The Real Global Warming Disaster

The Real Global Warming Disaster (Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?) is a 2009 book by English journalist and author Christopher Booker in which he asserts that global warming cannot be attributed to humans, and then alleges how the scientific opinion on climate change was formulated.

The Real Global Warming Disaster
Cover of the book
AuthorChristopher Booker
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectClimate change
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherContinuum
Publication date
17 October 2009
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages368 pages
ISBN1-4411-1052-6

From a standpoint of environmental scepticism, Booker seeks to combine an analysis of the science of global warming with the consequences of political decisions to reduce CO
2 emissions and claims that, as governments prepare to make radical changes in energy policies, the scientific evidence for global warming is becoming increasingly challenged. He asserts that global warming is not supported by a significant number of climate scientists, and criticises how the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presents evidence and data, in particular citing its reliance on potentially inaccurate global climate models to make temperature projections. Booker concludes, "it begins to look very possible that the nightmare vision of our planet being doomed"[1] may be imaginary, and that, if so, "it will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive, and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made".[1]

The book's claims were strongly criticised by science writer Philip Ball,[2] but the book was praised by several columnists. The book opens with an erroneous quotation,[3] which Booker subsequently acknowledged and promised to correct in future editions.[4]

The book was Amazon UK's fourth bestselling environment book of the decade 2000–10.[5]

Synopsis

The book consists of three parts and an epilogue.

Booker sums up the book's contents in a long epilogue, which quotes Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

In the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear

Booker contends that in this quote Shakespeare is identifying that "when we are not presented with enough information for our minds to resolve something into certainty, they may be teased into exaggerating it into something quite different from what it really is".[6] The first chapter of the book is the introduction, where Booker warns us of the risk posed by 'those measures being proposed by the world's politicians in the hope that they can avert' climate change. It talks about the ineffectiveness of wind turbines, and how they produce the same amount of energy per year as one coal-fired power station (3.9 gigawatts). In the prologue, Booker claims that many people, including the former U.S President Barack Obama, were 'seriously misinformed' about the evidence surrounding Global Warming and the effects it might have on the world. Part I of the book tells how Climate Change has risen to 'the top of the World's political agenda' so quickly, and the methods he thinks the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change used to convince politicians that the issue was genuine, including James Hansen's famous hearing before the American Senate, where he allegedly turned the room temperature up in order the strengthen his point. Part II of the book is entitled 'Gore and the EU unite to Save the Planet'. It depicts how, panic-stricken, the world's politicians took action to encourage more renewable forms of energy, and the closure of the world's non-renewable power stations. Finally, Part III speaks of how the Global Warming 'consensus begins (began) to crumble.' It claims that the evidence behind Climate Change and its causes is coming under increased scrutiny, and that by no means is the science "settled".

Reception

The book received a positive reception from non-scientists in the media: In The Spectator, Rodney Leach said it was one of the best of its type, remarking that Booker "narrates this story with the journalist's pace and eye for telling detail and the historian's forensic thoroughness which have made him a formidable opponent of humbug".[7] Columnist James Delingpole, himself the author of a denialist book, described the book as "another of those classics which any even vaguely intelligent person who wants to know what's really going on needs to read".[8] Writing in The Herald, Brian Morton was largely sympathetic to the position taken by Booker in the book, attributing global warming to natural causes.[9] A positive review by Henry Kelly in The Irish Times, referring to the book as "meticulously researched, provocative and challenging",[10] was criticised by Irish environmental campaigner and climatechange.ie website founder John Gibbons, who said that the decision by The Irish Times to allow Kelly to review The Real Global Warming Disaster was part of a recent trend of "the media giving too much coverage to 'anti-science' climate change deniers and failing to convey the gravity of the threat, making readers and viewers apathetic".[11] In The Scotsman, writer and environmentalist Sir John Lister-Kaye chose The Real Global Warming Disaster as one of his books of the year, writing that "though barely credible in places" this was an "important, brave book making and explaining many valid points".[12]


Scientist Philip Ball, on the other hand, wrote in his review in The Observer that the book was "the definitive climate sceptics’ manual" in that it makes an uncritical presentation of "just about every criticism ever made of the majority scientific view" on global warming. Though expressing "a queer kind of admiration for the skill and energy with which Booker has assembled his polemic", Ball called the claims made by the author "bunk". Ball also criticised Booker's tactic of introducing global warming deniers "with a little eulogy to their credentials, while their opponents receive only a perfunctory, if not disparaging, preamble".[13]

Houghton misquotation

The book opens with an incorrect quotation which wrongly attributes to John T. Houghton the words "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen".[14] The publishers apologised for this misquotation, confirmed that it would not be repeated, and agreed to place a corrigendum in any further copies of the book. In an article which appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on 20 February 2010, Booker wrote "we shall all in due course take steps to correct the record, as I shall do in the next edition of my book".[4] Houghton felt that Booker continued to misstate his position regarding the role of disasters in policy making, and he referred the matter to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC Reference 101959), following whose involvement The Sunday Telegraph published on 15 August a letter of correction by Houghton stating his actual position, that adverse events shock people and thereby bring about change.[15] An article supportive of Houghton appeared in the New Scientist magazine.[16]

See also

Bibliography

Notes
  1. Booker 2009, p. 342
  2. Ball, Phillip (15 November 2009). "The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker". The Observer. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
  3. Connor, Steve (10 February 2010). "Fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist". The Independent. Retrieved 10 February 2010. The quotation has since become the iconic smoking gun of the climate sceptic community. The words are the very first to appear in the "manual" of climate denialism written by the journalist and arch-sceptic Christopher Booker. They get more than a 100,000 hits on Google, and are wheeled out almost every time a climate sceptic has a point to make [...]
  4. Booker, Christopher (20 February 2010). "What the weatherman never said". The Sunday Telegraph. Retrieved 21 February 2010.
  5. Carrington, Damian (17 December 2010). "Bestselling green books of the decade". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
  6. Booker 2009, p. 341
  7. Leach, Rodney (4 November 2009). "A wild goose chase". The Spectator. Retrieved 2 February 2010.
  8. Delingpole, James (28 October 2009). "You Know It Makes Sense". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 11 November 2009. Retrieved 5 April 2010.
  9. Morton, Brian (3 November 2009). "Is a climate-change sceptic more like a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier, merely out of touch or mendacious and evil?". The Herald. Retrieved 3 April 2010.
  10. Kelly, Henry (19 November 2009). "Myths of global warming skilfully debunked". The Irish Times. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  11. Monaghan, Gabrielle (4 April 2010). "A little warming under the collar". The Times. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  12. Lister-Kaye, John (5 December 2009). "Books of the year: Writers' choice". The Scotsman. Retrieved 5 February 2010.
  13. Ball, Philip (15 November 2009). "The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker". The Observer. Retrieved 4 February 2010. But much, including the central claim, is bunk. [...] Booker's position would require that you accept something like the following: 1) Most of the world's climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception. 2) Most of the world's climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models, yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.
  14. Connor, Steve (10 February 2010). "Fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist". The Independent. Retrieved 10 February 2010.
  15. "Letters". The Daily Telegraph. 15 August 2010. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
  16. Giles, Jim (15 May 2010). "Giving life to a lie". New Scientist. Retrieved 24 June 2010.

Further reading
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