Yesterday morning I was delighted to see that Andrew’s Montfod’s book will be published on Monday. For those of us who have read his Bishop Hill blog over the last few years there should be a treat in store, and one that could not come at a better time.
A book length treatment of the Hockey Stick controversy is long overdue. Although David Holland’s 2007 paper on the subject for Energy and Environment did an excellent job of putting this strange tale in context for non-specialists, and Marcel Croc’s lengthy article in Natuurwetenschap & Techniek had provided much fascinating background prior to that, the only comprehensive source of information on this subject is the extensive posts by Steve McIntyre at climateaudit.org, and these are definitely not for the faint hearted. In any case, both the Holland and Croc contributions have been overtaken by events as much has happened since their publication.
Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph has often been described as the icon of the global warming movement, and with good reason. Even more potent than dodgy representations of polar bears seemingly marooned on icebergs, this graph is an image that compellingly conjures up concerns about human influence on the climate that have come to dominate political, economic and social agendas worldwide during the last decade. It appears to give absolute scientific authority to all we have been told about a planet imperilled by human profligacy. Its message has been immensely persuasive, and in some respects this has been devastating.
At least since the 18th century, when the owners of grand country houses began to surround themselves with extensive parks, we have had a respect for the aesthetic and spiritual value of beautiful countryside. During the 20th century protection of this aspect of our heritage was incorporated into legislation. The green belts that surround many of our cities, the creation of National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty are examples of this. The planning laws in general have attempted to prevent the incursion of development in rural areas.
Back in 2004, I began work on a book about changing attitudes to the British landscape. I was puzzled and concerned that, soon after the start of the new millennium, a willingness to sacrifice a vital part of our cultural heritage by building wind farms had become acceptable. Just the kind of places which, only a decade or so previously, we would have struggled to preserve, were now being industrialised with no sign of widespread public outrage. My initial assumption was that an industrialised population had become detached from the natural world and was now indifferent to what was happening.
At that time media coverage of climate change amounted to little more than an occasional scare story about glaciers retreating or the latest prediction from a computer model; the usual outpourings of woe from the environmental movement. There seemed little reason to suppose that this amounted to more than just another fashionable scare story that would eventually run its course and fizzle out. I had already encountered a few:
- Drab summers of the 1950s blamed on nuclear bomb testing
- Mutual Assured Destruction and a nuclear winter
- Global dimming from industrial pollutants causing a new ice age
- The Club of Rome’s warnings about the population bomb, mass starvation and the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel deposits
- Acid rain and the widespread destruction of forests
- CFCs, the hole in the ozone layer, and pandemic skin cancer
- HIV becoming a killer on the scale of the Black Death
- Megadeaths caused by mad cow disease
All that changed one morning when I opened a copy of National Geographic that was lying on my workable. This edition had the headline ‘Global Warming: bulletins from a warmer world’. A double page fold-out featured a version of the Hockey Stick by Mann and Jones published in GRL Vol 30 No 15 (2003).
I was less familiar with the internet then than I am now, and although I had heard of the Hockey Stick graph I had been unable to find it. But I did know that this was supposed to be the single piece of scientific evidence that clinched the armageddon scenario, and apparently no one was questioning it. On the other hand, I had assumed that when I actually saw the Hockey Stick in the flesh it would turn out to be a whole lot less convincing than it was made out to be.
This is what confronted me:
To say that I was shocked might be an exaggeration, but I was certainly brought up all standing with a distinct feeling of dread.
The problem I was facing now was a pretty serious one. Apart from the obvious implications for humanity, quite a lot of work had already gone into the book and none of it took any account of AGW being anything other than just another environmental scare story. The graphic that I was now looking at seemed very neat, very dramatic and completely irrefutable.
When I’m writing and I get stuck, my first reaction is always the same. I fumble around in my pockets until I find my pipe, tobacco and lighter, hoping that by the time I get the thing lit and drawing properly I’ll have had a useful thought or two. If this doesn’t work, then I go for a walk round my table, which is a large L-shaped arrangement at the centre of a big room: another attempt to play for time.
Having stared at the page for a while through an increasingly dense haze of blue smoke, puffing ever more desperately on my pipe, I decided that it was time for a trip round the table. When I got back to the place where the National Geographic lay open I stopped and looked at the graph, but it was no less uncompromising and I set off round the table again, very slowly this time.
