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 Enviros Beware March 2, 2007
Joel M. Kauffman (Berwyn, PA United States)
107 out of 132 found this review helpful
What a shame that this penetrating, sarcastic yet accurate polemic has to be made available as something "politically incorrect". Since it was written by a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Insitute, this by itself might have been enough to make an old "tree-hugger" avoid it.
Part I is an exposé of the true motivations of today's self-proclaimed enviros, who are shown to take seriously the line: "We're from the government, and we're here to help you!" Their priorities are shown by Horner to be global government, tight controls over individuals, and, very oddly for Americans, leveling the playing field for business by transferring wealth from developed countries to the rest. This is shown to be the only result so far among the 15 countries participating in the Kyoto Treaty to lower carbon dioxide emissions. Actually the Treaty is said to be aimed at lowering carbon dioxide concentrations, which is a stretch. Emissions among the 15 have not been lowered at all, but wealth has been transferred. Since human-caused warming has little basis in science, as shown below, enviro beliefs must be considered to be a strange religion, according to Horner. Claims of consensus for the enviros' alarmist views are dismissed by showing how certain literature searches were woefully incomplete and how many climatologists with credentials, as well as other scientists, do not agree with the alarmist view even though they are not "Holocaust deniers".
Part II deals with the claims made for the effect of carbon dioxide on "global warming". Changes in near-surface temperatures of the Earth are presented in clear form with adequate graphs.
Horner depicts enviro efforts to control temps as requiring lying about what actual temps are and have been. According to Horner, enviros have "eliminated" the global cooling from 1940-1970, tried to hide the warming from 1900-1940 and the "Little Ice Age" from 1450-1850, and especially the "Medieval Climate Optimum" from 1000-1450 AD, when temps were warmer than now. The most extreme fraud was said to be that of Michael E. Mann in his "hockey stick" graph of temps from 1000-1998, published in 1999. Two Canadians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, found data selection and computer massaging of the data series used, and persuaded the Editor of Nature to demand a "correction of error", which was done with ill grace. Yet the "hockey stick" graph is still presented as the temp record of 1000 years by alarmists. Many other details are given of disappearing ground stations for temps, no correction for urban heat island effects, general cooling in the southern hemisphere for 50 years, and the total non-correlation of temps with carbon dioxide concentrations. Like old Communist re-writing of history, the Medieval Climate Optimum during low carbon dioxide concentrations had to be written out of history so the innocents would think there is unprecedented warming NOW.
Part III shines light on the complicity of most mainstream media in the climate hoaxes, the willingness of corporations to find ways to get fatter on some of that wealth transfer, and Al Gore's "Inconvenient Ruse". In this, Horner lists 15 specific omissions in the prize-winning docuganda An Inconvenient Truth, and 19 errors of commission. Meaning that if AIT were used as evidence in a court trial, there would be at least 34 counts of perjury possible. It might have been better if the excoriation of Gore had been left until after the factual points had been made.
Part IV delineates the probable lack of effect of Kyoto on warming and the staggering costs if it were ever seriously implemented, as China, India, Brazil and for now the USA, say they will not do. Horner's political sympathies are clear as he points out that former President Clinton had a proxy sign the treaty, but never pushed for its approval, knowing how it would fare in the US Senate. Then there are many examples of Bush-bashing for not signing the treaty as though it had not already been signed by a USA designee. Again, global governance is shown as the true goal of climate malarkey.
Finally, on p303, Horner wrote: "As the curtain descends on the remnants of scientific inquiry into and free speech about "environmental" and other such issues of controversy, we confront a circumstance in which a naturally driven climate is seized upon to cow a population with fear by governments seeking to expand their powers and businesses itching to profit from Man's gullibility. But it isn't over yet."
Horner's writing is easy to read fast, academically referenced (but with very few citations to peer-reviewed journals) and has a good index. One of the very few errors was writing that the breaking of the strong C-C and C-H bonds in hydrocarbons releases energy (p68). Of course, this process requires energy as any Chemistry text would show. Ethanol does not evaporate more easily than gasoline (p267). There are reasonable numbers of graphs and quotations.
For an equally accurate book without the pejoratives and sarcasm, and better sources of citations, see "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years" by S. Fred Singer, PhD, and Dennis T. Avery, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Oct 2006. Fewer laughs, though.
