Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25698 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

A first step on the road back to sanity from the madness of the Global Warming Religion
Recently, I started to wonder where I could learn more about "Global Warming" and the temperature rises that were predicted. There must surely be books or magazine articles that explained the observations and the models. How had the models been tested and verified? What were the formulas and equations the models were based on? What were the confidence limits on the predictions?

From my own experience more than twenty years ago, in making and using computer models of automatic control systems, I know only too well that a model that has not been validated is worth very little. Only when a model has been shown to make accurate predictions, for example, by comparing its predictions with physical measurements under a variety of conditions, can it be used with confidence. Even then, its predictions can never be taken as certainty.

My search for information made me feel disquieted. I came across statements about how there is "a concensus" among climate scientists that man-made global warming exists. OK, there is "a concensus" - but where are the details of the physical models used? What assumptions are they based on? If the assumptions turn out to be invalid, does this invalidate the predicitions?

More and more, I began to feel that "man made global warming" had the appearance of a new and intolerant religion. Man-made Global Warming will lead to the Destruction of The Planet. And it is YOUR FAULT.

This book confirms my impression. It does not use these words but, in effect, belief in Man Made Global Warming is a new religion, with its own Priesthood, who tolerate no dissent. A scientist who questions it is deranged, incompetent, senile - or has simply been corrupted.

Eventually, truth will out. The Global Warming Religion will merit a chapter in a future edition of the book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds". "The Deniers" will have been one of the first steps on the road back to sanity. I recommend it to anyone who wants to form a blanced view.

Welcome cracks in the Global Warming fortress
This book is a milestone. It's people giving testimony, it's starting to crack open the veritable fortress of "rebuttals to skeptics" that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" science has built around itself. It's written by an environmentalist with a long and well-proven track record of committment to the same green issues I'd like to support again myself - and will, as soon as Environmentalism drops its Global Warming "religion" with its intolerance, its sheer bad science, and its conviction of the wrong culprit.

CO2 is not guilty and neither are our emissions, in fact, taking action against CO2 is harmful in all ways and helpful in none. We're probably due for cooling not warming. And cooling is far harder to cope with than warming. I've written a whole primer "Curious About Climate Science" which is about my own U-turn from AGW believer, with clear science and evidence. It is very important that people can see the evidence for themselves, plus the unbelievable evidence of cover-ups and falsifications and ad hom attacks. Sceptics used to be supported by big oil etc, but now the exact opposite is the case. Nobody wants to fund sceptics. Meanwhile, Al Gore is raking in the shekels from his scare-based industries, and getting money from the oil company in which he is involved (one with a particularly bad environmental record too).

Peak Oil, Peak All, overpopulation, environmental degradation, and a host of other issues connected with rebuilding sustainability, are all vitally important. We just don't need the bad climate science to hide these vital issues from view.

Now the book. I like Lawrence Solomon, he is open and direct - he does not practice "sleight of hand". He talks about how he himself came to change his own position during the course of collecting scientists' statements, and he talks a lot about the use of the unfortunate word "denier" - unfortunate because no-one here is in denial of anything. People state their positions quite clearly, and Solomon reports those positions quite clearly.

What is interesting is the pattern. Several world experts and prominent scientists here say, in effect "I believe in general in the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming. However, in my particular discipline, I can see that the evidence does not hang together". Solomon is simply reporting people's stories as they are, no more than that. He is not writing an activists' manual here. Probably he would never have been able to publish, had he gone beyond the simple stories - the people he writes about would not have allowed him to use them.

However, it is very suggestive, to think about joining up the dots. If every single aspect of the manmade global warming thesis, and the IPCC practice, has been seriously criticised or accused of key misrepresentation, then the whole edifice does indeed become questionable.

Excellent presentation of the scientific debate on the climate
Lawrence Solomon, the noted environmentalist, has written a most useful book on the debate over global warming. He shows that scientific opinions still differ across the whole field.
He cites Edward Wegman, former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences, who demolished the famous `hockey stick' graph which supposedly proved that the 20th century was the hottest ever. His team of expert statisticians also disproved the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2001 report's assessments, "the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported."
Solomon criticises Dr Nicholas Stern, once the World Bank's chief economist, whose 2006 review has become the most influential global warming report, embraced by the Blair and Brown governments. Stern seemed to bring hard economic facts into the world of scientific forecasts and guesses.
Yet his review is now wholly discredited. Dr. Richard Tol, Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, calls it `preposterous'. Crucially, Stern estimated the cost of additional carbon emissions as $29 a ton, as against Tol's conclusion that the costs were `likely to be substantially smaller' than $14 a ton.
Tol said, "In sum, the Stern Review is very selective in the studies it quotes on the impacts of climate change. The selection bias is not random, but emphasises the most pessimistic studies ... Results are occasionally misinterpreted. The report claims that a cost-benefit analysis was done, but none was carried out. The Stern Review can therefore be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent."
Solomon also cites Roger Revelle, who led the President's Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution in 1965 which first identified CO2 from fossil fuels as a possible problem. Yet in 1992, he wrote, "Drastic, precipitous, and especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating, particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."