A couple of years ago, Brandon Shollenberger wrote up a lengthy review of Mann’s Hockey Stick Wars at Lucia’s. Brandon has fleshed out his review in an ebook here. Brandon summarized the book as follows:
“there is a great deal of misinformation, and even disinformation, polluting the airwaves. One prime example was world renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, and his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines. Mann’s book contains many errors, misrepresentations and outright false statements. Responses to his book have been limited primarily to the blogosphere where the average person will never look. Even worse, those responses have been disjointed, broken up across many web pages and scattered throughout numerous discussions. This book is the first part of an attempt to bring together those responses to create informative counternarrative which allows people to quickly get up to speed on the infamous hockey stick controversy while correcting much of the misinformation present in Mann’s book. It covers about half of the hockey stick controversy in slightly over ten thousand words.”
Other books on the incidents are, of course, Andrew Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion and Hiding the Decline; Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller’s The CRUTape Letters; Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files; and Rupert Darwall’s The Age of Global Warming, as well as fictional accounts of events by Mann and Bradley.
Brandon’s objective was to focus on deceptions in Mann’s Hockey Stick Wars and does not attempt to cover the same ground as the other works. Brandon’s work is also influenced by the interest in 2014 in connection with Mann v Steyn in itemizing the most direct misrepresentations in the Mann corpus, some of which, as Brandon observes, Mann has unrepentantly repeated for over a decade. For example, Brandon observes about Mann’s bizarre Excel spreadsheet fabrication: “Despite this correspondence being readily available for a decade now, Mann has continued to repeat his fabricated story about a spreadsheet error. This demonstrates an apparent pattern of deception consistently found in Mann’s book and other writings.”
Take a look.
I regret not giving more coverage to the earlier works. Because their coverage of me was so favorable, I felt somewhat abashed in endorsing them, but, in retrospect, I should have done so.
Climate Audit 
54 Comments
A commenter at Amazon takes issue with Brandon’s lack of expertise in the climate science arena. Despite acknowledging that he hasn’t read the review Buzz writes,
“1.0 out of 5 stars This is Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. December 26, 2014
This is written by someone who is highly biased on the denial side of the “debate.” Brandon is someone who has no background in the actual science he’s commenting on yet thinks he is qualified to “clear things up” for people.”
Brandon’s attention to detail leaves Buzz in a difficult spot. The observations in this review are cogent and well referenced. Although Brandon’s mastery of the statistics behind the Hockey Stick is impressive – for the most part he relies on simple fact checking to to make a case that “Mann’s book contains many errors, misrepresentations and outright false statements.”
Further to that point Dr. Mann continues to deliver his Hockey Stick and Climate Wars presentation relying on the outdated slide with the instrumental record truncated at 2005. Anthony Watts and others noticed this at the 2014 presentation at the Cabot Institute.
DGH “Why doesn’t Dr. Mann add 10 years of the instrumental record to his Hockey Stick presentation? ”
Further questions for the climateballers
1) Why are the climateBallers using Hansen’s version C model to demonstrate the robustness of the models.
As most everyone recalls Hansen had 3 scenerio’s A, B & C. “Scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000.” Hansen’s predicted temperature increase, from 1988 to 2012, is 0.29 ⁰C, ONLY 31% HIGHER than the actual increase of 0.22 ⁰C.
So, only Scenario C, which “assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions” comes close to the truth.
Joe, I don’t recall the details, but when I looked at this many years ago, I concluded that Hansen’s descriptions did not match the actual forcings used, so it is not so easy to pick which scenario should be used. This is because he had different values for forcings of various gases and a different mix of gases, making the descriptions inaccurate.
Steve: I carefully parsed Hansen’s forcings about 5 years ago and, if you’re interested in the topic, the posts are worth revisiting. The CFCs in Scenario A make it not comparable.
I agree with your point, I was only trying to highlight the extent to which the climate ballers are promoting the robustness of their models by omitting 7-10 years of the most recent reality and B pretending that the other 97% of their models never existed.
DGH, that review still cracks me up. The most amazing thing about it to me is Amazon apparently has no problem with reviews like that. Amazon’s policies allow reviews by people who openly admit they have not read what they are reviewing. I never would have imagined that. I was shocked when they decided his review was acceptable under their policies.
