A Place to Stand

chat@channel4.com
I have, for the 2nd time been banned from the C4 News discussion group for the crimes of not accepting the guilt of Milosevic, sea level rise, that our own leaders are not war criminals & for posting on a banned subject (though I couldn't know it was banned at the time).
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Dear C4 Communities,
In response to the decision of Channel 4 to prevent my participation in your news discussion group, yet again, may I confirm that I still consider C4 to be the best news provider on terrestrial UK television, though it must be admitted the competition isn't tough. May I also thank you for this time at least having the common courtesy to confirm why I was censored. Last time I received no explanation though I suspect it was because I had dared to mention that in the ITN vs LM "concentration camp video" even the judge, in summing up for ITN confirmed that ITN had indeed faked the video representing the most important single news story ever broken by them but that LM had erred in failing to bring to their reader's attention the possibility that ITN had been accidentally faking.

I thought this unfair since I had gone to considerable lengths to say that the video was allegedly "accidentally" faked & that ITN had conceivably accidentally failed to notice when it was used wrongly to suggest the existence of a concentration camp & conceivably accidentally not noticed when George Bush used it to support illegal war & conceivable not noticed when the judge said it was faked & conceivably not noticed in each of the succeeding years when ITN did not withdraw their conceivably accidental lie.

Since this has now undeniably been brought to ITN's attention it is, of course, inconceivable that you will be unable to apologise for this allegedly accidental lie this week.

Your current gagging is because of 5 instances.

1) I disputed vociferously that Milosevic was guilty with somebody who made the most outrageous claims, repeatedly & repeatedly refused to produce evidence. I remind you that the legal position is that ANYBODY is innocent until proven guilty & that, due to his murder in custody, Milosevic remains legally innocent. Your action is thus not merely censorship but flies in the face of our legal tradition. If this is your official position C4, or its employees, could not object if somebody, for example, accused John Snow of kidnapping raping & murdering dozens of pre-schoolers purely because there is no evidence. The other disputant was not banned despite what he said being clearly hundreds of times more offensive than anything I did.

2) I accepted that a statement made by another party that there had been no blood test of Milosevic containing rifampcin represented his standard of honesty. Considering that such a test exists & did show poison I believe my remark was as restrained as possible without disputing the proven facts. Since you have said that I may rejoin if "posts of this nature will not occur again" I must ask you what form of words would be within your code & truthful at the same time?

3) I asked a disputant to withdraw the claim that we are currently experiencing a 300 foot sea level rise & the claim that Stephen McIntyre had not shown the mathematics of the Hockey Stick theory of global warming nonviable. Since we aren't & he has I ask again what form of words would be within your code & still truthful?

4) That I attempted to put up a thread relating to the massive & spectacular attack & explosions in Camp Falcon, Iraq which you decided should be censored. One of the problems with censorship is that it is, by it's nature, difficult to tell that a subject has been censored because discussion is censored. Short of C4 publishing a list of subjects censored from C4 discussion I cannot see how it would have been possible for me to pre-censor myself. If you wish me to do so in future, as you suggest, I must ask for specific advice.

5) I referred to Ms Clare Short as an "obscene racist Nazi war criminal". Firstly it is a matter of law that anybody involved in planning or launching an aggressive war is a war criminal, as I proved she had done & the other points were similarly proven (& have not been disputed by you). Even if it is the case of C4 that people should not mention the effects of the law what I said about Ms Short was not as grave a criticism as that of a member of the racial "Untermensch" (i.e. ex-President Milosevic) about whom neither C4 nor anybody else has produced serious evidence. If, as you say, you wish me to stay within your guidelines, it is necessary for you to produce your guidelines. About whom, other than former cabinet members, is it impermissible to ever mention proven criminal activities. About which racial groups, other than the "Untermensch" (Slavs, Jews, Gypsies) is any sort of libel, no matter how obscene, to be supported by C4?

I would like it to be possible for myself, or indeed others of conscience, to participate on the C4 discussion group. I am prepared to avoid telling truths which C4 finds politically unacceptable but am not willing to lie. If you can answer these points about your guidelines it may be possible to progress.

Neil Craig

Labels: International politics, Reading, Yugoslavia

The Institute of Science in Society really sounds like, well, an institute of science. In fact it is just a another bunch of wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasites flying under yet another false flag. I have said before & will doubtless have to say again that one of the problems with politics is that the parasites who crawl out from under things & never have anything to contribute keep adopting respectable political banners. These banners are worth defending because an ideal that cannot be expressed in words will disappear.

The Luddites have adopted many of them - "environmentalist", "ecologist" (both genuine scientific terms), "concerned local", "progressive", "liberal", "concerned scientist" (Union of - membership available to all $25) etc.

My particular annoyance with them is this article which, with all the outrage of the thief they say should not be copied & uses the name of the pioneering scientist Sir Austin Bradford Hill & his principles (which I reprint because the "Institute" has no claim to ownership) in a wholly fraudulent way to say that by these quite proper & rigorous principles catastrophic warming is something other than a scam.

In the the words of Numberwatch's John Brignell "Sir Bradford Hill, a great proponent of statistical rigour. After the death of Hill, his colleague Doll rather went off the rigorous rails and launched into some of the greater excesses of the subject that its practitioners call epidemiology" {I recommend this link to anybody interested in how statistics are fiddled to produce scare stories]thus a field he helped form has been traduced & turned over to charlatans who endlessly get paid, almost always by government, to produce the scare stories the papers are infested with.

So these are the principles he laid down & they are indeed worth checking any eco-fascist claims against:

(1) Strength of the association. The death-rate from lung cancer was over nine times as high in smokers as in non-smokers; in heavy smokers, it was more than twice that again. This was obviously much stronger supporting evidence than if the rates had only been slightly higher.

(2) Consistency: Are we talking about the result of a single study, or of several, and if there is more than one, were they all done in the same way or were they really different? Bradford Hill pointed out that according to a committee advising the US Surgeon General, 36 different inquiries, not all using the same methodology, had found an association between smoking and lung cancer. That does not rule out the possibility that the same fallacy was at work in all of them, but it strengthens the case.

(3) Specificity: If a disease occurs only in one group of people and if there are no other diseases that occur only in this group, this is strong evidence for cause and effect. In fact, while the death rates for smokers are higher for many causes of death, the increase is much greater for lung cancer than for the others, so this criterion is still satisfied.

(4) Temporality: While cause obviously has to come before effect, it is not always obvious which of two events was really first. If people who smoke are more likely to die from lung cancer, does that mean that smoking causes cancer or is it that the sort of people who are predisposed to lung cancer are also likely to adopt a life style that includes smoking? Here the obvious explanation is correct – smoking does cause lung cancer – but it is a question we should ask.

(5) Dose response: Does increasing the purported cause increase the effect? In the case of smoking and lung cancer, the increase in death rate rises linearly with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and this is strong supporting evidence. On the other hand, in many cases there are threshold or trigger effects, and then there will be no dose response. Drinking two glasses of poison doesn’t make you twice as dead.

(6) Plausibility: Is the cause-effect relationship plausible? Ideally, we would like to be able to find the mechanism that links cause and effect, but often this is not possible; if it were there would be no problem. We can, however, ask if it is at least plausible that A could be the cause of B. Hill immediately warns, however, that what is considered plausible changes in time. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was thought totally implausible that doctors not washing their hands could be responsible for the deaths of women in maternity wards.

(7) Coherence: Does the claim that A causes B seriously conflict with what we know about B? This is really a companion to the plausibility criterion. If our present knowledge provides no plausible mechanism by which A can cause B, can we actually rule it out? John Snow was not able to suggest how polluted water could be the means by which cholera is spread, but even in 1854, there was no good scientific reason for ruling out the possibility that it might be.

(8) Experiment: If we change A, does B change as well? If people stop smoking, does the death rate from lung cancer fall? We now know that it does. Not only do deaths from lung cancer in a population increase when the proportion of smokers goes increases [2], an individual who gives up smoking reduces his or her chance of contracting the disease depends on the total number of cigarettes smoked [3]. Bradford Hill did include laboratory experiments in his paper, such as the effect of tobacco smoke on dogs, but because he was writing specifically for epidemiologists he considered those to be part of coherence.

(9) Analogy: Are there analogous examples? After it had been established that thalidomide and rubella can produce birth defects, it was easier to make the case that some other birth defect could be caused by a drug or a viral disease.

And this is my reply:

Association - The increase over the last "2 or 3 centuries" (so not that certain) may be passable but since CO2 didn't start rising till the 20thC that disproves any correlation.

Consistency can only apply when the studies are unrelated. As you point out they are often merely rehashes of each other. Had there bee consistency over different methods or even over a long period of time that would be relevant but in fact we know that before the warming scare there was a cooling scare, in which Hansen & some other alarmists were involved. The consistency argument points to a consistent history of "environmental" scare stories all of which have, so far, proved to be untrue.

Specificity - warming has been found on Mars & other planets. That is consistent only with the solar theory.

Temporality - as you have acknowledged, the temperature growth has been going on for "2-3 centuries" which predates the CO2 growth & thus proves the latter did not cause the former.

Dose response - CO2 has continued to rise at the same rate but over the last 12 years temperature has fallen - no correlation.

Plausibility - not all calculations from the 19thC are automatically accepted (e.g. Kelvin calculated the earth couldn't be over 1 million years old). The current theory depends on unknown but massive positive feedbacks & that we rest on a knife's edge likely to tip on to catastrophic warming (Arrhenius assumed negative feedback.) If there was a positive feedback it would mean there has been no time in the last million, possibly billion, years when we fell off that knife edge which is statistically incredibly implausible.

Coherence - there is & always has been an inconsistency in that measurements of tropospheric temperature should be rising faster than on the ground (the CO2 being in the atmosphere). The opposite is the case. The proposition is not coherent.

There are many possible analogies but taking ozone - the "environmentalists" promised catastrophe & that even if CFCs were banned it would take 50 years before the Antarctic Ozone hole stopped growing (they had not predicted the hole for Antarctica before it was first measurements were first taken there). In fact the hole started shrinking almost immediately - as soon as Mount Erebus stopped pouring out millions of tons of sulphur in fact. The analogy with this & the other false scare stories is obvious.

