My publisher wonders if I am going to write to the Scottish Review of Books and ask to respond to Alastair McIntosh's review. School is back tomorrow and there is something of a backlog of real work to complete. But I thought I would set down a few thoughts anyway and see if I can bring myself to write anything.
The premise of the review is that the reader shouldn't believe me. In essence that is all Alastair has to say. We should be quite clear about this - he has not pointed out anything that is incorrect about the book. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Factually he cannot lay a finger on me and in the absence of anything solid with which to attack me, McIntosh appears to have decided to base his review on ad-hominems or, more intriguingly, on lines of argument that are already rebutted in the book. Take this for instance:
...McIntyre’s attack on Mann is strongly contested. A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that McIntyre had overplayed his hand. A German appraisal picked up “a glitch” but “found this glitch to be of very minor significance”. An investigation by the US National Academy of Sciences, according to a report in Nature, “essentially upholds Mann’s findings”.
The WHOI paper (better known to those who have read the book as the Huybers comment on MM05), the German appraisal (von Storch and Zorita's comment on the same paper), and the NAS report are of course all discussed in some detail in HSI and their flaws are outlined for the reader. This must be clear to anyone who has read the book. By raising the comments and the NAS report and then failing to mention that I have discussed them, McIntosh rather sneakily implies to the reader that I have missed important facts out from the book. The only alternative explanation is that he hasn't read it at all. Either way it's not pretty and reflects badly both on McIntosh and on the Scottish Review of Books.
There's more of the same too:
Even if Mann were guilty as charged by the climate change contrarians, the hockey stick has been replicated by at least a dozen other studies.
That's discussed...
Above all, the MWP is probably a red herring. Its warming effect was probably more regional than global.
... and that too. And then there's this:
Montford’s analysis might cut the mustard with tabloid intellectuals but not with most scientists. Credibility counts.
OK, it's ad hominem, but even disregarding the logical fallacy, I can only point out that inside the front cover are several endorsements from prominent experts in the area. These are hard to miss, being situated just inside the front cover. So the question we must ask once again is this: did McIntosh fail to read the book or did he deliberately mislead his readers?