A family member may not review a book on Amazon because Amazon is worried about the bias it might introduce. I’d argue a person who feels inclined to review something they’ve never experienced is probably going to introduce just as much bias.
They do have a feature of showing verified purchasers’ reviews. I wonder if Mann will send the Skeptical Science Army to vote down the book. For his own book they even wrote their own negative review that would be the most popular.
I hadn’t heard they wrote their own negative review. Do you have more information about it? That seems like an incredible thing to do. I wouldn’t put it past them!
Looks different now. It used to show up right alongside as the most helpful negative review. Still the top 3 star review is complaining about the Tea Party.
And other negative reviews that take its place would get voted down. Mark Steyn mentioned one such review, that Mann had tweeted about it.
You know who that is, right?
No, should I?
Not necessarily. The only reason I know is because I’ve read a great deal of the commentary under the negative reviews of Mann’s book. At some point, “Buzz” changed his moniker from his real name to the current alias. If you look at older comments, you can see people referring to him as Rob. I don’t really know how Steve feels about identifying him so, for now, I’ll just say his name is Rob and that he participated in the rating of abstracts for Cook’s consensus drivel.
EEB,
Yes, I see where “Buzz”‘s name is mentioned in comments. Interesting that he chose to anonymize afterward.
It’s beginning to appear as if he changed his ID for the express purpose of remaining anonymous when he submitted his one star review of Brandon’s work. He posted that review in late December of 2014. As recently as October 19 he was still commenting under his real name. Check out the comments under the one star review of Mann’s book, posted by C. F. Fulbright on October 19, 2014.
That would be interesting if true EEB. I’d be a little surprised though. If he wanted to remain anonymous, why not create a new account?
I guess he could just be bad at remaining anonymous, or maybe he only wants enough anonymity that it isn’t obvious who he is.
Perhaps. Still, he’s spent over two years admonishing numerous negative reviewers of Mann’s book for not having read it. Now, not only has he done the same to you, he acts as if he’s perfectly justified in doing so. While he certainly could have covered his tracks far more effectively, the fact of the matter is the person we’re talking about, at least in my opinion, simply isn’t very bright.
I engaged Buzz in the book review, only wanting him to admit that he has a problem with Brandon’s background because of what he says in the book. I got him to go as far as “There’s quite a difference when someone with no credentials makes broad comments that disagree with the overwhelming body of scientific research, and when well credentialed people make broad comments that are in agreement with the overwhelming body of research.” I decided to accept that as being close enough.
Five star reviews for The Hockey Stick Illusion are getting below
average helpful ratings (including mine). I remembered this post from the
bish:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2014/9/7/manndacity-integrity-and-amazon-
reviews.html
He links to a FaceBook page of Mann’s. Here’s a quote from it:
The link in it is for HSI.
Steve, thanks for calling attention again to this little book. Steyn should enjoy it. Mann’s twisting and turning and outright deliberte prevarications exposed, using his own book written statements versus the indelible history of what was actually done and said. Perhaps Brandon would be kind enough to gift author copies to M, B, and H.
I sent out free copies of my eBook to a number of people who would take the “other side” of it, but I can’t remember if I sent one to Mann, Bradley or Hughes. Well, I know I didn’t send one to Bradley or Hughes. I meant to send one to Mann, but I don’t know if I found an active e-mail address for him.
I’d be happy to send a free copy to anyone who thinks I got things wrong in it. I don’t know who would accept it though. I know people like John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky didn’t.
I haven’t managed to buy the book yet, but still trying. amazon.co.uk shows “This title is not currently available for purchase” (16 March).
One minor error which needs correcting on the first page of text: it’s ‘Intergovernmental’ not ‘International’ (the I in IPCC).
Coldish, I’m sorry to hear you haven’t been able to buy it. I don’t know why that is. I haven’t heard of anyone else having trouble. If the problem lasts, I’d be happy to e-mail you a copy.
As for the mistake, thanks for pointing it out. I can’t believe I made it. I’ve made, and corrected, that same mistake so many times in so many places I thought I had gotten it out of my system. I guess I was wrong >.<
I had problems first with the link in the post but then discovered I had to buy it from Amazon.fr where my account is. Worked fine. Thanks, Brandon. A great (though sad) story.