The "Institute" has censored my comment (& presumably others since none appear). Now what sort of "Institute of Science" prevents factual discussion of basic scientific principles? - a fraudulent one, that's what sort.

On a further thread they have the another "scientist" "rebutting" the sceptic's arguments on warming. Again this "rebuttal" is not strong enough to face examination & they have censored this rerebuttal:

Your first argument obviously depends on the assumption that absorption of CO2 naturally is an absolutely fixed amount. That purely by chance it happens to be exactly the same as production over millions of years. That a rise in the amount of CO2 would not make it easier for water or trees to absorb more of it. This could be called a highly improbable unproven assumption if we did not know that it was totally false. Experiment shows that plants do grow faster in a higher CO2 environment - something that the "Institute of Science in Society" would certainly know if you knew any science.

On your other allegations:

There is no empirical evidence for CO2 causing measurable warming.

It is a lie to say there is no correlation between solar activity & temperature. The last 2 years, for example, have had very low sunspot level & as anyone can see our promised "barbecue summer" & "mild winter" have been cool or as you put it "unusually cold weather".

The globe is cooling - if it were not we could not be having "unusually cold weather".
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They have other "scientific" articles on why GM is dangerous etc. The whole panoply of anti-science scares on offer posing as science.

If anybody thinks I am a little annoyed at this it is because it was brought to my attention on another blog by somebody who had obviously been taken in by the aura.

Not every single "environmentalist" is, like these, a wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasite morally inferior to normal creatures under rocks but they are very difficult to find. Such would already, without prompting, have publicly denounced almost all the other "environmentalists" for lying. But then such people, like the honourable founder of Greenpeace, would be doing real environmentalism now.

PSD I got barred from Treehugger too for telling the truth so that they could keep lying about "consensus"..

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism

I mentioned earlier that the Australian opposition party had split with many of the most prominent shadow cabinet members resigning over the leader's insistence on supporting global warming. Well now they have a new leader who is sensible on the subject.

This may be a first: a major political party has dumped a global warming believer as leader and replaced him with sceptic who last month called AGW “crap”. Tony Abbott has tempered his public pronouncements since, but has today become the new Liberal leader, toppling warmist Malcolm Turnbull, specifically because he was the only one of the three contenders today to promise to delay the Government’s emissions trading scheme.

And immediately the government's cap & trade bill has been defeated

KEVIN Rudd has lost his bid to deliver an emissions trading scheme in Australia before talks in Copenhagen but won an early election trigger after the Senate formally rejected the laws again today.

Just two Liberal senators broke ranks with a clear mandate among Coalition MPs to delay an ETS and voted with Labor on an emissions trading scheme

Fair dinkum.
Looks like that "early election trigger" will give the people a chance to express their opinion. Iain Dale has an article explaining that the British Conservatives haven't the balls to do this - doesn't phrase it like that but that Cameron has total control of the party. However strong your hold appears you can't stop the tide.

Here is an honest acknowledgement from a previously alarmist journalist of the clear extent of fraud.

Meanwhile our media continue to censor. Last night the BBC's important news about warming was that Antarctica is more doomed than previously thought (it isn't) & John Snow, on a warming junket to Rio promised thet "The Science" says we have catastrophic warming - not "a few people with no scientific principles, paid by government" as he would have said if honest, or "some scientists" if half honest, or "scientists say" if only 75% corrupt, or "some scientific results" if only 87.5% corrupt, or "science says" if only 90% a liar but "The Science says".

And in the personally pleasing stuff I found yesterday that somebody in Australia Googling "Professor Phil Jones" had got me as 8th hit in the entire world. Today it is down to 18th which I still find incredibly unlikely.

History of the CRU
There is also an outstanding article in The Register on warming & I am linking to page 2 of it which gives the history of alarmism & its connection to the CRU.

What I found that I hadn't known is that when the Climate research Unit was founded by Hubert Lamb "the father of climate science" he was not taken in by this. Compare & contrast his assessment of global temperature with the alarmist lies.
Lamb's original graph
Mann's fraud

As you can see not only was Lamb right about the Medieval warming period but he had even got the blip showing 1934 as the warmest of last century which Stephen McIntyre independently rediscovered hidden within America's GISS figures.

This means the fabrication overlays the correct assessment we knew of years ago. So what growth factors caused the fraud to overwhelm the known truth?

CRU was founded in 1972 by the 'Father of Climatology', former Met Office meteorologist Hubert Lamb. Until around 1980, solar modulation was believed to be the driving factor in climatic variation. A not unreasonable idea, you might think, since our energy (unless you live by a volcano vent) is derived from the sun. Without a better understanding of the sun, climatology may be reasonably be called "speculative meteorology".

But CRU's increasing influence, according to its own history, stemmed from politicians taking an interest. "The UK Government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s, following a meeting between Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and a small number of climate researchers, which included Tom Wigley, the CRU director at the time. This and other meetings eventually led to the setting up of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, within the Met Office," the CRU notes.

Lamb (who died in 1997), however remained sceptical of the greenhouse gas hypothesis to the end.

In addition to inheriting all the problems of climatology, the greenhouse gas hypothesis has several unique issues of its own, and addressing them is a challenge for the most scrupulous researcher. How CRU addressed them was to define climatology for two decades - and ultimately defined the public debate and policy, too...

The first IPCC report in 1990 used the established temperature record created by Lamb. It's very different to the one we're familiar with today ...we find Jones unambiguous in an email: "We will be rewriting people's perceived wisdom about the course of temperature change over the past millennium," he wrote...

'Climategate' raises far more questions than it answers, and one of the most intriguing of these is how a small group (backing a new theory, in an infant field) came to have such a huge effect on global policy making. Is it fair to hang CRU Director Jones and his colleagues out to dry - as some climate campaigners such as George Monbiot have suggested? If the buck doesn't stop with the CRU climatologists - then who or what is really to blame?

Poring over the archive, it's easy to find a nose here, and a large leathery foot over there - and to conclude that the owner of the room may have a very strange taste in furnishings. The elephant in the room can go unnoticed...

the very nature of the problem itself has led the "science" onto shaky ground - onto modelling (which has no predictive value) and anecdotal evidence (which merely demonstrates correlation, but not causation). That's why the 'Hockey Stick' was a very big deal: it substituted for hard evidence; if fossil fuel emissions affected the climate at all significantly, this remained a future threat, and certainly not an urgent one.

The demand from institutions, (principally the UN, through its IPCC), national policy makers and the media has taken climate scientists into areas where they struggle to do good science. Add professional activists to the mix - who bring with them the Precautionary Principle - and the element of urgency is introduced.

So that is what happened. "Policy makers" (aka politicians) decided, with the fall of the USSR, as detailed in Michael Crichton's State of Fear, to quite deliberately fund, push & demand a scare story which was completely opposite to that which the emerging climate science had already proven. With money & a very small number of buyable "scientists" such as Jones & Mann replacing a real giant & perverting his life's work & the obedient media, at least within the English speaking & NATO areas, to promote this false story they had deliberately manufactured this fraud.

This goes somewhat beyond climate science. On another blog, where the reasons why climate science, social science & economics don't achieve the level of scientific accuracy that physics takes for granted. The conventional explanation is that these sciences are newer & have unique problems. One commenter explained:

This science has a lot of similarities with social sciences (like economics):

(1) The system you're trying to understand is complex.

(2) Controlled experiments are difficult or impossible.

(3) The knowledge you can be somewhat confident about is qualitative, not quantitative.

(4) Given the inability to reach verifiable, quantitative conclusions, there will be a tendency for scientists to reach conclusions on a non-scientific basis (such as a desire to conform to the consensus).

I disagreed saying

A 5th similarity to social sciences & economics is that the main customer, usually government, is more interested in funding findings that support what they have already decided to do than which will, in due course, turn out to be accurate. I suspect this is the main thing holding all these proto-sciences back...

Climate science differs from proto-sciences like social science& economics in that it used to be a real, albeit boring, science, having liked day by day weather forecasting, because of satellites, it was making slow but steady progress in understanding underlying trends. Then it became politically useful & vast amounts of money were poured into it but only to climate modellers who produced the required scare stories. This enhances my earlier point that the thing holding back proto-sciences is not lack of information or their complexity (compare with quantum physics) but that they are funded by politicians who want their prejudices confirmed rather than accurate science.

...when Hubert Lamb established the CRU it was doing good, mathematically rigorous, science. Then the politicians & their political spinners moved in & it "just growed". Lamb's graph of climate differs in all respects from the present one, particularly in being far less jazzy looking & in being correct - not only showing the Medieval warming but also the 1934 peak McIntyre rediscovered by analysing GISS figures.

Political support has caused this Lysenko style perversion ...

I regard the accuracy of Lamb's initial graph as proof that climate science was & thus could be a real rigorous science before the politicians took control of it by their control of funding. The effects of state funding of science seem to be negative. The lesson for anybody who wants real sciences of sociology or economics is clear. I believe we could have accurate replicable sciences of economics & sociology if the funders did not simply want their interests catered too.

This article has a similar opinion of the "Voodoo sciences".

UPDATE An interesting Wall Street Journal article on the government funding of alarmism & pressure to prevent any funding at all of anything sceptical. I think that supports the point made here entirely. H/T to Al Fin who links other articles too.

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism, International politics, Science/technology

Ofcom's finding on whether the Great Global Warming Swindle film was right is to be published tomorrow so the papers are reporting it yesterday.

The headline story is that they get censured. Buried further down is that they don't get censured for any factual inaccuracy:

But the broadcaster will not be censured over a second complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, with Ofcom finding that it did not mislead the public

The censure then is for:

(A) one participant, Professor Wunsch, wants out because he has clearly found what he said while in no way untrue was not career enhancing

(B) the IPCC complain that they weren't given time on the programme to put their viewpoint despite the fact that they were asked & refused to appear

Ofcom is expected to find that the programme made significant allegations against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, questioning its credibility and failed to offer it timely and appropriate opportunity to respond.

