Articles Tagged "Book"

I came across this book review yesterday from the Daily Express. Its for the Christopher Booker Book "The Real Global Warming Disaster".

Article has been updated with links direct to the Daily Express: -

President Obama is gravely concerned; Gordon Brown and David Cameron are agreed that something must be done; the EU is united in the view that urgent action is needed.

(Editor's note: Vox Day interviewed Ian Wishart, author of "Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming," on Aug. 9, 2009. This column is an abridged version. The full transcript is available at Vox Popoli.)

How did you end up deciding to write a book about the science of global warming? You're in New Zealand, after all, which few would consider to be at the forefront of the debate.

New Zealand is a perfect example for Americans of where this global warming issue is headed. The U.N. lobbyists pushing for a comprehensive emissions cap-and-trade scheme desperately want agriculture included in the mix, which is why the IPCC announced last year that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture outweighed all of the industrial CO2 emissions caused by humans. However, the lobby groups know that they'll never get American farmers herded into that particular pen unless the rest of the world is lined up first, and unless America first surrenders its national sovereignty to an overarching international governance organization like the U.N. ... Now, in New Zealand's case we've been a U.N. guinea pig for the last two decades, in the sense that we have strongly globalist political parties and a strongly globalist bureaucracy. We're often the first to stick our hands up to endorse various U.N. initiatives or ratify daft treaties. In fact, our last prime minister, Helen Clark, is now the No. 3 leader at the U.N., tasked with overhauling the agency for a bold new global mission. Helen Clark was a key figure in the leftist global organization Socialist International, alongside one or two people who are now President Obama's advisers. The fact that she's now running the U.N. Development Program and is tipped as a future U.N. secretary general should be sounding alarm bells. If the U.N. says "jump," our government's usual response is "how high?"

Why We Disagree About Climate Change, By Mike Hulme
Cambridge University Press, 2009 432 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0521727327

More than a few people will be tempted to buy this book based on the promise, implicit in its title, that it examines the ideas and motives of both sides in the global warming debate. But that is not what this book is about. It is the musings of a British socialist about how to use global warming claims as a means of persuading “the masses” to give up their economic liberties.

That the author, Mike Hulme, is a scientist who helped write the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other government agencies makes this book even more disturbing.

Extracted from Global Warming And Other Bollocks: The Truth About All Those Science Scare Stories by Professor Stanley Feldman and Professor Vincent Marks, to be published by Metro on July 8 at £9.99 © 2009 Stanley Feldman and Vincent Marks. To order a copy (p&p free) call 0845 155 0720.

THE SUN IS BEHIND GLOBAL WARMING

The consensus view is that man-made CO2 is causing the lion's share of global warming. But natural changes in the Sun's power may be as much to blame. There is good evidence that the cause of at least some of global warming is an increase in the intensity of the Sun's heat. Indeed, global temperatures appear to be more closely related to solar activity, which is constantly changing, than to levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. After all, the Earth warmed up more during medieval times than during the 20th century, and it cooled down considerably during the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries - without any manmade event that would have affected CO2 output. Temperatures also dipped between 1940 and 1975 - a period of intense industrial activity. Meanwhile, data from between 1880 and 2000 shows a close correlation between increased solar activity and higher average temperatures on Earth. So couldn't it be that the Sun is responsible for heating us up after all?

In the following open letter to the President of the Australian Academy of Science, William Kininmonth explains that the science of climate change is ‘not settled’ and if the scientific community is to get to a position where it can confidently prediction future climate it will be necessary to both understand why and how the climate system has varied in the past, and to have a robust computer construct of the climate system. Given so far we have neither, the recent very public criticisms of Ian Plimer’s new book ‘Heaven and Earth’ are not logical or consistent.

Dear Professor Lambeck,

I was Interested in your views of Ian Plimer’s book, Heaven and Earth, given in the transcript of your interview on the ABC’s Okham’s Razor. As President of the Australian Academy of Science your opinions carry considerable influence. Based on your own understanding of science and the wide expertise within the Academy that you could draw from I expected a reasoned evaluation, both of the science of climate change and the sociological processes that may have led to the divergent views that exist on the magnitude of human influence. I was disappointed and suspect that many others will have been similarly disappointed.

Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is the report on global warming the United Nations’ climate panel should have written - but didn’t.

The 880-page report, released today at an international meeting in Washington DC of scientists and policy experts, rigorously critiques the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN�s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that harmful global warming “very likely” has been due to human activity in the release of greenhouse gases. The science behind that conclusion is soundly refuted in Climate Change Reconsidered, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso.

The full text of the report and related materials can be found Here

H/T IceCap.US

by Daniel Finkelstein, Thoughts for the Week, The Times

Not so long ago, there came an important moment in the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. It wasn’t a real breakthrough or anything like that. Lee Harvey Oswald still shot JFK, in case you were wondering. The important moment came in the development of the conspiracy theories.

You see, when the field of assassination studies first opened up, it was possible to master the whole of it. You could be an assassination expert. No longer — now you have to specialise. The volume of “evidence” and the number of competing theories is so great that if you are to amass any sort of expertise, you have to take one area and bone up on that. So you know all about the autopsy, or all about Lee and Marina Oswald, or all about the flight path of bullets and so on.

A few days back, the Nobel prizewinner Sir Harold Kroto told The Times that to tackle climate change two revolutions were needed. The first was a technological revolution.

Speech: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
For SCOOP

A discordant note was sounded at the launch in Parliament Tuesday evening of Gareth Morgan’s book on climate change, Poles Apart, by Bryan Leyland, energy consultant and chairman of the economics panel of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. He had been invited to speak at the function by the publishers, Random House. Here is the text of Mr Leyland’s short address:

First, a word about conflict of interest. As part owner and operator of a small hydropower scheme that would see huge windfall profits in the event of a carbon tax, my stand against the man-made global warming hypothesis and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that it spawned is, for sure, in serious conflict with my financial interests. I wonder how many people in this room are in a similar position?

Think tank releases new book questioning the scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.

Written By: Dan Miller
Published In: News Releases > May 2009
Publication date: 05/19/2009
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

As Congress debates global warming legislation that would raise energy costs to consumers by hundreds of billions of dollars, The Heartland Institute is about to publish an 880-page book challenging the scientific basis of concerns that global warming is either man-made or would have harmful effects.

In “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),” coauthors Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress rely for their regulatory proposals.

Interview Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.

As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK's most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists. In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, he explores how the issue of climate change has come to be such a dominant issue in modern politics. He treats climate change not as a problem that we need to solve – indeed, he believes that the complexity of the issue means that it cannot be solved, only lived with – and instead considers it as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon."

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