Me and Bob

Bob Ward has written an article in Comment is Free...about...me.

Did he read it?

My publisher wonders if I am going to write to the Scottish Review of Books and ask to respond to Alastair McIntosh's review. School is back tomorrow and there is something of a backlog of real work to complete. But I thought I would set down a few thoughts and see if I can bring myself to write anything.

Click to read more ...

Scottish Review of Books

A critical review of The Hockey Stick Illusion in the Scottish Review of Books. I was interested to see the Huybers and von Storch critiques of McIntyre's GRL paper mentioned without any allusion to the reasons given in my book as to why they were wrong.

You get a lovely warm feeling when this is the best your critics can come up with...

Bunfight at the Wiki corral

The bunfight over the Wiki page for The Hockey Stick Illusion continues apace, with the whole article now locked down. One of the bones of contention is whether the NWT review that I posted about is allowable, with one participant arguing that the review (which was by NWT's editor) was "a comment to promote a product in a webshop".

The idea that the magazine's editor should be writing sales copy for a webshop is rather extraordinary, so I queried this with Marcel Crok, who ascertained that the review had appeared in the magazine proper...

...and in a sister publication called De Ingenieur....

One word for readers here - I suggest you don't get involved in the bunfight. Leave it to those who have been dealing with the issue already. We don't want to fall foul of Wiki's proscriptions against canvassing.

HSI - big in Hawaii

Another review from the Pacific - this time from the Hawaii Reporter, an online newspaper.

...deserves a prominent place in your library.

A citation

According to the Wiki page for The Hockey Stick Illusion, the book has been cited in a paper by Oxford legal scholar Elizabeth Fisher. It's good to see an impact being made outside the narrow confines of the climate blogosphere.

Geoscientist magazine on HSI

The reviews are coming thick and fast - here's the latest one, from Geoscientist, the magazine of the Geological Society.

Andrew Montford tells this detective story in exhilarating style. He has assembled an impressive case that the consensus view on recent climate history started as poor science and was corrupted when climate scientists became embroiled in IPCC politics. His portrayal of the palaeoclimatology community is devastating; they are revealed as amateurish, secretive, evasive and belligerent. But the most serious charge is that they have simply failed to demonstrate any scientific integrity in confronting McIntyre. The University of East Anglia emails, which appeared just as Montford was completing his book, suggest that the Hockey Team were more interested in knobbling McIntyre than in addressing his arguments.

Read the whole thing.

HSI in NWT

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.

Click to read more ...

HSI in Quadrant magazine

John Dawson reviews The Hockey Stick Illusion in Australia's Quadrant magazine.

The Hockey Stick Illusion is the shocking story of a graph called the Hockey Stick. It is also a textbook of tree ring analysis, a code-breaking adventure, an intriguing detective story, an exposé of a scientific and political travesty, and the tale of a herculean struggle between a self-funded sceptic and a publicly funded hydra, all presented in the measured style of an analytical treatise.

Read the whole thing.

McIntyre on RC on BH

Steve M weighs in on Tamino's review of the Hockey Stick Illusion.

Booker namechecks man of cloth

Christopher Booker's latest article namechecks your humble host while discussing the selection of papers for the Oxburgh report.

Josh 28

More cartoons by Josh here.

Tamino on the Hockey Stick Illusion

Tamino has a rave review of the Hockey Stick Illusion up at Real Climate. I'm reading it now.

A few initial observations - there is a lot of discussion of proxy selection rules in Tamino's piece. This is complex for those who aren't embedded in the nitty gritty of the science, but stand back and ask yourself this: if you have over 100 series in your database, and one of these is the fourth most important pattern in the tree rings of a couple of closely related tree species in one area of the western USA, how comfortable are you that this series should form the basis of the temperature reconstruction for the northern hemisphere? The idea that you can reconstruct hemispheric temperatures in this way is deeply unsatisfactory.

Click to read more ...

Another HSI review

The Maui News has a review of The Hockey Stick Illusion.

The Hockey Stick Illusion deserves space on the shelf of classic books about science fraud like Peter Medawar's The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice. Montford, though not a scientist, is a good choice to tell this story, for, as Medawar said, "There is poetry in science but also a lot of bookkeeping."

HSI in ECOS

ECOS, the magazine of the British Association of Nature Conservationists has published a review of The Hockey Stick Illusion. You can download a draft of the review here. It's written by Peter Taylor, the author of Chill.

This book will have repercussions. It is well written, though demanding of constant focus, well laid-out and thoroughly referenced. It should be read by every believer in the authority of scientific institutions – but of course, that is not likely. Montford has done a great service to science, to history and to a public grown sceptical of the scare stories upon which vast amounts of research funding, carbon trading and energy technology subsidies depend. That story cannot now claim that the 20th century warmth is unprecedented.