Channel 4 argues that the organisation refused to cooperate with the programme-makers.

Even had they not been asked to appear this would still be a corrupt decision. That is unless Ofcom are about to issue thousands of reports criticising the media for every occasion the warming claim has been broadcast without inviting a sceptic to say why it is rubbish. Also on numerous other "news" items such as anything to do with Yugoslavia. Indeed I am so inspired by this decision that I am going to put in a complaint about the lack of any scepticism in a C4 discussion of the Sterns Report where it was specifically promised:

"Despite this on Channel 4 News last night John Snow, while reporting on the Stern Report said that "we are going to hear from all sides of the argument" which turned out to be David Miliband, George Monbiott & somebody who hoped the new taxes wouldn't hurt too much."

Ofcom's response, if any, will be published.

(C) "In the closing moments of the program a voice over from the climate change sceptic Fred Singer claimed that the Chief Scientist of the UK had said that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the planet would be in the Antarctic and that “humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic”.

Sir David has never made such a statement."

This is an out & out deliberate lie. Sir David did indeed make that statement as can be seen from this report in the Independent 2nd May 2004.

Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.

......He said that the Earth was entering the "first hot period" since 60 million years ago, when there was no ice on the planet and "the rest of the globe could not sustain human life". The shock warning - one of the starkest yet delivered by a top scientist or senior government figure

......"No ice was left on earth. Antarctica was the best place for mammals to live, and the rest of the world would not sustain human life," he said. And Sir David warned that if the world did not curb its burning of fossil fuels "we will reach that level by the end of the century".

Difficult to be more clear than that. If the Indie was fabricating their story in 2004 the time for him to have denied it was when it came out. He did not deny having said it then because it was a truthful report & it is clearly a lie for him to claim it now.

Incidentally I have reported previously on how the former editor of Nature said Sir David had proved himself, by his Antarctica claim, capable of only a "kindergarten analysis" the learned scientist/ass Jeff Harvey had failed to notice that the claim he was criticising had come not from me but from the government's chief science advisor but since science is about the facts not the prominence of the people discussing them he would doubtless be equally happy to say it to Sir D's face

Compare & contrast with Al Gore's film where a judge decided that 11 or 13 facts (depending on how you count them), amounting to almost every claim he made about warming leaving only his picture & incidental music, were lies. He also had refused space to opponents, indeed the egregious Al has never been willing to publicly debate any of his claims & an obedient media has given him massive coverage while ensuring he never had to. Had Al ever been required to allow the opposing views Ofcom claim to believe necessary he would never have been heard of, which I grant may not be an argument against such rules.

Obviously from now on any media will have no choice but to offer airtime/column inches to sceptics on the warming & indeed other subjects if they intend to claim any remote shred of impartiality (as out TV are required to) & Ofcom will come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who doesn't.

Assuming Ofcom are an honest & impartial monitoring organisation & not merely enforcers of government propaganda that is.

Very little.

This is the problem when you know there is a long history of our media lying. A BBC which described the ex-SS auxiliary & public supporter of genocide, the Bosnian Moslem leader Izetbegovic as a "moderate minded Moslem committed to a multicultural Bosnia", may or may not be slightly more truthful this time.

I don't know that everything they tell us about Zimbabwe is a lie but I don't know that it isn't & I do know that the people saying it are prepared to tell any lie. I also know that we don't get to hear from the people being demonised. The last time I saw some real foreign policy opposition on TV was when the Chinese ambassadress appeared on C4 News to defend their record in Tibet - she knew her facts & took John Snow apart - he was reduced to saying that the guards around the Olympic flame weren't competitively chosen students from across China but secret police because our press had said so.

My problems with the story we get:

• Sir Robert Mugabe used to be a fine upstanding example of how Britain's example could produce moderate successful governments (hence his knighthood). Now he is "another Hitler". When exactly did he metamorphosis & was there any sign of it other than taking over from white farmers, who after all, are the hardly the world's most oppressed minority?
• What else has Zimbabwe done that makes it more worthy of our attention than, for example, Congo?
• How much is the place's economic chaos is down to its own government & how much to western formal & informal sanctions because if the latter then blame does not lie fully with him?
• Is Morgan Tsvangirai & his lot really more democratic than his opponent or are they merely our thugs against their thugs? Is this case merely supporting the leader of 1 tribe rather than another?
• Are we funding his campaign, as we did in Serbia, Ukraine & Georgia among others? If not who is?
• Have we any plan for what to do in the event we move in? For example much of Africa's problems are that state boundaries have nothing to do with ancient tribal/national boundaries but were drawn on maps in London & Paris. I suspect dividing it into 2 countries on ethnic lines would work best - Basuto is about the only successful subsaharan state & is relatively ethnically homogeneous. However I see no sign anybody has even been thinking of this let alone prepared to do it.
• It is clear that Zimbabwe has had a somewhat democratic first round & if Mugabe didn't win he came close. Not like Saudi then, whose leader is apparently a fine fellow. There certainly are a lot of people willing to vote for Mugabe. If everything we are told is true why is that?

My suspicion is that this is merely the current TV war being rolled up for our entertainment & distraction in the best tradition of the Roman gladiatorial games. We also see the public being ramped up to face this week's hate figure. We seem to have had a lot this year - Mugabe, Sudan, the Chinese, the Burmese & of course al Quaeda (though bin Laden himself has almost become an unperson). The problem with gladiatorial games, however entertaining, is that real people die. Are our actions against that country doing the locals any good & is there any prospect that even if successful (looking at Iraq & Yugoslavia perhaps particularly if successful) they ever will?

If not we should abide by the rule of law & mind our own business. Is there any case since Korea when intervention to "help" another country has actually done so? Is there not a long history of it turning out that the "good guys" we were putting in were more corrupt, less competent & no nicer than the "baddies" we were taught to hate? If not we should at least examine how to do it better before killing more.

===========================

And in complete contrast to that here is a suggestion I made of how to at least do it while keeping our own hands casualties down - though perhaps the locals would welcome us, a promise I have heard before:

According to the TV today there are 500,000 Zimbabwean "political refugees" in Britain. That must be well over 100,000 potential male soldiers. Why not form & invite them to join a British Foreign Legion which could, in due course, go back there, after training in Afghanistan. I'm sure they would all jump at the chance - at least if they are genuine political rather than economic migrants they would.

u
UPDATE
Spiked, independently, has done an article on similar lines & their writer has answered several of my questions & the answers are rather as i had expected.

The Irish government are coming under pressure to accept a "bail out" from the EU because international financial institutions (eg the EU) are worried & politicians from bigger EU countries (eg Angela Merkel of Nazi Germany) have been talking up a crisis. In fact the Irish crash is entirely because they have guaranteed their banks. Their national debt would normally be considered pretty small compared to our, though it depends how it is reported eg

"Irish deficit blooms to 32%" - BBC
"UK deficit lower than feared at 62.2%" Guardian

Last night both BBC evening news & C4 news asked members of the Irish government if they were "ashamed" of their financial situation. A remarkably coincidental use of words if they are genuinely independent broadcasters. I do not believe I have heard them ask precisely the same question of members of the British, US or indeed other EU governments. John Snow in particular was purely insulting asking that question & when the minister explained, reasonably, why Ireland's economy itself is not in such straits simply repeated the question again & again.

Daniel Hannan has done a number of blogs on this subject. I would particularly recommend "Ireland's woes will continue until it leaves the euro" which clearly explains why Ireland's inability to set its own interest rates made the property bubble inevitable & why their current inability to let their currency fall, as ours has done, prevents recovery.

I wrote this letter to the Irish Independent & with a slight alteration to the entire UK press. Somewhat to my surprise, because I could see why they might not be keen on advice from a Briton, the Irish paper printed it. To no surprise no UK paper seems to have done so.

Ireland must resolutely refuse the EU's poisoned chalice of a so-called bailout.

Ireland's best answer would be to drop out of the euro, introduce new punts valued at 1:1 for the euro, accept the debts in that and let the punt fall as sterling has done. This would hurt the euro and cost the mainly German and Swiss bankers and super rich who are the majority owed money.

Irish banks overheated because Ireland is part of the euro and thus when German money was flooding in they couldn't raise interest rates as any prudent government would have done. Thus the property bubble was inevitable. The people who lent them that money were taking a business risk and business risks should involve an element of risk.

There is nothing, apart from being tied to the euro, intrinsically wrong with the Irish economy, or at least nothing not at least equally wrong with Britain's, but Britain is starting to recover because the pound could fall 20pc.

The 'bailout' is not to help Ireland (briefings that the price would be raising our corporation tax which is certainly not to Ireland's benefit prove that). It is to pay the super rich, to maintain the euro's credibility and to destroy an economy that has been a standing reproach to the failure of bigger EU economies.

Neil Craig
Glasgow, Scotland

I sent them a link to this article investigating who the Irish bank's money is owed to & turns out to be mainly banks & billionaires in Germany & Switzerland (HT to Mark Wadsworth) which says "To give you an example, one of the private banks is EFG Bank of Luxembourg. EFG stands for European Financial Group which is the third largest private bank group in Switzerland. It manages over €7.5 trillion in assets. It is 'mostly', 40%, owned by Mr Spiro Latsis, son of a Greek shipping magnate. He also owns 30% of Hellenic Petroleum. His personal fortune is estimated to be about $9 Billion."

Looking up Mr Latsis one finds that, by the purest coincidence "He is a longstanding friend of the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, whom he invited on a trip on his luxury yacht. In 2005 this incident made Spiro the centre of a corruption scandal involving Barroso. The British MEP Nigel Farage requested that the European Commission disclose where the individual Commissioners had spent their holidays. The Commission did not provide the information requested, on the basis that the Commissioners had a right of privacy. The German newspaper Die Welt reported that the President of the European Commission, José Barroso had spent a week on the yacht of Spiro Latsis. It emerged soon afterwards that this had occurred only a month before the Commission approved 10.3 million euro of Greek state aid for Latsis' shipping company."

