The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds)
A.W. Montford
Language: English
Pages: 482
ISBN: 1906768358
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Here is the definitive exposé of the distorted science behind the iconic global warming graph centrally responsible for the global panic about climate change.
From Steve McIntyre's earliest attempts to reproduce the Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph, to the explosive publication of his work and the launch of a congressional inquiry, The Hockey Stick Illusion is a remarkable tale of scientific misconduct and amateur sleuthing. It explains the complex science of this most controversial of temperature reconstructions in layperson's language and lays bare the remarkable extent to which climatologists have been willing to break their own rules in order to defend climate science's most famous finding.
The book also covers the recent leak of the email archives of the Climatic Research Unit which has led to the resignation of its Director, Professor Phil Jones, and exposed the degree to which climate scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have hidden and manipulated data to support their claims.
threw the question open to the forum to see if anyone could help or shed any light on the problem. The readers at Climate Skeptics were a diverse bunch. People from all over the world and from very different backgrounds used the forum to exchange news and views on the development of the global warming scare, from both scientific and political viewpoints. Teachers and engineers were common on the site, and there were other interested amateurs from a huge variety of other specialisms. There were
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3352. 262. Hulme M. Newspaper scare headlines can be counter-productive. Nature. 2007; 445(7130): 818. 263. Information Commissioner’s Office. Awareness Guidance 2: Information provided in confidence; 12 September 2008. Available at: http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/freedom_of_information/detailed_specialist_guides/confidentialinformation_v4.pdf. 264. Jansen E, Overpeck J, Briffa H, Duplessy JC, Joos F, Masson-Delmotte V, et al. Palaeoclimate. In:
found that this divergence was not unique among those series where updated figures were available, with Series 51, 54 and 59 all showing declining ring widths while the versions used by Mann showed increases. More on PCs Having finally exhausted, for the time being, the possibilities for error in the MBH98 database, McIntyre returned to the subject of the principal components calculation. Where Mann had got a PC that extended back in time further than the underlying data, nothing could be
suggesting widening tree rings, apparently the result of global warming. The bottom chart is the equivalent from McIntyre’s analysis of the same dataset, calculated using a standard PC algorithm and showing, well, not much of anything. This was starting to look like dynamite: Mann had got his PC calculation wrong, and in the Antipodean proxy compilation at least, the effect of putting it right was to make the hockey stick shape disappear completely. Reconstruction How would this pan out
to Ammann that they write a joint paper outlining where they agreed and where they differed and setting out possible approaches to resolving those differences. Ammann, however, was noncommittal. It would, he said, interfere with his career advancement to be so closely involved with McIntyre, although one wonders if this linking of their names would have been quite as bad as the alternative: namely, a possible reputation for withholding adverse results. Regardless of this, a few days after