Another long stare at the Hockey Stick got me nowhere, and when I started my third circuit I was no longer thinking about Mann’s computations but about what I could do to adjust my book plan, and my thinking , in the light of this new revelation.
This was a good thing, because when I came round to the infernal graph again I saw it with new eyes, and there seemed to be something wrong. It was all too neat, too dramatic and too conclusive. Science isn’t like that, and nor is the natural world. I sat down and began to examine it more critically. There were three things that struck me, none of which, incidentally, I would find convincing or even credible today.
When I was at school, I was taught that if you drew a graph it was rather important that all the data in each series was derived in just the same way. The version of Mann’s Hockey Stick that I was looking at clearly depended on splicing proxy and instrumental data for both temperature and Co2 levels. That seemed odd.
Then there was the medieval warm period; where the hell had that gone? I’d heard of Hubert Lamb and knew that his millennial reconstruction was derived from a wealth of historical, archaeological, botanic, entomological and other observations. What I was looking at now seemed to be a complex mathematical construct derived from only one source: tree rings.
Lastly, and I’m not proud of this now, it crossed my mind that the graph might suggest that both temperature and Co2 levels in the atmosphere had increased during the last millennium in proportion to the amount of scientific interest and research effort that they had attracted. But I did realise that this was a rather flippant idea.
As there seemed to be nothing in the MSM questioning the authority of the Hockey Stick I started to search on the net and soon found Steve McIntyre and John A’s newly launched Climate Audit blog; the first blog that I had ever looked at. It seemed that there were perfectly rational and well-informed people who had reservations about Mann’s work, not least because its creator seemed very reluctant to let anyone else check his workings. Incidentally, and much later, I learned that when Steve McIntyre first saw the Hockey Stick his reaction was similar to mine except that I think he described it as being ‘too presentational’ rather than ‘too neat’.
From then on I became absorbed in the controversy about climate change that is still raging today, in spite of continuing efforts to convince a commendably wary public that the science is settled. The Hockey Stick has remained at centre stage throughout that time, but with the publication of the Climategate emails, and the publication of The Hockey Stick Illusion next week, it seems likely that in future it will have a very different significance. The icon of the global warming movement may finally be transformed in the public consciousness into an equally potent symbol of scientific controversy or worse.
Andrew Montford has a fascinating tale to tell involving larger than life characters, diligent searchers for truth, meticulous detective work, dirty tricks and character assassination, accusations of fraud, possible malpractice in high places, powerful vested interests and all of this played out against a background of moral indignation and high stakes politics. It’s a gift of a story and I’m delighted that it is now going to be told by someone who has a gift for explaining complex scientific issues clearly and in a way that is accessible to all. I am also glad that Andrew has been able to incorporate the extraordinary revelations in the Climategate emails into his manuscript at the last moment.
Recommendations from Roger Pielke Jnr, Wibjörn Karlén, Nigel Calder, Andrew Bolt, Edward John Craig and Andrew Orlowski can be found here. You can order your copy from Amazon now.
When I first saw the hockeystick graph, it took me back to my schooldays, and the kind of boy who could get excited plotting xy = -c. That’s how I imagine them down at the Hockey Team changing rooms, comparing graphs, seeing who can make it go highest up the y axis.
Mike:Look! Mine’s gone woosh! off the top of the graph!
Phil: Look at mine! It’s gone woosh! right up to the sky!
Keith:Mine’s stopped going woosh!
Mike and Phil: Well, you’d better make it go woosh again, or you can’t be in our gang!
Geoff:
I’m afraid your comment is a pretty fair appraisal of the culture revealed by the Climategate emails. And it is futile for the IPCC’s cheerleaders to claim that this kind of groupthink is confined to CRU. Just a quick flick through the address headers shows that it extends to the very highest echelons of the IPCC.
If one goes back just five years or so, the UN was under fire from all sides for its failure to effectively address the kind of regional and international crises that it was intended to avert: Rwanda, Iraq, Kosovo, Iran, North Korea, the Middle East, famines in Africa, and on and on, with allegations about corruption and malpractice at the heart of the organisation too. At that time there were constant headlines calling for the UN’s replacement.
Since then the IPCC’s high profile crusade against climate change has diverted attention from these failings and done much to allow the UN to rebuild its image.
The chaotic organisation and final collapse of the Copenhagen summit revived concerns about the basic competence of this organisation. Now, tragically, new allegations are emerging about the UN’s failure to coordinate relief in Haiti, thereby boosting a death toll that is already horrifying.