A Refutation of Para-science April 16, 2007
thefonz (Niagara Falls)
67 out of 87 found this review helpful
Mr. Horner did a very thorough analysis of current popular and widely believed commentary about global climate change. Due to the fact that the media tends to oversimplify the topic in order to create fear and impact for ratings, most of his work was about putting cogent, rational perspective into this debate. Science is complicated, tricky and slow and also its method is part of a long tradition of cautious inquiry. Suffice it to say that to think of it in terms of the Academy Awards, ratings or popularity is to trivialize science.
This trivialization is due to the fact that those who propagate presumed facts about the earth and even probabilities of future events are not always, in fact, scientists. Nonetheless, Mr. Horner does the IPCC great justice and shows it great respect because the oft-quoted political summary of that report does not refer to the lack of scientific consensus and even very deliberate, reasoned language that is not alarmist contained in the report. I was also not aware that the vast majority of scientists who commented on this were not specialists in the earth sciences. (I recall the mention of OB/GYN.) To claim that the science is unsettled is not denying anything. The temperature of the earth, the average will always change, either up or down. Stasis is not the expected condition of nature.
Although I don't regard it as a demerit, there is some repetition of facts throughout the book. One example is the closing of the Siberian temperature stations after the collapse of the Soviet Union which made the average global temperature, predictably, go up immediately, showing higher averages for the 1990's. In Mr. Horner's defense, the book is divided into distinct sections that could be read independently and would be complete unto themselves.
One extremely important lesson in Mr. Horner's work (and one that immediately shows that some reviewers haven't read the book, and if they did, something was lost in the translation from English to English) is that big oil and government (meetings with the Enron, President and VP in 1994, Ken Lay, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, respectively) were designing plans to basically create a government supported cartel of domestic oil producers. On top of this, energy companies are the ones who get the big taxpayer funded subsidies for alternate energy research and development. To further sweeten the icing, one of the plans in this meeting was to get the energy industry more involved in the trading of carbon credits, which effectively means that the government would help them diversify their own industries. (Add ag corporations) It's kind of like what would happen behind the scenes with national health insurance. Employers would love it. They would be relieved of the costs of keeping personnel to search for the best insurance plans, to administrate claims, changes. Larger companies and insurance companies could lay off lots of people, thanks to the government, who would absorb only a small portion of those unemployed. And, we're kidding ourselves if we think insurance companies would despise this. They'd simply consolidate and become a federal department, ridding themselves of competition and then, any permitted public insurance they provided would be guaranteed by the government, which is the taxpayer. Nothing different with big government and big oil - government programs that meddle in industry only serve to create corporatism, the marriage of government and business in order to protect markets, increase costs and prices and, since taxes work on percentage cuts, government revenue - all with your money. This can't even be described as win-win for both sides, because there are no sides.
It's that last point - your money - where Mr. Horner hits hard. The eagerness of people to support non-governmental movements, ones that are full of unelected persons supporting more layers of regulation in the private citizen's life, under the guise of the greater good is something of concern. For many centuries people fought off kings, queens, tyrants and struggled to get more liberties. Now, people seem to willingly want to cede control of their lives and choices to government and the weight of its alliances with non-governmental interests. Moreover, these purveyors of our behavioral changes haven't really been on the level about what it's going to cost us, not only in terms of money, but in so many other qualitative aspects of our lives as we know them. The impacts on the developing world would be worse. Per Kyoto, only the very wealthy economies are expected to make changes to their energy use to avert global climate catastrophe whereas all of the other countries can emit without limit or restrictions on the types of emissions. The lesson is that when it's a problem, it's global, when it needs to be paid for to be fixed, it's selective by region, so some regions are more equal than others.
There was one surprise. I always though Al Gore was a lawyer and had a brilliant academic career. So said his handlers and marketing people. Mr. Gore eeked out a BA, which included two science courses with grades of C+ and D (the D reserved for Man's Place in Nature, ironically), yet Mr. Gore plants himself in a career that is about science. He attended, but did not complete, graduate school. This brings back memories of Mr. Gore's condescending eye-rolling in the debates preceding the 2000 election. It's fair to question the motives of all strong opinions in the climate issue, but Mr. Gore's in particular, should be equally suspect, especially given his "qualifications". This is where a "be worried, be very worried" applies.
