Meltdown : The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media

Rating:
Summary: Useful, but . . .
Review: As another reviewer put it (in discussing the author's earlier "Satanic Gases"), this book is a useful beginner's guide, but it should only be read in conjunction with another book that gives the other side of the story. For that I recommend John Houghton's "Global Warming: The Complete Briefing." Pat Michaels gives numerous examples of alleged environmentalist exaggeration, but he himself exaggerates in the other direction by claiming that "We know, to a very small range of error, the amount of any future climate change for the foreseeable future, and it is a modest value ..." How can he be so sure?

Rating:
Summary: Corr . of "Publisher's Weekly" ; Dear "Physics Student"
Review: As the author of this book, I am compelled to correct a mis-impression that the Publisher's Weekly review leaves with the reader.

Their review states:

"...his remedy for biased science is not better science but a "wider source of bias" in the form of more funding of climatology by the fossil fuel industry"

My text is very clear on this. From Chapter 12:

"Environmental science funding should not derive from a single provider, but such a monopoly will inevitably develop as long as the political process provides the vast share of scientific largesse. In this environment, private sources, ,meaning indivuduals and foundations, have little incentive to fund basic science."

"One solution to the dilemma of predictable exaggeration is to take advantage of the relationship between science and its funders, recognizing that nothing is free. There is clearly a broad spectrum of interests on climate change, ranging from those who are threatened by regulations to th ose who will thrive from them".

Both the basic language and a long prior history of writing on this indicate that I surely am not confining this to the fossil fuel industry! I have written voluminously that breaking the problem of monopoly funding means getting ALL interests involved even if the total amount of support remains constant. That means the Sierra Club as well as Chevron-Texaco. That means Honda/Toyota (which probably benefit) as well as Ford (despite W.C. Ford's public protestations, they have a lousy track record on total corporate fuel economy).

I think that should have been very clear in the book and I apologize if it was not.

Publisher's weekly is also aghast that I think Academic Tenure should be abolished, but, as argued repeatedly in the book, the problem with tenure is that those who judge the applicants are those who must be in the monopoly stream in environmental science research, which make any assistant professor reluctant to work outside of that stream. In other words, in this case, tenure destroys, not fosters, diversity. Anyone who has ever sat on a Promotion Committee is painfully aware of this difficulty.

I gave this four stars because I suspect that's going to be the overall rating and I didn't want to bias the results.

Hope you all enjoy the read. It's worth it just for the cover, which is a beaut. It was fun to write.

PJM

Dear "Physics Student" (see your review above).

If you were in my class, I'd scribble "Not Your Best Work" on your review and give it a C-. Obviously you did not read my book very carefully. Consider:

1. The central tendency of the population of climate models is to produce a constant rate of warming once it is established. See figures 2.5 and 2.6 in the color insert.

2. Greenhouse warming is established by noting the disproportionate warming of cold dry air in the winter. Basic physics. Been going on for decades.

3. Therefore, unless you choose to invalidate all those models, we know the rate for the forseeable future and it is 0.75 deg C/50 years.

4. You probably don't like me because the greenies don't. They don't like me because they have lost this argument every time. Ask Bob Watson, former head of the UN's climate panel, who ran into this argument in front of the House Science Committee a few years back.

5. Here's someone the greenies (and Al Gore) worship: NASA's James Hansen. Here's what he wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001:

"Future global warming can be predicted much more accurately than is generally realized...we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 3/4deg C +/- 1/4deg C, a warming rate of 0.15 +/- 0.05 deg C per decade."

Lower on the same page of Meltdown (Page 19)you will see another Hansen quote, in which he states that it was just peachy for scientists to exaggerate global warming for political effect.

With regard to John Houghton, his book is way out of date. Don't waste your time or money. If you want to see what's in it, just listen to CNN or CBS or ABC etc...on global warming. Very old, very slow. Houghton has also written that it is a religious virtue to induce privation in order to stop warming. I am not making this up. So, if you want your global warming science from the parish priest, be my guest.

