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The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)
Product Description This latest installment in the P.I.G. series provides a provocative, entertaining, and well-documented expose of some of the most shamelessly politicized pseudo-science we are likely to see in our relatively cool lifetimes. From the Inside Flap "Global warming": the Left's last best chance to gain a stranglehold on our political system and economy For decades, environmentalism has been the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small. It's for Mother Earth! It's for the children! It's for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares they've trumped up haven't been large enough to justify the lifestyle restrictions they want to impose. With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only "global governance" (Jacques Chirac's words) can tackle such problems. Now, in The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Christopher C. Horner tears the cover off the Left's manipulation of environmental issues for political purposes--and lays out incontrovertible evidence for the fact that catastrophic man-made global warming is just more Chicken-Little hysteria, not actual science. He explains why, although Al Gore and his cronies among the media elites and UN globalists endlessly bleat that "global warming" is an unprecedented global crisis, they really think of it as a dream come true. It's the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government. For, as Horner explains, if global warming really were as terrible as the Leftist doomsayers insist it is, then no policy imaginable could "solve" it. According to the logic of the greens' own numbers, no matter how much we sacrifice there would still be more to do. That makes global warming the bottomless well of excuses for the relentless growth of big government. Horner (an attorney and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) reveals the full anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human agenda of today's environmentalists, dubbing them "green on the outside, red to the core." He details how they use strong-arm legal tactics--and worse--against those who dare to point out the weakness of their arguments for global warming. Along the way, he explodes ten top global warming myths, carefully looking at the evidence to determine how much warming there really is and what is actually causing it. He exposes the lies that the environmental lobby routinely tells to make its case; the ways in which it is trying to impose initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol on an unwilling American public; and much more--including the green lobby's favorite politicians (John Kerry, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and others). It's time to stand up to the environmentalist industry and insist: human beings are not the enemy. In breezy, light-hearted, and always entertaining fashion, The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming and Environmentalism gives you the facts you need to do so. Reader Reviews Christopher Horner's book is one of the best commentaries on the politicized nature of science to come out this decade. The book tackles the so called scientific "consensus" on global warming from just about every conceivable angle. He brings up a variety of little known (or at least rarely reported) facts that should give anyone pause before swallowing the all the claims routinely offered as evidence of manmade global warming. Readers will learn, for example, that concurrent with the rise in global mean surface temperature during the 1990s (the "hottest decade on record") there was a dramatic drop in the number of surface reporting stations, especially in Arctic regions of the former Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, when you eliminate a significant number of lower temperatures from the set of global reported temperatures, you obtain a higher mean. Readers will also learn about the fraudulent nature of the now infamous "hockey stick," a graph created by Michael Mann, which purported to show that after 900 years of steady temperatures, the last 100 years have witnessed a dramatic rise in temperature resulting in a graph shaped like a hockey stick. This graph, first published in the journal Nature, and then republished in numerous UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) press releases, was one of the most popular and convincing pieces of evidence ever marshalled in favor of global warming. Of course, in producing a graph showing no climate change for 900 years, Mann had to completely ignore the well established medieval warm period from 1000 to 1300AD and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" which lasted into the mid 1800s and from which we have just recently emerged. But Horner presents some little known and truly damning evidence when he notes that Mann's methodology was designed to produce such a graph regardless of the evidence. Indeed, even when fed random numbers, Mann's algorithms produce hockey sticks. Despite these stunning indictments of some of the more popular claims for global warming, this book is not primarily a review of the scientific evidence. Horner is far more concerned with motives and the psychology of those who embrace global warming than he is with the arguments used to advance it. In some cases, these motives are fairly obvious. Despite the mantra that "Big Energy" opposes the "scientific consensus" about global warming, the fact is that some companies, like Enron (formerly) and Dupont (at present), lobby for the passage of legislation similar to the Kyoto treaty because they stand to profit from it. Cap-and-trade policies for limiting carbon dioxide emisions can substantially increase the bottom line for many companies, even as they increase costs for customers with no discernable benefit for the environment or the economy. Similarly, journalists and major news outlets sell more by reporting sensationalist headlines than by