In spite of the doomsaying, misery-merchandising and bleakness of the messages and messengers of climate change, Mr. Horner injects some humorous one-liners that provide relief between the footnoted citations of horror. Considering the topic, that's a feat in and of itself.
"Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing." April 12, 2007
DWD (Indianapolis, IN)
57 out of 75 found this review helpful
I am a former environmentalist.
Quotes like the one in my title (from Tim Wirth, a former Clinton State Department official) pushed me to be a FORMER environmentalist.
Now I am a conservationist. I do believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there!
Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance".
I am now embarassed by that.
I did not listen to other sources.
I ignored my training as a junior historian.
I did not look to see if this has happened to us before. Santanaya's famous quote about learning from history went right over my head. Even worse, I was ignoring my poli-sci training and not looking at the motivations of some of these reports.
The globe cools. The globe warms. We've had recent periods of global warming, recent periods of cooling. Just like your body is not always 98.6 degrees, the earth's temperatures deviates.
Now, on to the book.
I bought this book because of an extensive radio interview I heard with the author, Chris Horner. He has a wickedly sharp sense of humor. He marshals his facts and takes it to his opponents in an entertaining, yet effective manner.
Even if you are absolutely dead-set against Horner's point of view, it does provide a useful counterpoint to Al Gore's more prominent "Inconvenient Truth." To be honest, I would equate the book with that movie. The science is not mind-numbingly detailed and complicated. It is boiled down to the essentials so that the average reader doesn't fall asleep. If I were to return to my old habits and show environmentalist panic material I would also have my students read this book.
Horner's strengh is not going after the science. Rather, it lies in going after the policies that some politicians and groups are advocating in the name of the science. On that score Horner is a bulldog - relentless and effective. His ability to dig up the most damning quotes is quite impressive.
This is a great read. I'll try to share it with others, but I doubt that the ones who really need to read it will want to. It's hard to shake those old beliefs. I know, I've already made this trip from Environmentalist wacko to responsible conservationist.
I give this one a grade of A-.
Good overview of the flip side of the argument February 6, 2007
Michael A. Weyer
96 out of 130 found this review helpful
As this book shows, the debate over global warming is not as one-sided as the media would have you believe. The authors do a great job showing that there is great debate on whether it even exists and the problems they have telling this version. As the book shows, there is still much on weather and climate scientists do not understand and can't be predicted. Al Gore's "An Inconvient Truth" is focused on, showing the various mistakes and errors it made and that, despite what Gore claims, not even a vast majority of scientists agree on global warming. As a liberal but a doubter in the phenomenon, I would urge people to at least read over this side of the argument rather than do what the authors accuse many "lefties" of doing and simply ignoring any data that doesn't prove your point.
Why does the media ignore the facts? March 8, 2007
Frank Rumbauskas (San Antonio, TX USA)
62 out of 86 found this review helpful
To me, basic common sense told me that the concept of man-made global warming is junk science. In fact, the environmental lobby has not come up with one bit of factual scientific data to support global warming, just lots and lots of junk science.
This book blows the lid off it all. It contains information I'd already learned from other sources, but all in one single volume. It debunks the junk science used by the left to promote the myth of man-made global warming (in fact it's not based in scientific method at all) and explains why all of this delusional hysteria is over nothing.
Let's face it - who is promoting the myth of global warming? Scientists who make six figures per year, all paid by research grants funded by the global warming movement. What would happen if these scientists came out and told the truth that there is no man-made global warming? You guessed it - no more grants and no more six figure salaries. They'd be on the unemployment line instead.
If you had the choice of lying and saying that global warming is real and receiving a six figure salary for it, or telling the truth and admitting that it's a sham and losing your job, what would you do??????
Global warming is a sham, promoted by the very same people who are getting rich by perpetuating the myth. Furthermore, the Kyoto treaty is anti-capitalist and pro-socialist. It does nothing but redistribute wealth from those who worked for it to the looters who are looking for a handout. In fact, basic economics says that if the US signed the treaty, the country would plunge into an economic disaster far worse than the Great Depression, including the loss of over 5 million American jobs.
This book is a must-read. Even for environmentalists. And if they refuse to hear the other side of the story, that's only further proof that they have an evil socialist agenda motivating them.
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