Sven, I’m glad you figured it out.
And I’m glad people like it. As sad a story as this is, the saddest part is how few care. The more people are aware of it, the less sad this whole thing will be.
Why do you link to Amazon India for Brandon’s ebook? I find that mystifying.
The short links for Amazon USA and Amazon Canada are:
http://amzn.com/B00RE7K3W2
http://amazon.ca/dp/B00RE7K3W2
Steve: will fix. dont know why it came up that way on my browser
Have you been watching the World Cup, and saved some money by buying the India link?
Steve observes, “For example, Brandon observes about Mann’s bizarre Excel spreadsheet fabrication: “Despite this correspondence being readily available for a decade now, Mann has continued to repeat his fabricated story about a spreadsheet error. This demonstrates an apparent pattern of deception consistently found in Mann’s book and other writings.””
The unchallenged persistence of that fabrication, despite this correspondence being readily available demonstrates an obvious pattern of studied negligence by willfully compliant journalists and editors. In my view, that marks a wholesale sellout of journalistic ethics.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think journalists are usually “willfully compliant” in deceptions like that one. I listened to an interview on the radio a couple months ago that gave a different explanation for things like that. I wish I remembered it better (so I could at least give a reference), but basically, a veteran journalist said journalism is lazy. It shouldn’t be, and it isn’t when journalism is at its best, but papers require a lot of stories. That gives a lot of incentive to taking the easy route on stories.
That matches my experience. I’ve seen plenty of pieces which seemed to be nothing more than a press release rewritten as a news article with maybe a quote or two added in. I’ve also seen plenty of pieces which were insightful, asked difficult questions and basically showed what journalism is supposed to be about. I’ve then seen tons of pieces which fell somewhere in-between.
In all that, I didn’t get the impression there was dishonesty or an intentional subversion of anything (though I’m sure that does exist in journalism). What I saw seemed to be nothing more than laziness and/or apathy. If a writer doesn’t care about a topic, it’s easier to repeat talking points than actually examine the issues.
Of course, that still goes against journalistic ethics. Passive wrongdoing is still wrongdoing.
I largely agree Brandon but you’ve missed this: what happens to people like David Rose and Matt Ridley who do the extra work and don’t deliver a ‘total consensus’ message in big brands of the mainstream media. Others notice the treatment they receive and steer well clear. For my own reaction on Twitter to David Rose’s cri de coeur in the Mail on Sunday of 1st February, and its surprising sequel, see Science of Doom.
Congratulations on the ebook, which you know I rate highly as an aid for much better communication of some essential truths.
Thanks!
And yeah, I’m sure there are other factors in play. What you describe may not be completely unrelated to what I describe though. I’d wager most journalists believe they wouldn’t allow themselves to be intimidated into silence. I bet that includes many of the ones like you describe. I bet there are many journalists who believe reasons like, “It’s not worth the trouble.” It’s often possible to convince people it would be too much work to decide who is right, so they just don’t try. Combine that with some people who are willing to push particular talking points, and you can easily wind up with an inaccurate narrative.
In other words, a few “bad” people can overcome many “good” people if the “good” people are convinced to do nothing. Because of that, apathy is a powerful tool in creating a false narrative.
Journalists are, in my direct experience, limited by three major personality traits.
They tend to be better with word than numbers, consider words superior to numbers, and so simply neglect to _think_ about the numbers that may come up in the events they cover. A source willing to “walk through” arithmetic (if not higher math) with a journalist can, usually, get a point across. But it an atypical reporter who will discover the relationship of two or more numbers in proximity, all by him/her self. The tendency at large results in innumerate reporting.
They tend to be extroverted, in the sense that they value groups and crowds and the esteem of their audience. Consensus matters in their view; a larger audience is better than a “more selective” one. In consequence journalists view efforts to bring in like-minded members and shun, shame, or banish rebels from the group — hecklers from their audience — as not only acceptable but valued. At large the result is group-think.
They tend to be sensationalist. For example: “Today MATTERS! This is the biggest story, EVER! We should all CARE! Isn’t that TRAGIC?! This will make you FEEL GOOD!” The story is actually incidental to the headline, or at least to the lede sentence; and head/lede is there to engage the audience’s heart or gut, not head. “Click-bait” is the word-of-the-day for the process but the tendency goes back to the beginnings of print. A picture or “info-graphic” — a report cover showing the hockey-stick or a stranded polar bear — is entirely expected as part of “good story”. Overall the result is over-exposure of false alarms.