carefully examining the evidence for such claims. This is one reason Mann's "hockey stick" went unchallenged for as long as it did. It was a nice visual for news consumers. But the bulk of this book is an analysis of ideologues and true believers: people who are so passionate about their cause that they will brook no dissent; people like history teacher Naomi Oreskes. Ms. Oreskes claimed she did an analysis of all 928 articles on climate change and found none that disputed the claim of manmade global warming. The fact that she cherry picked her 928 articles from a total of over 11,000 did (eventually) receive some coverage. Readers of this book will further learn how she intentionally distorted the findings of the limited articles she bothered to peruse. For the record, only 13 of those articles actually defended manmade climate change. This says much about the so called consensus, but even more about the tactics and mentality of those who believe in environmental Armageddon. This is the actual focus of Horner's book. In some respects, this focus is a little disappointing. I for one would like to see more of the (actual) data about global warming, or at least more evidence as to why we should be skeptical of some, or all, of the claims made by the alarmists. You will not find in this book, for example, the study, also published in Nature, which purported to link grape harvests in Southern France to temperature increases. That study was thoroughly vetted (though not by Nature, which refused to publish a rebuttal). Similarly, you would never know from reading this book that some groves of ancient bristlecone pines, which grow at their upper elevation limits of their range in the White Mountains of California, are an excellent proxy for measuring long term local, if not global, warming. Visitors to the Patriarch Grove can see thousands of years of climate history before their very eyes. In times of warming, the pines move up the hillside above the grove, but die back in times of cooling. Thousand year old stumps show the limits of the grove in times of previous warming, while the edge of the present grove shows where these long lived pines retreated during the period of the Little Ice Age. Today, young bristlecone pines are again beginning to colonize the hills above the Patriarch Grove. Evidence for climate change? Yes. Evidence for the claim that this is the warmest period in world history? Hardly. But this is precisely the sort of evidence I would like to see more of in a comprehensive book on global warming. The real climate picture is far more complex than the wildly exaggerated claims of Al Gore, and easy as it is to refute those claims, it would be nice to find out more of the actual research on the topic. This book simply does not do that. Nonetheless, I cannot fault Christopher Horner too much for devoting more space to satirizing (and sometimes savaging) the various global warming alarmists than to actual climate research. The very behavior of global warming advocates almost demands such treatment. They, after all, are the ones who claim there is a consensus and argue that we are past debate. They are the ones who try to silence scholars like Dr. Edward Wegman, mathematician, who has modestly suggested adding statisticians to the review boards of academic journals to prevent wildly misleading presentations of the data, and hurricane expert Christopher Landsea who had the temerity to note the 2005 hurricane season was not the result of global warming. (Neither was the almost non-existent 2006 season.) They are the ones, in short, who would like to abandon actual science, involving such standards as debate, access to data, and replicable experiments in favor of a politically imposed "consensus." Surely such (non) scholars as Al Gore, Oreskes, James Hansen, and Michael Mann deserve to be mocked by Horner. They are, as he says, watermelons: green on the outside by red on the inside. They hate capitalism and the wealth it brings and couch their attacks on it in terms of science. But the problem Horner is writing about also deserves more serious attention. Why is it that "science" now demands consensus? What do self professed scientists hope to gain by making their wild doomsday prophecies? I've personally come to believe that "science" is really more of a religion than a methodology to enhance our understanding of the natural world. Like many other evangelical faiths "science" hopes to convert others by offering sacred texts that can only be properly interpreted the ordained priesthood. This explains the criticism, often levelled against those who disagree with a particular scientific consensus, that they are not "scientists" and therefore cannot hope to understand, much lesson, claims made by the self appointed guardians of the new faith. (As if one needed more than a sixth grade mathematics background to know, for example, that removing multiple low outliers from your data set will raise any mean, even that of "average global surface temperature.") And like other faiths, science proposes various end-of-the-world scenarios from which the faithful can only be saved if they will abandon their sinful ways (in particular, their SUVs) and accept the discipline of their new priesthood. All this is far removed from the traditional caution that used to be commonplace among scientists. Of course, there are still many people, including many amateurs, engaged in serious scientific research who make careful, nuanced, and limited claims about data that they have laboriously gathered and considered from multiple angles. But the new religion of science has little use for such people. They can continue to publish in obscure journals, but their careers are over should they publicly express hesitation, much less outright dissent, from the popular claims of the day. This dramatic change in the nature of science is a fascinating story in and of itself. Hopefully Christopher Horner can be persuaded to pursue it further in another book. 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