Lawrence Solomon's "The Deniers"

This is an excellent book on global warming and the science behind it. Surprisingly it is written by an environmentalist, but one disgruntled by the manipulation of facts that has moved focus away from his concerns to ones that he believes are less significant.

The work underlying the book started as a series of articles for one of Canada's major newspaper, the National Post. The premise was to see if there were any reputable scientists that were sceptical about global warming. What he found were many, many scientists who were crossing swords with the global warming "catastrophists". Most of these scientists agreed that greenhouse gases cause warming, but their concern was that science had been hijacked by alarmists with political motives, that the "science" under global warming doomsayers is not the "consensus" that Al Gore claims it to be.

You have to read the book, but the list of highly respected scientists with concerns about the IPCC and its crusade on "global warming" will surprise you. Here are just the scientists mentioned in the first two of the fourteen chapters in this book:

Dr. Edward Weegman PhD in mathematical statistics from U of Iowa, in 1978 he headed the Mathematical Sciences Division of the Office of Naval Research, he helped found the field of cmputational statistics, he was the original program director of the basic research program in Ultra High Speed Computing at the Stategic Defense Initiative's Science and Technology Office. He is a past president of the International Association of Statistical Computing. He showed that the famous "hockey stick" graph of temperatures is based on mis-applied statistics.

Dr. Richard Tol PhD in economics from the Vrije University in Amsterdam. He is the Michael Otto Professor of Sustainability and Global Change and director of the Center for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Hamburg Univeristy, etc. He showed that the infamous Stern Report of 2006 was based on faulty models, selected data that picked the worst case possible, and other fraudulent techniques.

Dr. Christopher Landsea PhD from Colorado State Universityu is a research meteorologist with NOAA, he was the Chair of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones, etc. He was a member of the IPCC but resigned in 2005 because that organization held a conference and presented "results" on global warming and hurricanes that was in fact not supported by any scientific research. He, in fact, was the researcher that IPCC was supposedly depending on to complete the research in 2007 and publish it. But when IPCC jumped the gun and published stuff that he knew was false and overly-political he resigned. He is not against "global warming" but he quit because he was disgusted that the radicals have seized organizations like IPCC to push a political agenda without regard for the science.

Here is the position taken by the author of this book, Lawrence Solomon, an environmentalist in his own right:

How can I explain my respect for scientists on both sides of the IPCC divide? I will explain by analogy to the world of economics.

For the last ten years, in addition to my job at Energy Probe, I have edited the op-ed submissions of many impressive economists to the National Post, among them Nobel Laureates such as Milton Friedman and Robert Mundell. When these economists engaged in debate in the pages of the Post on the economic controversies of the day, they rarely agreed. ... They could not agree on whether the stock market was going up or down, or the economy was headed into a recession, or whether the dollar was overvalued.

We all know enough to take the forecasts of economists with a grain of salt. It's not that we think they're pulling a hoax. Be we know from long experience that economics, and especially economic models, encounter severe "limits to predictability"...

How much more daunting the task of climate-change models, which ideally need to encompass not only the myriad forces on land, in the oceans, and in the atmosphere, about which we have little uncontroversial data and scant understanding, but also an understanding of the Sun and cosmic forces, spanning hundreds of millions of years in the past and many decades into the future. ...

I think many of them [climate scientists] are wrong in one very important area, which is how to proceed from scientific results to environmental policy. This applies to scientists on all sides of the global warming debate. Many of them reason along the [the lines that reducing CO2 is a kind of insurance policy]...

But Kyoto is not an insurance policy. Just the opposite, it is the single greatest threat today to the global environmnet, because it makes carbon into currency....

This is not some abstract theoretical concern. We are already seeing environmental havoc from the new economic order that Kyoto has spawned. I know about this havoc mostly from my colleages at Probe International, who confront it daily. News of it often comes directly from groups in the Third World.

The first big Kyoto calamity is the threat to the world's forests, especially the old-growth forests, which do not soak up carbon from the atmosphere. These have become favourites of corrupt Third World governments. By seizing the forests, cutting them down, and converting them to carbon-intensive plantations, governments and their cronies have been cashing in on carbon credits. ...

A second loomiing catastrophe, also caused by Kyoto carbon credits, again affects the poorest of the poor: a dangerous rise in food prices as agricultural lands are turned to ethanol and other biofuels rather than nourishment. ...

Carbon as currency also means the resurrection of large hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors.

This is a book well worth reading whether you are for or against global warming. It is an important book to read to understand how science and scientists can be bent to political ends and how careers can be ruined if you fail to submit to a political consensus.

I remember during the early 1970s being shocked and upset to learn how Trofim Lysenko subjugated science to his political ambitions and how a dissident scientist like Zhores Medvedev could be treated (literally incarcerated in a mental "asylum") by hardliners in the Kremlin bent on stamping out any dissent in the scientific intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, especially by the Lysenkoists. Sadly, the kind of manipulation of careers by the political interests behind the global warming doomsayers is recreating this same kind of climate of fear and destroying careers today... plus ça change, c'est la même chose.