Innumerate, social, and sensational.
Brandon, Richard, Pouncer
I’m sure there is truth in what you all say. Another related point I have previously seen discussed is that journalists are in the main generalists, in that they have relatively shallow knowledge across a broad range of subjects. As such, they are often not very good at spotting technical errors that someone with greater expertise would find obvious. They also have a tendency to revert to the same ‘expert’ sources for confirmation or for interview quotes, rather than necessarily seeking out someone who would critically review the information.
This isn’t intended as particularly a criticism, just a fact of life – most news journalists are expected to write a number of stories simultaneously across a number of issues, so they rarely have the time to delve into the depths of a story.
Ooops, I see your system made a nice picture of the book! It was not my intention.
Brandon:
I just read your e-book. An excellent, easy-to-read critique of Mann’s appalling book. I particularly like the way that you unpacked some of his foot-notes. I hope Steyn’s lawyers have added it to their pre-deposition reading materials.
bernie1815, I’m glad to hear you liked it!
Here is my Amazon review, titled Unanswerable Critique
“This is actually an extended essay review of Michael Mann’s similarly title book, an unfortunate confusion. It is an easy read for those already familiar with the materials, more difficult for those who are not familiar with the use and abuse of tree rings as temperature proxies and the inherent limitations of Mann’s type of error prone, dustbowl empiricism. It succinctly exposes and fully documents the many instances where Michael Mann has misrepresented his own work, the work of bodies set up to investigate his work and the work of his leading and most knowledgeable critics, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. It is also a belated antidote to the numerous sycophantic reviews of Mann’s book, many of which were organized by Mann. He still calls for his “followers” to pounce on any negative reviews of his book on Amazon. A quick visit to Mann’s Facebook page will reveal the scope of his fear of criticism. Creepy.”
I don’t want to take away from Brandon’s Book thread, but there’s a book on Climategate written by NoCal’s semi-celebrity meteorologist, that is never mentioned in the skeptosphere, as he doesn’t seem to participate in any of the sites. Based on the review comments his book likely has sold more copies than any of the ones cited above except Mann’s.
ClimateGate, by Brian Sussman.
Thanks for that link. Scrolling down the top few comments it’s amusing to see the first 1-star review begins ‘This is not a review’ and goes on to attack the book because it’s written by a meteorologist – a meteorologist, in the eyes of the commenter, being totally unqualified to write anything about climatology. As Brandon has noted above, it is indeed bizarre that Amazon allows reviews from those who openly admit to not having read the book. Any such review ought to be erased (this applies equally to positive non-review reviews – I recall seeing a 5 star review of a new album saying something along the lines of ‘I’ve not heard this yet but their previous stuff has been brilliant’ – it makes a nonsense of the whole review process).
Brandon’s book now rated #1 Best Seller in One-Hour Science and Math Reads by Amazon.
Here come the Friends of Mann…
Go Brandon!
(I mean of course beat all-comers from the consensus corner on Amazon. Far be it from me to wish the man to nitpick in other directions than those he sees fit to do on CA 🙂 )
Woot. Though really, I’m not sure how much competition there is in that field. The competition is apparently much tougher in the One-Hour Teen & Young Adult section, where my book is only rated #5.
Then again, that’s not bad given I’m still not sure why my book is even in that category.
Perhaps because teens and young adults are buying it.
Joking apart, that could be important feedback. Something shorter and punchier grabs the teen and young adult market.
I suspect the real reason for it is just that I set the age range for the book to include teenagers. Amazon asked me what age the book was suited for so I said anyone over 13. I thought it was intended as some sort of rating guideline (as in, how “appropriate” the book was) or who would be capable of understanding it.* Maybe it was more than that.
*I started following the hockey stick debate when I was 18. I am confident many teenagers could understand this stuff if they wanted to.
Brandon, do you have an email we can use for typos? I just noticed that 2 out of 22 is less than 10%, not 5%, as mentioned in the text beneath the 22 time series at the start of the Basics section (page 10.) This may have come to your attention already, but I’d like to help if I can. I’m sure these kinds of things will be prominent with the cultists.