From the same organisation that wants Ireland to surrender its sovereignty to them so that the taxpayer rather than Mr Latsis' will pay Mr Latsis' business & risk a tiny part of his E7.5 trillion portfolio. That & to deprive Ireland, by raising its business taxes of the chance to "save itself by its exertion & save Europe by its example".

UPDATE _ I have to acknowledge an error here pointed out by Spiked when I questioned one of their articles. Ireland's deficit for this year will be up to 32 per cent to bail out the banks after running at much lower figures in recent years rather than their whole national debt as I assumed. I have put the bits affected by my error in italics. Here's the 'national debt clock', currently running at €90billion.

Nonetheless E90 billion (about £75 bn) is only marginally proportionally above our official debt & less if we include our bank debt. They have cut spending more than us (we are not really cutting spending just not growing it as much as inflation would require). Like us their electricity supply is endangered & unlike us they cannot devalue but otherwise the economic basics are good & competitive. If the EU allow them to remain so.

Labels: Fixing the economy, International politics, letters

Sir Nicholas Sterns UK government global warming "expert"

Sir Nicholas Stern made a revealing comment in his OXONIA lecture of
January 2006: "in August or July of last year, [he] had an idea what the
greenhouse effect was but wasn't really sure". It seems that, starting
from a position of little knowledge of the issues, he has swiftly
espoused the official view of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction
and Research, on whose advice the Review relies heavily. But this Hadley
Centre picture of reality, though broadly in line with that of the IPCC,
is by no means universally held. Many of the specific claims that are
endorsed in the Review have been seriously challenged in the scientific
literature, while the text plays down the great uncertainties that
remain.

Which rather suggests his area of expertise is in saying what governments want to hear. Regrettably I suspect the majority of "experts" in politics have similar talents.

More from the same magazine & PDF

We conclude that the Stern Review is biased and alarmist in its reading
of the science. These and other related problems arise because the
Review has relied for advice almost exclusively on a small number of
people and organizations that have a long history of unbalanced alarmism
on the global warming issue. Most of the research cited by the Review
does not, on inspection, make a convincing case that greenhouse warming
constitutes a major threat that justifies an immediate and radical
policy response. Contrary research is consistently ignored, as are basic
observational facts showing that alarm is unwarranted. The Review fails
to present an accurate picture of scientific understanding of climate
change issues, and will reinforce ill-informed alarm about climate
change among the general public, the bureaucracy and the body politic.
HM Government will need to look elsewhere for a balanced, impartial and
authoritative review of the current climate change debate.
-- Robert M. Carter et al., World Economics, October-December 2006

Obviously only those parts of the MSM who are in some way honest will be giving 1% as much time to this & other disproofs of Stern as they did to the original release. I predict that John Snow on C4 news who, on the day the report was released, said they were going to give full coverage to all sides & then introduced 3 people from various wings of catastrophe enthusiasm & zero sceptics will not be reporting it.

A letter from me in the Scotsman today. Only the first sentence & a half appears (rest shown <>) still it means that 2 of the 4 letters chosen are sceptical about the warming scare. I like the way the "widely unreported" remark about the Oregon Petition, & by implication the entire sceptical view, was removed. But to be fair to the Scotsman they did print part of this & the Herald, which is my local rag, didn't. This letter also went out to a considerable number of other papers some of which I will miss, so if anybody sees it please let me know where. The Herald printed 5 letters, not one of which was sceptical.
----------------------------
" We are told that there is no debate as to the reality of catastrophic global warming. This ignores Oregon Petition of 17,100 scientists have gone on record to say "Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. < To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful."

Despite this on Channel 4 News last night John Snow, while reporting on the Stern Report said that "we are going to hear from all sides of the argument" which turned out to be David Miliband, George Monbiott & somebody who hoped the new taxes wouldn't hurt too much.

According to Channel 4 those who have even doubts about the theory are unpersons.

In another example of unpersonage I noted that last night on Newsnight Ross Finne said that there "was no argument in Scotland about the reality of warming" with a self satisfied aside about America. Sorry Ross, there may be no argument in the comfortable coffee klatsch of Holyrood but there is in real life.>
Faithfully
Neil Craig

Reference - Oregon Petition http://www.oism.org/pproject/"

// posted by neil craig @ 11:23 am 0 comments

Treasury Secretary John Snow and other U.S. officials have pressed China to sever its currency's direct link to the dollar. U.S. manufacturers contend that practice has undervalued the Chinese currency by as much as 40 percent and given China a substantial advantage against U.S. competitors.

Full article
As can bee seen from the world economies listing below China's economy is already about 60% of America's. So with a serious revaluation both economies would be about equal with China still growing at 8-10% & the US at 4-6% (& the UK at 2.5% & Scotland at 1.5%). Looks like reality has caught up with the Plan for a New American Century. What odds it catches up with us to.

Labels: eco-fascism, Government parasitism, Media

John Redwood, on his blog, has called for a public enquiry.

It would be helpful if in the UK there was a proper enquiry into what has been happening to the evidence and its interpretation at East Anglia. Where public money is being spent on scientific research we need to be assured the standards and independence of the research are worthy of public support.

On Question Time last night the BBC did actually allow a question on the emails & fraud. Melanie Philips, who has long written that it is indeed a fraud was put in the first position, always the hardest because you can't marshal your thoughts, everybody else gets to pick you apart & at least on this occasion, you have no comeback. Nonetheless she put the case cogently |& accurately. The BBC's own guest, comedian Marcus Brigstocke said that he had helped perform scientific experiments in Greenland & seen with his own eyes that it was melting away which is simply a lie. Conservative David Davis showed movement by saying that while warming is definitely happening (it definitely isn't now) there was doubt it was catastrophic, which destroys the entire case cutting half the economy. Later on Andrew Neil's Politics show Michael Portillo said roughly the same. A silly woman on QT & another on Neil's (Diane Abbot MP) said the Cockermouth flood "proves" catastrophic warming which may fit the BBC's assertions of 2 years ago, during the floods then, that CAGW would mean more floods but not their assertion the previous year that it would mean droughts. In fact the Cockermouth flood could have been averted if the eco-fascists had not vetoed it, which does not affect whether warming is real but does show that mitigation is infinitely more practical than what they propose.

I Have written this summary of the global warming theory & its faults on Charles Crawford's blogoir but think it worth putting here too. Strangely enough LibDem Norman Fraser, in his role as the ghost of Christmas past, has taken to making his normal illiberal assertions there, as always without stooping to facts.
##################################

That CO2 absorbs more infra-red than oxygen & nitrogen is not in dispute. The question is whether this is a catastrophic, serious, trivial or minuscule effect.

CO2 makes up about 3 parts in every 10,000 of the atmosphere which is up by about 1 part. Calculations have suggested that a doubling would increase temperature by about 0.3 C - the rest of the alleged catastrophic warming assumes positive feedback systems, primarily increasing heat putting more water vapour in the air (water vapour being orders of magnitude more important as a greenhouse gas) & also assuming no negative feedback (primarily more cloud cover which is highly reflective).

However 0.3 C is a minor effect compared to variations we have seen - the little ice age being significantly colder, the medieval warm period being about 2 C warmer & the Climate Optimum (9,000 to 5,000BC) possibly as much as 4C warmer. In none of these did we see the positive feedback system required. That we stand on the cusp of a global tipping point & have done so for millions, even billions of years without tipping into runaway warming is inherently unlikely . It is orders of magnitude more likely that negative feedback effects predominate which is why we have relative stability - we are probably much closer to a cooling tipping point where increased snow cover increases reflectivity increasing snow since we have had ice ages as recently as 10,000BC but the current eco-fascist scare is not concerned with that.

Beyond that only 3% of Earth's CO2 production is of human cause, farting cows make more & termites much more.

Beyond that there are geo-engineering things we could do now to induce cooling (putting SO2 into the stratosphere) & that we have the capability to do in a generation to induce warming (square miles of orbiting tinfoil mirrors) if the human race does not succumb to fascist Ludditry

###################
Meanwhile, nearly a week after it broke across the world online, our media still censor as much as they can. This from Aberdeen is the only letter I can find on it & since i have sent 2 almost everywhere I can say for a fact that it is not that the press aren't getting letters but that they are censoring.

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Media

"RUSSIA HAS CUT OFF GAS TO EUROPE .... through Ukraine"
John Simpson Channel 4 News

All a matter of grammatical inflection isn't it? When Ukraine refused to pay for its gas Russia stopped supplying it. Ukraine's answer was to steal the gas sent in for through shipment to other countries which, in turn, left Russia with no option to stop supplying gas that wasn't being received

Thus technically Simpson wasn't lying - Russia has cut it off, though it hasn't cut off gas supplied through Belarus, but by downplaying the qualification he & our media generally, are lying.

Russia have fulfilled their contracts & proven they are not "playing politics" with gas. The Ukrainian government are thieves. It is as simple as that. The Ukrainians are relying on the fact that their government is considered a western satellite, coming to power in an election bought & paid for by western intelligence & organised by western psychological warfare teams. Just like Serbia & Georgia in fact.

Were the country stealing from us not our satellite there is no question that NATO & the EU would have been spitting blood. If we were buying BMWs from Germany, shipped via the Channel Tunnel we would not remain silent if half of them disappeared in Calais.

This is all because of a new & pointless cold war against Russia. The whole point of the cold war was alleged to be to stop the Russians having armies in central Europe & instead adopting capitalism & free trade so that we could all be friends & experience the "end of history". Well they did, they did & we didn't. Maybe it is just governments relentless seeking after hobgoblins to keep us in line but there is clearly threat from Russia & no real reason not to trust that contracts will not be kept (at least no reason on our side).

If NATO/EU were to simply say that Ukraine has a legal duty mot to steal our gas & that they should stop doing so then they, being in a minority of one, would have to do so.

If that were to lead to the fall of their corrupt government in what way would that actually be a loss to us? A competent trustworthy neighbour is in our interests as well as Russia's. We should stop playing games. Europe is going to have enough problems keeping the lights on because of our self inflicted anti-nuclear Luddism without making things worse.

