The Hockey Stick Illusion

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science is a book written by Andrew Montford and published by Stacey International in 2010, which promotes climate change denial.

[5] The Hockey Stick Illusion first outlines a brief history of climate change science with particular emphasis on the description of the Medieval Warm Period in the first IPCC report in 1990, with its inclusion of a schematic based on central England temperatures which Montford describes as a representation of common knowledge at that time.

[8] The book describes how Steve McIntyre first became interested in the graph in 2002 and the difficulties he found in replicating the results of "MBH98" (the original 1998 study) using available datasets, and further data which Mann gave him on request.

Montford focuses on those e-mails dealing with the peer review process and how these pertained to Stephen McIntyre's efforts to obtain the data and methodology from Mann's and other paleoclimatologists' published works.

[13][14] Matt Ridley discussed it in The Spectator,[3] and in Prospect magazine said the book was "written with grace and flair" and deserved to win prizes, while conceding that he had financial interests in coal mining.

IPCC FAR 1990 Figure 7.1.c (red) based on Lamb 1965 showing central England temperatures; central England temperatures to 2007 shown from Jones et al. 2009 (green dashed line). [ 7 ] The high medieval temperatures contrast with the "hockey stick" MBH99 40 year average (blue, uncertainties omitted) and Moberg et al. 2005 low frequency signal (black).
The original northern hemisphere hockey stick graph of MBH99, smoothed curve shown in blue with its uncertainty range in light blue, overlaid with green dots showing the 30-year global average of the 2013 reconstruction by the PAGES 2k Consortium 2017 . The red curve shows measured global mean temperature, according to HadCRUT 4 data from 1850 to 2013.