If politicians and the media decide to join up the dots, then the UN is likely to have a pretty difficult year.
The UN seems to confirm the famous analogy between bureaucracies and septic tanks – where only the really big chunks float to the top.
TonyN: I’m glad you didn’t include Y2K in your list of fashionable scare stories. BTW I’m amused that Y2K (the subject of my first post on the NS thread, over two years ago) is central to recent allegations that GISS has manipulated temperature data: see story on Climate Audit here.
Interesting link, Robin. I was intrigued by the suggestion that RC was being edited on NASA time and whether Gavin Schmidt was aware of the house rules.. :-)
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/general_law/ethicsfaq.html#misuse
Sorry – that last link doesn’t take you the last step. Look for ‘misuse of position’.
Robin:
There were a couple of other items on the list that I deleted, just before posting, on my wife’s advice. Y2K wasn’t one of them.
SteveM has been remarkably quiet since the 257 NASA emails were released. If I were Jim Hansen I would be worried.
[Update: Apparently SteveM has been busy with a squash tournament and preparations for a holiday, but if I was JH I’d still be worried]
Benny Peiser has an excellent, and very perceptive, article in Die Weltwoche on the fallout from Copenhagen, its far reaching impact on international relations, and doubts over the future role of the UN and EU in formulating climate policy. It can be found here in a sometimes rather stilted translation.
TonyN: “Y2K wasn’t one of them”. Good.
What follows is wholly O/T (and probably of little interest): but we have had quite a serious Y2.1K problem. It’s amazing how stupid people can be. There are several examples. Here’s just one – as reported by the Guardian. Note the vast cost (£270m) of fixing this one relatively small problem.
BTW I’m amused how each side of the AGW debate gets Y2K wrong. The sceptics see it – wholly incorrectly – as a prime example of a scare that turned out to be without foundation. The warmists, in contrast, ignore it. Yet it’s really a perfect exemplar for them: a little understood problem that, as a result of major publicity, was addressed and with worldwide effort and expenditure largely resolved to everyone’s benefit.
Robin, the difference with Y2K was that there were some quite easily identifiable technical issues that needed correcting. With Climate change nothing has been identified with any precision at all.
With all due respect to your hard work on Y2K the fact remains that a good proportion of the Y2K work I did on behalf of my Boss was routine and cost our customers an unnecessary premium. Many people remember this over the necessary work that was largely unheralded. And I suppose this demonstrates that there are always those who take advantage of any situation and this has certainly coloured everyones view of Y2K.
TonyN, do you think the fact that the US and UK had to suck up to the UN to get some measure of legitimacy for their escapade in Iraq, may have allowed the UN to feel it had greater legitimacy in the later part of the decade? Could the UN have extracted some measure of agreement from the UK and US over climate change for its co-operation over Iraq?
Certainly its back to type for the over the disaster in Haiti
Peter G:
It certainly seems possible that once the Iraq invasion had taken place it afforded the UN some protection from its main critic. On the same kind of lines, I did notice that President Obama’s decision to attend the Copenhagen summit was announced within an hour or two of Gordon Brown, who had desperately been trying to persuade him to do so, agreeing to send more troops to Afghanistan. But I don’t suppose one should read too much into such things
I think that the man to watch Benny Peiser so far as commentary on the UN’s predicament is Benny Peiser. His analysis, and predictions, before Copenhagen were spot on. See here for latest instalment that suggests that the EU was the other big looser.
TonyN
The Benny Peiser article is very lucid (as long as you know what a ‘fata morgana’* is!) and summarises the situation perfectly. Nice to see a political commentary that addresses the problems with the science, too. I hope he’s right “that most governments have lost trust in the advice given by climate alarmists and the IPCC”.
How long before the MSM and BBC crack, I wonder?
*It’s a mirage.
James P #12
Fata Morgana is Morgan le Fay, Merlin’s more magical sister, also a will o’ the wisp, (which is NH4 and so 20 times more dangerous than CO2). Congratulations to Benny for finding a nice poetic image to replace the tired old “Scam”.
Geoff – I must admit that I had to look it up. I wonder if Benny used the term, or if they had a particularly literate translator?