It may be cynical of me but I suspect if the pipeline through Belarus, which supplies Germany were not working perfectly well & if it were not merely the weaker Balkan countries being cut off there would be action. A couple of years ago NATO unilaterally claimed to redefine "self defence" as including the right to attack any country which wouldn't sell them energy at a price they liked - that was a threat aimed at Russia (at a time when Russia's army looked less effective than now) but refusing to lay down the law (literally) to Ukraine makes them shifty as well as weak - never a good idea to look both at the same time.

Mind you they are doing the minimum:

To try to restart supplies, the EU proposed yesterday that it should send independent monitors to watch the dials on the pipes at Ukraine's borders. Russia claims that Ukraine is taking gas it has not paid for from the pipelines, reducing the onward supply to Europe. It has responded by cutting supplies in the pipeline by the amount it says Ukraine is stealing.

Meanwhile global warming continues apace

Temperatures plunged to record lows in Germany and heavy snow forced normally sunny Marseille to close its international airport as freezing winter weather gripped much of Europe on Wednesday.

Port authorities in the Dutch city of Rotterdam deployed an icebreaking ship for the first time 12 years, while in Britain forecasters issued a new severe weather warning.

Though in a recent Google newsearch I found only 20,000 mentions of "global warming" & 38,000 of "climate change" so the rebranding certainly goes on apace.

And a cheer for common sense (not reported by John Simpson) in Bulgaria because of this.

In Bulgaria, which switched off most of its nuclear reactors ahead of its accession to the E.U. in 2007, President Georgi Parvanov has called for the temporary reactivation of at least one disabled nuclear reactor to help the country meet its heat and power needs as the dispute continues.

A couple of days ago I did a lecture excerpted from Michael Crichton's book State of Fear. Now I am including the bibliography he put in at the end. Don't worry this is it I'm not going to do a chapter a day.
##################################################

What follows is a list of books and journal articles I found most useful in preparing this novel. I found the texts by Beckerman, Chase, Huber, Lomborg, and Wildavsky to be particularly revealing.

Environmental science is a contentious and intensely politicized field. No reader should assume that any author listed below agrees with the views I express in this book. Quite the contrary: many of them disagree strongly. I am presenting these references to assist those readers who would like to review my thinking and arrive at their own conclusions.

Aber, John D., and Jerry M. Melillo. Terrestrial Ecosystems. San Francisco: Har-court Academic Press, 2001. A standard textbook.

Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (Report of the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, National Research Council). Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002. The text concludes that abrupt climate change might occur sometime in the future, triggered by mechanisms not yet understood, and that in the meantime more research is needed. Surely no one could object.

Adam, Barbara, Ulrich Beck, and Jost Van Loon. The Risk Society and Beyond. London: Sage Publications, 2000.

Altheide, David L. Creating Fear, News and the Construction of Crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002. A book about fear and its expanding place in public life. Overlong and repetitive, but addressing a highly significant subject. Some of the statistical analyses are quite amazing. I assume the lecture was drawn heavily from this

Anderson, J. B. and J. T. Andrews. “Radiocarbon Constraints on Ice Sheet Advance and Retreat in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica.” Geology 27 (1999): 179–82.

Anderson, Terry L., and Donald R. Leal. Free Market Environmentalism. New York: Palgrave (St. Martin’s Press), 2001. The authors argue government management of environmental resources has a poor track record in the former Soviet Union, and in the Western democracies as well. They make the case for the superiority of private and market-based management of environmental resources. Their case histories are particularly interesting.

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth. New York: Oxford, 1979.

Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt, eds. In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 1997. See particularly part III on the advent of netwar and its implications.

Aunger, Robert, ed. Darwinizing Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. See especially the last three chapters, which devastate the trendy concept of memes. There is no better example of the way that trendy quasi-scientific ideas can gain currency even in the face of preexisting evidence that they are baseless. And the text serves as a model for the expression of brisk disagreement without ad hominem characterization.

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage, 1992. This highly influential text by a German sociologist presents a fascinating redefinition of the modern state as protector against industrial society, instead of merely the ground upon which it is built.

Beckerman, Wilfred. A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth. Oakland, Calif.: Independent Institute, 2003. A short, witty, stinging review of sustainability, climate change, and the precautionary principle by an Oxford economist and former member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution who cares more about the poor of the world than he does the elitist egos of Western environmentalists. Clearly argued and fun to read.

Bennett, W. Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2003.

Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Four Walls, 2003. The history of the eugenics movement in America and Germany is an unpleasant story, and perhaps for that reason, most texts present it confusingly. This book is an admirably clear narrative.
Bohm, R. “Urban bias in temperature time series—a case study for the city of Vienna, Austria.” Climatic Change 38 (1998): 113–28.

Braithwaite, Roger J. “Glacier mass balance: The first 50 years of international monitoring.” Progress in Physical Geography 26, no. 1 (2002): 76–95.

Braithwaite, R. J., and Y. Zhang. “Relationships between interannual variability of glacier mass balance and climate.” Journal of Glaciology 45 (2000): 456–62.

Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Brint, Steven. “Professionals and the Knowledge Economy: Rethinking the Theory of the Postindustrial Society.” Current Sociology 49, no. 1 ( July 2001): 101–32.

Brower, Michael, and Warren Leon. The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999. Of particular interest for its advice on mundane decisions: paper vs. plastic shopping bags (plastic), cloth vs. disposable diapers (disposable). On broader issues, the analysis is extremely vague and exemplifies the difficulties of determining “sustainable development” that are pointed out by Wilfred Beckerman.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. I am old enough to remember reading this poetic persuasive text with alarm and excitement when it was first published; it was clear even then that it would change the world. With the passage of time Carson’s text appears more flawed and more overtly polemical. It is, to be blunt, about one-third right and two-thirds wrong. Carson is particularly to be faulted for her specious promotion of the idea that most cancer is caused by the environment. This fear remains in general circulation decades later.
Castle, Terry. “Contagious Folly.” In Chandler, Davidson, and Harootunian, Questions of Evidence.

Chandler, James, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian. Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion Across the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Changnon, Stanley A. “Impacts of 1997–98 El Niño-Generated Weather in the United States.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 80, no. 9, (1999): 1819–28.
Chapin, F. Stuart, Pamela A. Matson, and Harold A. Mooney. Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystems Ecology. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002. Clearer and with more technical detail than most ecology texts.

Chase, Alston. In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Essential reading. This book is a history of the conflict over the forests of the Northwest, a cheerless and distressing story. As a former professor of philosophy, the author is one of the few writers in the environmental field who shows the slightest interest in ideas—where they come from, what consequences have flowed from them in the historical past, and therefore what consequences are likely to flow from them now. Chase discusses such notions as the mystic vision of wilderness and the balance of nature from the standpoint of both science and philosophy. He is contemptuous of much conventional wisdom and the mud-dle-headed attitudes he calls “California cosmology.” The book is long and sometimes rambling, but extremely rewarding.
———. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park. New York: Atlantic, 1986. Essential reading. Arguably the first and clearest critique of ever-changing environmental beliefs and their practical consequences. Anyone who assumes we know how to manage wilderness areas needs to read this sobering history of the century-long mismanagement of Yellowstone, the first national park. Chase’s text has been reviled in some quarters, but to my knowledge, never seriously disputed.

Chen, L., W. Zhu, X. Zhou, and Z. Zhou, “Characteristics of the heat island effect in Shanghai and its possible mechanism.” Advances in Atmospheric Sciences 20 (2003): 991-1001.

Choi, Y., H.-S. Jung, K.-Y. Nam, and W.-T. Kwon, “Adjusting urban bias in the regional mean surface temperature series of South Korea, 1968–99.” International Journal of Climatology 23 (2003): 577–91.

Christianson, Gale E. Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Chylek, P., J. E. Box, and G. Lesins. “Global Warming and the Greenland Ice Sheet.” Climatic Change 63 (2004): 201–21.

Comiso, J. C. “Variability and Trends in Antarctic Surface Temperatures From in situ and Satellite Infrared Measurements.” Journal of Climate 13 (2000): 1674–96.
Cook, Timothy E. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Cooke, Roger M. Experts in Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Davis, Ray Jay, and Lewis Grant. Weather Modification Technology and Law. AAAS Selected Symposium. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, Inc., 1978. Of historical interest only.

Deichmann, Ute. Biologist Under Hitler, tr. Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Difficult in structure, disturbing in content.

Doran, P. T., J. C. Priscu, W. B. Lyons, J. E. Walsh, A. G. Fountain, D. M. McKnight, D. L. Moorhead, R. A. Virginia, D. H. Wall, G. D. Clow, C. H. Fritsen, C. P. McKay, and A. N. Parsons. “Antarctic Climate Cooling and Terrestrial Ecosystem Response.” Nature 415 (2002): 517–20.

Dörner, Dietrich. The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1998. What prevents human beings
from successfully managing the natural environment and other complex systems? Dozens of pundits have weighed in with their unsubstantiated opinions. Dörner, a cognitive psychologist, performed experiments and found out. Using computer simulations of complex environments, he invited intellectuals to improve the situation. They often made it worse. Those who did well gathered information before acting, thought systemically, reviewed progress, and corrected their course often. Those who did badly clung to their theories, acted too quickly, did not correct course, and blamed others when things went wrong. Dörner concludes that our failures in managing complex systems do not represent any inherent lack of human capability. Rather they reflect bad habits of thought and lazy procedures.

Dowie, Mark. Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. A former editor of Mother Jones concludes that the American environmental movement has lost relevance through compromise and capitulation. Well written, but weakly documented, the book is most interesting for the frame of mind it conveys—an uncompromising posture that rarely specifies what solutions would be satisfactory. This makes the text essentially nonscientific in its outlook and its implications, and all the more interesting for that.

Drake, Frances. Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This well-written overview for college students can be read by any interested reader.

Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper Business, 1993. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991. Edgerton, Robert B. Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony.
New York: Free Press, 1992. An excellent summary of the evidence disputing the notion of the noble savage that goes on to consider whether cultures adopt maladaptive beliefs and practices. The author concludes that all cultures do so. The text also attacks the currently trendy academic notion of “unconscious” problem-solving, in which primitive cultures are assumed to be acting in an ecologically sound fashion, even when they appear wasteful and destructive. Edgerton argues they aren’t doing anything of the sort—they are wasteful and destructive.
Edwards, Paul. N., and Stephen Schneider. “The 1995 IPCC Report: Broad Consensus or ‘Scientific Cleansing’?” EcoFable/Ecoscience 1, no. 1 (1997): 3–9. A spirited argument in defense of changes to the 1995 IPCC report by Ben Santer. However, the article focuses on the controversy that resulted and does not review in detail the changes to the text that were made. Thus the paper talks about the controversy without examining its substance.

Einarsson, Porleifur. Geology of Iceland. Trans. Georg Douglas. Reykjavík: Mal og menning, 1999. Surely one of the clearest geology textbooks ever written. The author is professor of geology at the University of Iceland.

Etheridge, D. M., et al. “Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn.” Journal of Geophysical Research 101 (1996): 4115–28.

Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Our experience of climate is limited to the span of our lives. The degree to which climate has varied in the past, and even in historical times, is hard for anyone to conceive. This book, by an archaeologist who writes extremely well, makes clear through historical detail how much warmer—and colder—it has been during the last thousand years.

Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. Feynman exemplifies the crispness of thought in physics as compared with the mushy subjectivity of fields such as ecology or climate research.

Finlayson-Pitts, Barbara J., and James N. Pitts, Jr. Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments, and Applications. New York: Academic Press, 2000. A clear text that can be read by anyone with a good general science background.
Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002. An astonishing text by a psychotherapist. In my opinion, the greatest problem for all observers of the world is to determine whether their perceptions are genuine and verifiable or whether they are merely the projections of inner feelings. This book says it doesn’t matter. The text consists almost entirely of unsubstantiated opinions about human nature and our interaction with the natural world. Anecdotal, egotistical, and wholly tautological, it is a dazzling example of unbridled fantasy. It can stand in for a whole literature of related texts in which feeling-expression masquerades as fact.

Flecker, H., and B. C. Cotton. “Fatal bite from octopus.” Medical Journal of Australia 2 (1955): 329–31.

Forrester, Jay W. Principles of Systems. Waltham, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press, 1971. Some day Forrester will be acknowledged as one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. He is one of the first, and surely the most influential, researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did groundbreaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behavior to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. His work was an early inspiration for the attempts to model the world that ultimately became the Club of Rome’s Limits of Growth. But the Club didn’t understand the most fundamental principles behind Forrester’s work.

Forsyth, Tim. Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science. New York: Routledge, 2003. A careful but often critical examination of environmental orthodoxy by a lecturer in environment and development at the London School of Economics. The text contains many important insights I have not seen elsewhere, including the consequences of the IPCC emphasis on computer models (as opposed to other forms of data) and the question of how many environmental effects are usefully regarded as “global.” However, the author adopts much of the postmodernist critique of science, and thus refers to certain “laws” of science, when few scientists would grant them such status.

Freeze, R. Allan. The Environmental Pendulum: A Quest for the Truth about Toxic Chemicals, Human Health, and Environmental Protection. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000. A university professor with on-the-ground experience dealing with toxic waste sites has written a cranky and highly informative book detailing his experiences and views. One of the few books by a person who is not only academically qualified but experienced in the field. His opinions are complex and sometimes seemingly contradictory. But that’s reality.

Furedi, Frank. Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. New York: Continuum, 2002. As Western societies become more affluent and safer, as life expectancy has steadily increased, one might expect the populations to become relaxed and secure. The opposite has happened: Western societies have become panic-stricken and hysterically risk averse. The pattern is evident in everything from environmental issues to the vastly increased supervision of children. This text by a British sociologist discusses why.

Gelbspan, Ross. The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1998. A reporter who has written extensively on environmental matters presents the classic doomsday scenarios well. Penn and Teller characterize him in scatological terms.
Gilovitch, Thomas, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Psychologists have created a substantial body of experimental data on human decision making since the 1950s. It has been well replicated and makes essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how people make decisions and how they think about the decisions that others make. The entire volume is compelling (though sometimes disheartening), and articles of particular interest are listed separately.

Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Debunks fear-mongering with precision and calmness.

Glimcher, Paul W. Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Glynn, Kevin. Tabloid Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Goldstein, William M., and Robin M. Hogarth, eds. Research on Judgment and Decision Making. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Gross, Paul R., and Norman Leavitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. See chapter 6, “The Gates of Eden” for a discussion of environmentalism in the context of current postmodern academic criticism.

Guyton, Bill. Glaciers of California. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998. An elegant gem of a book.

Hadley Center. “Climate Change, Observations and Predictions, Recent Research on Climate Change Science from the Hadley Center,” December 2003. Obtainable at www.metoffice.com. In sixteen pages the Hadley Center presents the most important arguments relating to climate science and the predictions for future warming from computer models. Beautifully written, and illustrated with graphic sophistication, it easily surpasses other climate science websites and constitutes the best brief introduction for the interested reader.

Hansen, James E., Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen, and Elaine Matthews. “Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (October 1998): 12753–58.
Hansen, James E. and Makiko Sato, “Trends of Measured Climate Forcing Agents.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (December 2001): 14778–83.

Hayes, Wayland Jackson. “Pesticides and Human Toxicity.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 160 (1969): 40–54.

Henderson-Sellers, et al. “Tropical cyclones and global climate change: A post-IPCC assessment.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79 (1997): 9–38.
Hoffert, Martin, Ken Caldeira, Gregory Benford, David R. Criswell, Christopher Green, Howard Herzog, Atul K. Jain, Haroon S. Kheshgi, Klaus S. Lackner, John S. Lewis, H. Douglas Lightfoot, Wallace Manheimer, John C. Mankins, Michael E. Mauel, L. John Perkins, Michael E. Schlesinger, Tyler Volk, and Tom M. L. Wigley. “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet.” Science 298 (1 November 2001): 981–87.

Horowitz, Daniel. The Anxieties of Affluence. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

Houghton, John. Global Warming, the Complete Briefing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Sir John is a leading figure in the IPCC and a world-renowned spokesperson for climate change. He presents a clear statement of the predictions of the global circulation models for future climate. He draws principally from IPCC reports, which this text summarizes and explains. Skip the first chapter, which is scattered and vague, unlike the rest of the book.

Huber, Peter, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, a Conservative Manifesto. New York: Basic Books, 1999. I read dozens of books on the environment, most quite similar in tone and content. This was the first one that made me sit up and pay serious attention. It’s not like the others, to put it mildly. Huber holds an engineering degree from MIT and a law degree from Harvard; he has clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor; he is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. His book criticizes modern environmental thought in both its underlying attitudes and its scientific claims. The text is quick, funny, informed, and relentless. It can be difficult to follow and demands an informed reader. But anyone who clings to the environmental views that evolved in the 1980s and 1990s must answer the arguments of this book.

Inadvertent Climate Modification, Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. A fascinating early attempt to model climate and predict human interaction with it.

IPCC. Aviation and the Global Atmosphere. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
———. Climate Change 1992: The Supplementary Report to the IPCC Scientific Assessment. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
———. Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
———. Climate Change 1995: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change Scientific/Technical Analysis. Contribution of Working Group II to the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
———. Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
———. Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. Climate Change: The IPCC Response Strategies. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1991.
———. Emissions Scenarios. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
———. Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
———. The Regional Impacts of Climate Change: An Assessment of Vulnerability. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Jacob, Daniel J. Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Joravsky, David. The Lysenko Affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. A readable account of this depressing episode.

Joughin, I., and S. Tulaczyk. “Positive Mass Balance of the Ross Ice Streams, West Antarctica.” Science 295 (2002): 476–80.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky, eds. Choices, Values and Frames. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The authors are responsible for a revolution in our understanding of the psychology behind human decision-making. The history of the environmental movement is characterized by some very positive decisions made on the basis of inadequate information, and some unfortunate decisions made despite good information that argued against the decision. This book sheds light on how such things happen.

Kalnay, Eugenia, and Ming Cai. “Impact of Urbanization and Land-Use on Climate.” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528–31. “Our estimate of .27 C mean surface warming per century due to land use changes is at least twice as high as previous estimates based on urbanization alone.” The authors later report a calculation error, raising their estimate [Nature 23 (4 September 2003): 102]. “The corrected estimate of the trend in daily mean temperture due to land use changes is .35 C per century.”
Kaser, Georg, Douglas R. Hardy, Thomas Molg, Raymond S. Bradley, and Tharsis M. Hyera. “Modern Glacier Retreat on Kilimanjaro as Evidence of Climate Change: Observations and Facts.” International Journal of Climatology 24 (2004): 329–39.
Kieffer, H., J. S. Kargel, R. Barry, R. Bindschadler, M. Bishop, D. MacKinnon,
A. Ohmura, B. Raup, M. Antoninetti, J. Bamber, M. Braun, I. Brown, D. Cohen, L. Copland, J. DueHagen, R. V. Engeset, B. Fitzharris, K. Fujita,
W. Haeberli, J. O. Hagen, D. Hall, M. Hoelzle, M. Johansson, A. Kaab,
M. Koenig, V. Konovalov, M. Maisch, F. Paul, F. Rau, N. Reeh, E. Rignot,
A. Rivera, M. Ruyter de Wildt, T. Scambos, J. Schaper, G. Scharfen,
J. Shroder, O. Solomina, D. Thompson, K. Van der Veen, T. Wohlleben, and N. Young. “New eyes in the sky measure glaciers and ice sheets.” EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 81, no. 265 (2000): 270–71.
Kline, Wendy. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001.

Koshland, Daniel J. “Credibility in Science and the Press.” Science 254 (1 Nov. 1991): 629. Bad science reporting takes its toll; the former head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science complains about it.

Kraus, Nancy, Trorbjorn Malmfors, and Paul Slovic. “Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks.” In Slovic, 2000. The extent to which uninformed opinion should be given a place in decision making is highlighted by the question of whether ordinary people have an intuitive sense of what in their environment is harmful—whether they are, in the words of these authors, intuitive toxicologists. As I read the data, they aren’t.

Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton, 1999. An anthropologist carefully reviews the data indicating that native Americans were not the exemplary ecologists of yore. Also reviews recent changes in ecological science.

Kuhl, Stevan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kuran, Timur. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Landsea, C., N. Nicholls, W. Gray, and L. Avila. “Downward Trend in the Frequency of Intense Atlantic Hurricanes During the Past Five Decades.” Geophysical Research Letters 23 (1996): 527–30.

Landsea, Christopher W., and John A. Knaff. “How Much Skill Was There in Forecasting the Very Strong 1997–98 El Niño?” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 81, no. 9 (September 2000): 2017–19. Authors found the older, simpler models performed best. “The use of more complex, physically realistic dynamical models does not automatically provide more reliable forecasts.. . . [Our findings] may be surprising given the general perception that seasonal El Niño forecasts from dynamical models have been quite successful and may even be considered a solved problem.” They discuss in detail that the models did not, in fact, predict well. Yet “others are using the supposed success in dynamical El Niño forecasting to support other agendas . . . one could even have less confidence in anthropogenic global studies because of the lack of skill in predicting El Niño.. . . Thebottom line is that the successes in forecasting have been overstated (sometimes drastically) and misapplied in other areas.”

Lave, Lester B. “Benefit-Cost Analysis: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs?” In Robert W. Hahn, ed., Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A critical review of problems in cost-benefit analysis by an economist who supports the tool but acknowledges that opponents sometimes have a point.

Lean, Judith, and David Rind. “Climate Forcing by Changing Solar Radiation.” Journal of Climate 11 (December 1988): 3069–94. How much does the sun affect climate? These authors suggest about half the observed surface warming since 1900 and one-third of the warming since 1970 may be attributed to the sun. But there are uncertainties here. “Present inability to adequately specify climate forcing by changing solar radiation has implications for policy making regarding anthropogenic global change, which must be detected against natural climate variability.”

LeBlanc, Steven A., and Katherine E. Register. Constant Battles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. The myth of the noble savage and the Edenic past dies hard. LeBlanc is one of the handful of archaeologists who have given close scrutiny to evidence for past warfare and has worked to revise an academic inclination to see a peaceful past. LeBlanc argues that primitive societies fought constantly and brutally.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Second Edition. London: Longman, 1995. In the sixteenth century, the educated elites of Europe believed that certain human beings had made contracts with the devil. They believed that witches gathered to perform horrific rites, and that they flew across the sky in the night. On the basis of these beliefs, these elites tortured countless people, and killed 50,000 to 60,000 of their countrymen, mostly old women. However, they also killed men and children, and sometimes (because it was thought unseemly to burn a child) they imprisoned the children until he or she was old enough to be executed. Most of the extensive literature on witchcraft (including the present volume) does not in my view fully come to grips with the truth of this period. The fact that so many people were executed for a fantasy—and despite the reservations of prominent skeptics— carries a lesson that we must always bear in mind. The consensus of the intelligentsia is not necessarily correct, no matter how many believe it, or for how many years the belief is held. It may still be wrong. In fact, it may be very wrong. And we must never forget it. Because it will happen again. And indeed it has.

Lilla, Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. This razor-sharp text focuses on twentieth-century philosophers but serves as a reminder of the intellectual’s temptation “to succumb to the allure of an idea, to allow passion to blind us to its tyrannical potential.”

Lindzen, Richard S. “Do Deep Ocean Temperature Records Verify Models?” Geophysical Research Letters 29, no. 0 (2002): 10.1029/2001GL014360. Changes in ocean temperature cannot be taken as a verification of GCMs, computer climate models.
———. “The Press Gets It Wrong: Our Report Doesn’t Support the Kyoto Treaty.” Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2001. This brief essay by a distinguished MIT professor summarizes one example of the way the media misinterprets scientific reports on climate. In this case, the National Academy of Sciences report on climate change, widely claimed to say what it did not. Lindzen was one of eleven authors of the report. http://opinionjournal. com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000606
Lindzen, R. S., and K. Emanuel. “The Greenhouse Effect.” In Encyclopedia of Global Change, Environmental Change and Human Society. Volume 1. Andrew
S. Goudie, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 562–66. What exactly is the greenhouse effect everybody talks about but nobody ever explains in any detail? A brief, clear summary.

Liu, J., J. A. Curry, and D. G. Martinson. “Interpretation of Recent Antarcti
c Sea Ice Variability.” Geophysical Research Letters 31 (2004): 10.1029/2003 GL018732.
Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. By now, many people know the story behind this text: The author, a Danish statistician and Greenpeace activist, set out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed that dire environmental fears were wrong and that the world was actually improving. To Lomborg’s surprise, he found that Simon was mostly right. Lomborg’s text is crisp, calm, clean, devastating to established dogma. Since publication, the author has been subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks, which can only mean his conclusions are unobjectionable in any serious scientific way. Throughout the long controversy, Lomborg has behaved in exemplary fashion. Sadly, his critics have not. Special mention must go to the Scientific American, which was particularly reprehensible. All in all, the treatment accorded Lomborg can be viewed as a confirmation of the postmodern critique of science as just another power struggle. A sad episode for science.

Lovins, Amory B. Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Perhaps the most important advocate for alternative energy wrote this anti-nuclear energy text in the 1970s for Friends of the Earth, elaborating on an influential essay he wrote for Foreign Affairs the year before. The resulting text can be seen as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from the nations of Europe. Lovins is trained as a physicist and is a MacArthur Fellow.

McKendry, Ian G. “Applied Climatology.” Progress in Physical Geography 27, no. 4 (2003): 597–606. “Recent studies suggest that attempts to remove the ‘urban bias’ from long-term climate records (and hence identify the magnitude of the enhanced greenhouse effect) may be overly simplistic. This will likely continue to be a contentious issue.. . .”

Manes, Christopher. Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization. Boston: Little Brown, 1990. Not to be missed.

Man’s Impact on the Global Environment, Assessments and Recommendations for Action, Report of the Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970. The text predicts carbon dioxide levels of 370 ppm in the year 2000 and a surface-temperature increase of .5 C as a result. The actual figures were 360 ppm and .3 C—far more accurate than predictions made fifteen years later, using lots more computer power.

Marlar, Richard A., et al. “Biochemical evidence of cannibalism at a prehistoric Puebloan site in southwestern Colorado. Nature 407, 74078, 7 Sept. 2000.

Martin, Paul S. “Prehistoric Overkill: The Global Model.” In Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution. Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein, eds. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1984, 354–403.

Mason, Betsy. “African Ice Under Wraps.” Nature online publication, 24 November 2003.
Matthews, Robert A. J. “Facts versus factions: The use and abuse of subjectivity in scientific research.” In Morris, Rethinking Risk, pp. 247–82. A physicist argues “the failure of the scientific community to take decisive action over the flaws in standard statistical methods, and the resulting waste of resources spent on futile attempts to replicate claims based on them, constitute a major scientific scandal.” The book also contains an impressive list of major scientific developments held back by the subjective prejudice of scientists. So much for the reliability of the “consensus” of scientists.

Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: New American Library, 1972. It is a shame this book is out of print, because it was hugely influential in its day, and it set the tone (“the predicament of mankind”) for much that followed. To read it now is to be astonished at how primitive were the techniques for assessing the state of the world, and how incautious the predictions of future trends. Many of the graphs have no axes, and are therefore just pictures of technical-looking curves. In retrospect, the text is notable not so much for its errors of prediction as for its consistent tone of urgent overstatement bordering on hysteria. The conclusion: “Concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent. Such an effort calls for joint endeavor by all peoples, whatever their culture, economic system, or level of development. . . . This supremeeffort is . . . founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national and world levels.” And so forth.

Medvedev, Zhores A. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Extremely difficult to read.

Michaels, Patrick J., and Robert C. Balling, Jr. The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming. Washington, DC: Cato, 2000. These skeptical authors have a sense of humor and a clear style. Use of graphs is unusually good. The Cato Institute is a pro–free market organization with libertarian overtones.

Morris, Julian, ed. Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle. Oxford, UK: Butterworth/Heinemann, 2000. A broad-ranging critique that discusses, for example, how precautionary thinking has harmed children’s development.

Nye, David E. Consuming Power, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. America consumes more power per capita than any other country, and Nye is the most knowledgeable scholar about the history of American technology. He draws markedly different conclusions from those less informed. This text is scathing about determinist views of technology. It has clear implications for the validity of IPCC “scenarios.”

Oleary, Rosemary, Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino, and Paul S. Weiland.
Managing for the Environment: Understanding the Legal, Organizational, and Policy Challenges. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1999. A much-needed compendium that sometimes covers too much in too little detail.

Ordover, Nancy. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Fascinating in content, confusing in structure, difficult to read, but uncompromising. The author insists on the culpability of both the left and right in the eugenics movement, both in the past and in the present day.

Pagels, Heinz R. The Dreams of Reason: Computers and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. The study of complexity represents a true revolution in science, albeit a rather old revolution. This delightful book is sixteen years old, written when the revolution was exciting and new. One would think sixteen years would be enough time for the understanding of complexity and nonlinear dynamics to revise the thinking of environmental activists. But evidently not.
Park, Robert. Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. The author is a professor of physics and a director of the American Physical Society. His book is especially good on the “Currents of Death” EMF/powerline/cancer controversy, in which he was involved (as a skeptic).

Parkinson, C. L. “Trends in the Length of the Southern Ocean Sea-Ice Season, 1979–99.” Annals of Glaciology 34 (2002): 435–40.

Parsons, Michael L. Global Warming: The Truth Behind the Myth, New York: Plenum, 1995. A skeptical review of data by a professor of health sciences (and therefore not a climate scientist). Outsider’s analysis of data.

Pearce, Fred, “Africans go back to the land as plants reclaim the desert.” New Scientist 175 (21 September 2002): 4–5.

