I've read at least a dozen books on the climate issue in the last month. This is the best. Koonin is not just another "skeptic." His approach to the matter rises above "controversy" and depends on evidence. Yet, he acknowledges where the panic is coming from. A lecture by Koonin covers much of the key material and provides color versions of the slides, which are black and white in the book. Another interview, without the slides, is here . In reading IPCC reports, it's evident that the "summaries" don't "summarize" the actual science. The ultimate summary, the speech by the head of the IPCC , bristles with inaccuracies and has no message beyond panic. As a senior climate scientist, Koonin provides some startling stories of the "blow-back" he gets by simply asking for an independent review of IPCC conclusions. In fact, there was a brief attempt to cripple such a review by denying federal funds to any study that challenged t...
Everyone agrees the Polar Bears are doing OK More or Less Armed with our new tools and a big bag of facts, we can read Shellenburger's well-written and entertaining "take" on Climate Change. His opening chapter provides an excellent account of the current state of climate panic. Then he gets down to his case, which is like Lomborg's warning about how our attempts to "fix" climate change may actually harm the people we are trying to help. Much of his writing is based on his experience in the Congo. He makes the totally valid point that extremely poor people in the Congo rely on wood for fuel: Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one mill...
The idea that everything we know will be swept away has a strange and long-standing tradition. In the Bible, you see it in the story of Noa, where all of creation (in the limited cosmology of the time) was swept away by a huge flood. We see it again in The Revelation of John, a version of a story that was very popular at the time . The vision is still popular among fundamentalist Christians. It is central to Islam, in particular to the world view of ISIS . A particularly alarming version of "Happy Doomsday" is emerging surrounding climate change. Essentially, the doomsayers cherry pick and interpret more or less "Scientific" evidence to show that not only will the world experience catastrophe as a result of climate change, but that climate change spells the end of civilization or possibly the human species. At the extreme end, claims are made that climate change will wipe out all life on Earth . The facts of climate change are indisputable. The claims of the doomsa...
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