared listen to it yet, but I'll give it a bash tonight.

We recorded this in the runup to Christmas, when I was still rather concerned about the book being published while the Climategate story was hot. I guess I needn't have worried.

Some MSM attention

Yesterday's Daily Express (a mid-market tabloid for those of you who don't know it) had a two page feature on the climate scandals, and gave The Hockey Stick Illusion a passing name check.

WHAT'S THE FUSS ABOUT THE HOCKEY STICK GRAPH?
Much of the current panic began in 1998 when Dr Michael Mann and
his co-authors published their now-discredited 'hockey stick' temperature plot. named for its shape that showed a long trend of steady temperature drop over a 1,000 year period and a sudden rise since the early nineties, it became the foundation stone for the global warming brigade.

New book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, by scientist Andrew Montford, tells how the figures don't stack up and how lone researcher Steve McIntyre exposed the myth. In fact the hockey stick, based on a computer generated model ignores natural climate fluctuations in the past. Christopher Booker, an author who believes the theory of man-made global warming has been disproved describes the original work as "one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history,of science' and adds: "Temperatures have always gone up and down over the years. The trend since 2001 is down. Noone knows what is going to happen but almost all the computer models on which man-made climate
change claims are based have been shown to be wrong.

There are a few nuances that I'd take issue with, and I'd not normally be described as a scientist, working in scientific publishing rather than research, but all in all I can't complain (apart from the fact that they recommend Booker's book at the end rather than mine!)