Also, next time, please read more carefully before you write a review. I was very explicit about this logic in my book. Again, if you want to invalidate the mathematical form of the output of all those models, go right ahead, but when you look at Figure 2.6, you'll have to admit that the observed warming in the last several decades has been remarkably linear. Nature chose between the models of different slopes and has settled on a modest one.

PJM

Rating:
Summary: Climate Change Incompetent Reporting Exposed
Review: For those of you whose understanding of climate change or global warming comes from the main stream media (New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, CBS-TV, et al) this book is a must read, that is if you subscribed to the "chicken little" thesis that the sky is falling, or in the case of climate change that we will be unable to live on planet earth because rising global temperatures will destroy civilization.


The sub-title of Meltdown reads "the Predictable Distortion of global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media" and in this he admirably succeeds in documenting and proving. The book is a compendium of headlines and stories found in the media mentioned as well as in a number of scientific journals, mainly Science and Nature. He also addresses some of the more outlandish stories, press releases, and declarations by organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wild Life federation. Dr. Michaels provide chapter and verse, 12 of them, documenting the egregious errors and in some case patently false information foisted on the public at large by all of these organizations. That said the main stream media comes in for the most criticism.

His method is really quite simple. He looks at the data gathered in the real world and uses it to confirm or rebut the hypothesis that anthropogenic warming is causing glaciers to shrink and retreat, is the root cause of rising sea levels that are about to inundate the island of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean or that malaria is making a come back due to warming trends or a plethora of other disasters just over the horizon.

Though he doesn't explicitly say so, the book amply illustrates the incompetence, ignorance, and lack of skepticism by the science writers, as well as their employers, in the main stream media. They come across as cheerleaders with a bull horn instead of skeptical fact reporting and investigative individuals they claim to be. For example, in an USA Today article on the effect of warming sea temperature, the text tells us an increase of 10 degrees will cause a volume increase of .1%. The accompanying graphic shows a 100% increase that are in fact 1000 times more than the actual effect. Or more blatantly, the New York Times in its August 19, 2000 edition reported on Page 1 that "The North Pole is Melting". This story was based on an eyewitness report of a professor of oceanography on a Russian cruise ship in arctic region that had sited open water. According to the Times, "it had been 50 million years since the pole was awash in water". That the Times failed to exercise due diligence is obvious since as Dr. Michaels points out that public domain information available with just a few "mouse clicks" would save them from printing a retraction, of sorts, on Page 3 of Section D three days later. In fact open seawater is not unusual at this time of year and in fact a common occurrence.

Space and time will not allow me to discuss the problems Dr. Michaels found with peer reviewed papers found in supposedly scientific journals, but suffice it to say it certainly should make one question any article from now on that was "peer reviewed".

Though not footnoted, the book provides references to all scientific articles sited as well as specific dates and editions for all news articles and scientific journals. So if one is inclined to "fact check" this book they have a great starting point.
Because science is numbers related, there are a substantial number of charts, graphs, and data summaries that allow the reader to easily follow the great deal of data provided. Ironically many of them come from publications and individuals and who are the targets of his book.

Even if this book does not change your mind it ought to give one pause about most any article published in the mainstream press, and for that matter "peer reviewed" scientific journals that purports to prove that climate change is about to destroy the human race or life as we have know it.


Rating:
Summary: Compelling Skepticism
Review: It's inspiring to me that a few individuals like Michaels, Lomberg, and some others, armed only with critical intelligence and courage, choose to stand against the tide of demagogues and chicken littles.

Using dozens of examples from science journals, the mainstream press and political speeches, he demolishes predictions of extreme climate change with easy to comprehend logic and facts. Michaels could have written a polemic, but his targets (government funded scientists, pandering politicians and media selling alarmism) end up looking so ridulous and cravenly self interested that he might as well have.

Without the few rays of sanity provided by people like Michaels, the world would seem completely mad to me.