Penn and Teller. Bullshit! Showtime series. Brisk, amusing attacks on conventional wisdom and sacred cows. The episode in which a young woman signs up environmentalists to ban “dihydrogen monoxide” (better known as water) is especially funny. “Dihydrogen monoxide,” she explains, “is found in lakes and rivers, it remains on fruits and vegetables after they’re washed, it makes you sweat . . .” And the people sign up. Another episode on recycling is the clearest brief explanation of what is right and wrong about this practice.

Pepper, David. Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996. A detailed account of the multiple strands of environmental philosophy by a sympathetic observer. Along with the quite different work of Douglas and Wildavsky, this book considers why mutually incompatible views of nature are held by different groups, and why compromise among them is so unlikely. It also makes clear the extent to which environmental views encompass beliefs about how human society should be structured. The author is a professor of geography and writes well.

Petit, J. R., J. Jouzel, D. Raynaud, N. I. Barkov, J.-M. Barnola, I. Basile, M. Bender, J. Chappellaz, M. Davis, G. Delaygue, M. Delmotte, V. M. Kotlyakov,
M. Legrand, V. Y. Lipenkov, C. Lorius, L. Pepin, C. Ritz, E. Saltzman, and
M. Stievenard. “1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica.” Nature 399: 429–36.

Pielou, E. C. After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. A wonderful book, a model of its kind. Explains how life returned as the glaciers receded twenty thousand years ago, and how scientists analyze the data to arrive at their conclusions. Along the way, an excellent reminder of how dramatically our planet has changed in the geologically recent past.

Ponte, Lowell. The Cooling. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. The most highly praised of the books from the 1970s that warned of an impending ice age. (The cover asks: “Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?”) Contains a chapter on how we might modify the global climate to prevent excessive cooling. A typical quote: “We simply cannot afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we are entering a period of climatic instability [i.e., unpredictability] are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored” (p. 237).

Pritchard, James A. Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Balance of evidence that elk have changed habitat. Also the nonequilibrium paradigm.

Pronin, Emily, Carolyn Puccio, and Lee Rosh. “Understanding Misunderstanding: Social Psychological Perspectives.” In Gilovitch, et al., pp. 636–65. A cool assessment of human disagreement.

Rasool, S. I., and S. H. Schneider. “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate.” Science (11 July 1971): 138–41. An example of the research in the 1970s that suggested that human influence on climate was leading to cooling, not warming. The authors state that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will not raise temperature as much as increasing aerosols will reduce it. “An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 K . . . believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”

Raub, W. D., A. Post, C. S. Brown, and M. F. Meier. “Perennial ice masses of the Sierra Nevada, California.” Proceedings of the International Assoc. of Hydrological Science, no. 126 (1980): 33–34. Cited in Guyton, 1998.
Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Federal Judicial Center. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1994. After years of abuse, the Federal Courts in the US established detailed guidelines for the admissibility of various kinds of scientific testimony and scientific evidence. This volume runs 634 pages.

Reiter, Paul, Christopher J. Tomas, Peter M. Atkinson, Simon I. Hay, Sarah E. Randolph, David J. Rogers, G. Dennis Shanks, Robert W. Snow, and Andrew Spielman. “Global Warming and Malaria: A Call for Accuracy.” Lancet 4, no. 1 ( June 2004).

Rice, Glen E., and Steven A. LeBlanc, eds. Deadly Landscape. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2001. More evidence for a strife-filled human past.
Roberts, Leslie R. “Counting on Science at EPA.” Science 249 (10 August 1990): 616–18. An important brief report on how the EPA ranks risks. Essentially
it does what the public wants, not what the EPA experts advise. This is sometimes but not always a bad thing.

Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Roszak is often at the leading edge of emerging social movements, and here he gives an early insight into a blend of ecology and psychology that has since become widespread, even though it is essentially pure feeling without objective foundation. Nevertheless, ecopsychology has become a guiding light in the minds of many people, particularly those without scientific training. My own view is that the movement projects the dissatisfactions of contemporary society onto a natural world that is so seldom experienced that it serves as a perfect projection screen. One must also recall the blunt view of Richard Feynman: “We have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.”

Russell, Jeffrey B. A History of Witchcraft, Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1980. Lest we forget.

Salzman, Jason. Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Non-Profits. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2003.

Santer, B. D., K. E. Taylor, T. M. L. Wigley, T. C. Johns, P. D. Jones, D. J. Karoly, J. F. B. Mitchell, A. H. Oort, J. E. Penner, V. Ramaswamy, M. D. Schwarzkopf, R. J. Stouffer, and S. Tett. “A Search for Human Influences on the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere.” Nature 382 (4 July 1996): 39–46. “It is likely that [temperature change in the free atmosphere] is partially due to human activities, though many uncertainties remain, particularly relating to estimates of natural variability.” One year after the 1995 IPCC statement that a human effect on climate had been discerned, this article by several IPCC scientists shows considerably more caution about such a claim.

Schullery, Paul. Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. The author was for many years an employee of the Forest Service and takes a more benign approach to events at Yellowstone than others do.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. An extraordinary and original book that reminds us how seldom academic thought is genuinely fresh.

Shrader-Frechette, K. S. Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991.
Singer, S. Fred. Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate. Oakland, Calif.: Independent Institute, 1998. Singer is among the most visible of global warming skeptics. A retired professor of environmental science who
has held a number of government posts, including Director of Weather Satellite Service and Director for the Center for Atmospheric and Space Sciences, he is a far more qualified advocate for his views than his critics admit. They usually attempt to portray him as a sort of eccentric nutcase. This book is only seventy-two pages long, and the reader may judge for himself.

Slovic, Paul, ed. The Perception of Risk. London: Earthscan, 2000. Slovic has been influential in emphasizing that the concept of “risk” entails not only expert opinion but also the feelings and fears of the population at large. In a democracy, such popular opinions must be addressed in policy making. I take a tougher stance. I believe ignorance is best addressed by education, not by unneeded or wasteful regulation. Unfortunately, the evidence is that we spend far too much soothing false or minor fears.

Stott, Philip, and Sian Sullivan, eds. Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power. London: Arnold, 2000. Focused on Africa. Stott is now retired, witty, and runs an amusing skeptical blog.

Streutker, D. R. “Satellite-measured growth of the urban heat island of Houston, Texas.” Remote Sensing of Environment 85 (2003): 282–89. “Between 1987 and 1999, the mean nighttime surface temperature heat island of Houston increased 0.82 ± 0.10 °C.”
Sunstein, Cass R. Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A law professor examines major environmental issues from the standpoint of cost-benefit analysis and concludes that new mechanisms for assessing regulations are needed if we are to break free of the current pattern of “hysteria and neglect”—in which we aggressively regulate minor risks while ignoring more significant ones. The detailed chapter on arsenic levels is particularly revealing for anyone wishing to understand the difficulties that rational regulation faces in a highly politicized world.

Sutherland, S. K., and W. R. Lane. “Toxins and mode of envenomation of the common ringed or blue-banded octopus.” Medical Journal Australia 1 (1969): 893–98.
Tengs, Tammo O., Miriam E. Adams, Joseph S. Plitskin, Dana Gelb Safran, Joanna E. Siegel, Milton C. Weinstein, and John D. Graham. “Five hundred life-saving interventions and their cost effectiveness.” Risk Analysis 15, no. 3 (1995): 369–90. The Harvard School of Public Health is dismissed in some quarters as a right-wing institution. But this influential and disturbing study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis of the costs of regulation has not been disputed. It implies that a great deal of regulatory effort is wasted, and wasteful.

Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Are environmental attitudes a matter of fashion? Thomas’s delightful book charts changing perceptions of nature from a locus of danger, to a subject of worshipful appreciation, and finally to the beloved wilderness of elite aesthetes.

Thompson, D. W. J., and S. Solomon. “Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change.” Science 296 (2002): 895–99.

Tommasi, Mariano, and Kathryn Lerulli, eds. The New Economics of Human Behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
US Congress. Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control. United States Congress. Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.

Victor, David G. “Climate of Doubt: The imminent collapse of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming may be a blessing in disguise. The treaty’s architecture is fatally flawed.” The Sciences (Spring 2001): 18–23. Victor is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advocate of carbon emission controls who argues that “prudence demands action to check the rise in greenhouse gases, but the Kyoto Protocol is a road to nowhere.”

Viscusi, Kip. Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Start at section III.
———. Rational Risk Policy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. The author is a professor of law and economics at Harvard.

Vyas, N. K., M. K. Dash, S. M. Bhandari, N. Khare, A. Mitra, and P. C. Pandey. “On the Secular Trends in Sea Ice Extent over the Antarctic Region Based on OCEANSAT-1 MSMR Observations.” International Journal of Remote Sensing 24 (2003): 2277–87.
Wallack, Lawrence, Katie Woodruff, Lori Dorfman, and Iris Diaz. News for a Change: An Advocate’s Guide to Working with the Media. London: Sage Publications, 1999.
Weart, Spencer R. The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

West, Darrell M. The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

White, Geoffrey M. Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Wigley, Tom. “Global Warming Protocol: CO2, CH4 and climate implications.” Geophysical Research Letters 25, no. 13 (1 July 1998): 2285–88.

Wildavsky, Aaron. But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. A professor of political science and public policy at Berkeley turned his students loose to research both the history and the scientific status of major environmental issues: DDT, Alar, Love Canal, asbestos, the ozone hole, global warming, acid rain. The book is an excellent resource for a more complete discussion of these issues than is usually provided. For example, the author devotes twenty-five pages to the history of the DDT ban, twenty pages to Alar, and so on. Wildavsky concludes that nearly all environmental claims have been either untrue or wildly overstated.
———. Searching for Safety. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988. If we want a safe society and a safe life, how should we go about getting it? A good-humored exploration of strategies for safety in industrial society. Drawing on data from a wide range of disciplines, Wildavsky argues that resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, and that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle) favor the social elite over the mass of poorer people.
Winsor, P. “Arctic Sea Ice Thickness Remained Constant During the 1990s.” Geophysical Research Letters 28, no. 6 (March 2001): 1039–41.
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