TonyN This is coming earlier than I anticipated. Pressure is building all over the country. If the Tories shift it will put the Lib Dem’s in a real pickle, for if they stick to their guns on Climate change, they are dead and buried and will lose lots of ex Tory votes, and if they shift they will have an internal war that will bury them anyway. If the Tories don’t shift it will be UKIP the spoiler.
It seems to me what Benny Peiser was saying is happening now.
PeterG:
Your excitement may be premature. See my 9086 (here) on the NS thread.
I’d quite like to be able to vote for a party that wasn’t UKIP. :-)
Thanks Tony for your account here about your Hockey Stick awareness, I suspect it has many resonances with other people. I cant help adding my twopenneth memory :) When I first saw the HS on the news I remember thinking it would be a bit of media hype that eventually, like a lot of other headline grabbing extremes, fall back to some reasonable level of explanation on Horizon or some likewise progam. After it strangely turned out otherwise, and it built up to to an uncritical orthodoxy, then that was when I would date my trangression into deniership ;)
I read you often, great blog, keep it up :)
Thanks Stuart! It looks as though the Hockey Stick may be about to rebound on its creators.
[…] new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science by Andrew Montford. Harmless Sky describes it like this: Andrew Montford has a fascinating tale to tell involving larger than life […]
TonyN,
I enjoyed reading the Bishop’s book and am about to Email Andrew with some thoughts, should he be thinking of a second edition.
He is certainly an excellent writer dealing with some tricky topics, some of which I think are perhaps a bit difficult for many people to follow, no matter how well they are explained. Chapters 2-6 might be heavy going for some, but from 7 onwards, more interesting.
A great book!
Further my 21, I couldn’t see a good place to post the following over at the Bishop’s place, so:
On page 286, concerning Esper 2002, I was surprised to read:
Esper’s website currently lists 126 publications (11 in review) where he is lead or co-author:
http://www.wsl.ch/staff/jan.esper/publications.html
The only one that includes Mann is:
10) Mann ME, Hughes MK – Cook ER, Esper J (2002) Tree ring chronologies and climate variability, Science 296, 848-849.
However, this is actually a hostile comment by Mann and Hughes, on the paper by Esper, Cook, & Schweingruber 2002, coupled with a hostile reply from Cook and Esper.
http://www.wsl.ch/staff/jan.esper/publications/Science_Mann_2002.pdf
There are other examples of hostility, between the groups, and for instance Esper was the first dendro to show a significant MWP. (which has not been eagerly treated by the IPCC etc. Esper has been openly concerned by the divergence problem that is also visible in a graph in his Esper et al 2002
Not to condone Esper’s non supply of data to Steve Mc etc, I don’t think he and his colleagues can be described as “team members“.
Incidentally some of Esper’s more recent publications are not dendro at all, or are moving away from mainstream, such as insect attack, drought, isotopes, fading climate sensitivity and whatnot.
An intriguing title in review is: A noodle, hockey stick, and spaghetti plate…
This Climategate Email exchange Cook versus Mann et al is also interesting:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=228&filename=988831541.txt
This and the sign-off in 10) above suggests that Cook was a strong lead in all this, and he was not alone at CRU in being critical of Mann.
Bob, #21:
Climategate broke when the finished manuscript was already with the publishers. Although Andrew was able to add an extra chapter there is no doubt that a second edition could expend on much that is in the early part of the book. The perils of publishing on current affairs.
TonyN Reur 23
Yes, I’m aware from his book that Climategate was a late break for Andrew, but the Emails were not of importance to the areas in his book that I think could be enhanced if he does a second edition. For instance, further my 22, the two dendro groupings:
1) Ed Cook (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, USA) plus his colleagues at CRU plus the Swiss Federal Research Institute, versus:
2) Mann et al
Can hardly be called a team, given their mutual hostility that was well evidenced before the Emails were exposed.
Another example: Andrew mentioned that the AR4 expert review comments are currently only available in a format that makes a search as difficult as possible. However, I took the precaution a couple of years ago to copy the original PDF’s comprising one whole page per chapter for both 1st and 2nd order drafts. (and indexes etc). These are very easy to search, and I would be happy to have these copied to any website. (I understand that they were first published under FOI)
Bob:
I think that one of the interesting things about the Hockey Team is that, in spite of the back-biting, and now attempts to lay blame on each other, is the way in which they have managed to maintain an impression of unity in the face of criticism up until now.
The review comments files sound like a very useful resource. I’ll contact you about this.