by George Gilder
The infamous "hockey stick"
Epitomizing the plot ofThe Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford and the special gratifications it affords the reader are any of the Colombo shows on television. In each case, we see the humble investigator initially ignored, brushed aside,stonewalled, disdained, doubletalked, waffled, red herringed, and evaded by lofty and complacent Establishment figures, citing their own authority, crowded schedules, sophisticated reasoning, advanced degrees, abstruse mathematics, and exalted ideals.
In this story, the Columbo figure is Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mining
consultant, and A.W. Montford's book tells the gripping and suspenseful
details of McIntyre's pursuit of the self-denominated "hockey team" led by
Michael Mann, who wrote the key chapters on his own work for the IPCC, and
Phil Jones, who maintains the temperature record used by the IPCC to
document the "Hockey Stick": limning allegedly unprecedented and anomalous anthropogenic global warming in the Twentieth Century while denying that any comparable or greater warming occurred in the Medieval period.
Parallel to McIntyre's relentless replication and decoding of the
increasingly desperate devices used by the climatocrats to defend their
findings is the amazing tale of the ascent of Mann. In four years he rose
from an obscure newly minted U Mass geosciences PhD in 1998 at U Mass into the Lead Author of the IPCC report's crucial Observed Climate Variability chapter, contributor to several other chapters, 'Scientific Advisor' to the White House on climate change, pundit on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, BBC, NPR, PBS, and scores of Establishment newspapers and magazines, all culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize for the team and a role as the very incarnation of a Consensus of science requiring the creation of a global apparatus to stigmatize as pollution, regulate and tax the very air we breathe, the CO2 that sustains all of plant and animal life.
Explaining the science in detail, Montford's narrative climaxes with the
dissolution of the hockey stick, the discomfiture of the Hockey Team, the
eruption of Climategate, and the quiet and total substantive victory of
the humble mining engineer. The reader should know that the supposed email "scandal", as described in the book, is in fact a rather trivial and even defensible part of the story. Few people are at their best in emails. What is shocking--and I use the word advisedly as a confirmed sceptic not easily shocked--is the so called science. I never imagined that it was quite this bad. It is shoddy beyond easy belief.
The hockey stick chart mostly reflects a defective algorithm that extends
and inflates a few deceptive signals from as few as 20 cherry-picked trees
in Colorado and Russia into a hockey stick chart that is replicated
repeatedly through reshuffles of the same or similar defective and
factitious data to capture and define two thousand years of climate
history. These people simply had no plausible case and were pressed by
their political sponsors to contrive a series of Potemkin charts. Don't
miss this definitive book.
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