My thanks for undertaking this task.
Bob Stewart, of course. People are welcome to contact me at my Gmail account. It’s just my first and last name (separated by a period) at gmail.com.
Thanks for pointing out that error. It comes from a rather silly mistake. Last year, I wrote a post discussing how Michael Mann defended his results by saying even if you remove bristlecone data, you could still get a hockey stick. His argument was if you removed one of the 22 proxies (extending back to 1400 AD) people challenged, you would still get a hockey stick because one of the other proxies. Of course, 2/22 is ~9%, not less than 5% like my book says. I got things right in that post, saying:
There I correctly distinguished between the proxies used by MBH and the underlying series, some of which were transformed into proxies by MBH’s (incorrect implementation of) PCA. The result was, according to Michael Mann himself, 20 series which had MBH’s PCA applied to them, plus one other series which did not, were responsible for the hockey stick. Given there were 415 total series, the post concludes:
Which is where my book got the 5% value from. Of course, the book was referring to something different (just the 2/22 proxies extending back to 1400 AD) so 5% was the wrong value to use. I just didn’t notice the mistake because I’d talk about 5% in other circumstances. That’s the sort of mistake that’s really easy for an author to make. Things like that are part of why authors like to have an editor. Sadly, I don’t >.<
Anyway, I'll get that fixed this evening along with a correction for the silly mistake pointed out above. I don’t know if Amazon will let you download an update for it though. I’ve had a hard time finding out what corrections can get pushed out to people who’ve already downloaded the book and which will only be available for new buyers.
Brandon,
Thanks for publishing this. I bought it and am much impressed; a book certainly worth the effort. How did you come up with $0.99? I would have paid more.
I originally planned to release this for free. I only decided to charge for it after I uploaded it to Amazon. When I did, I couldn’t find a way to set my price for free. I’m told there is a way, but when I tried, the lowest price I could set was $0.99. I didn’t like that, but then I was told a low price tag actually increases the odds of people downloading a book (because it creates an expectation of quality). I don’t know if that’s true, but it was enough to make me give up on trying to find a way to upload it for free.
As for the exact value, I did take some time considering how much to charge. It turns out Amazon can give 70% royalty for books. Unfortunately, it will only do so if you charge at least $5. If you don’t, you can only get 35% royalties. I couldn’t see charging $5 for something I intended to be read in an hour so I just abandoned the monetary part of it.
That said, what I’ve seen since I published it suggests I could have charged $1.99 or $2.99 for it. Doing so would likely have increased my profit margin. I’m not worried though. I didn’t do this for money. If I wanted money, there were far better ways I could have spent my time.
(Though I did buy a box of wine as celebration in light of the sales caused by this post. That means I get the gratification of you guys reading my book, plus the joy of wine!)
You’re welcome!
And of course, people are always welcome to ask me questions by e-mail. My e-mail address is freely available (as I said above, it’s just my first and last name separated by a period at gmail.com), and I respond to all e-mail I get.
I became interested in the climate debate when I saw Steyn on Hannity several months ago now. Brandon you are an excellent writer and documentarian. The systemic corruption of academic science and weakening of its brand could well be more harmful to us than atmospheric CO2. Keep weeded it out. Well done.
Thanks!
Reblogged this on I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog.
Let me draw attention to Steve’swording.
“…as well as fictional account (sic) of events by Mann and Bradly.”
I skimmed over it the first time I read the post.
Wow, what a turn of phrase!
Succinct, accurate and scathing.
I just read your book Mr. Shollenberger. It took me back to 2007 when, 1st year PhD student (Mech. Eng.), I attended a presentation on the climate change debate. The person who did the presentation – I suppose he was an environmentalist, but I’m not sure any more – tried to rebut an emission shown on local TV with scientists who disputed the human-caused global warming. So, for every argument presented in the documentary, he gave counter arguments. Everything was going fine, and as a naive student I would agree easily with what was presented to me, until he showed some graphs depicting correlations “proving” his story. However to my eyes it was quite the opposite. It was on that day that I stopped believing this story.
Thank you very much for providing a concise story on how the whole thing started, and arguments for my discussions. You present it in a relatively simple way, that at least someone with my background can understand.
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