 | Price Comparisons: Rental | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as Rental, at any of the stores we searched. | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | This latest installment in the P.I.G. series provides a provocative, entertaining, and well-documented expose of some of the most shamelessly politicized pseudo-science we are likely to see in our relatively cool lifetimes. |
Average Customer Rating:    Debunking Persistent Global Warming Myths Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Horner has written the best gift you could ever buy for your open-minded friends who enjoy a good read. No reasonable individual could read this very enjoyable book without becoming fully cognizant of the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the citizens of this planet.
Horner combines an unusually clear, concise, and humorous writing style with the keen eye and analytical mind of a scientist, enabling him to tell a comprehensive and persuasive story of how mankind is being fooled by an army of political socialists, anti-capitalist economists, and environmental zealots.
Excuse for Bigger Government
Horner tells us, "Global warming hysteria is truly the environmentalist's dream come true. It is the perfect storm of demons and perils, and the ideal scare campaign for those who would establish global governance."
He's right. Horner shows how, following the spectacular fall of communism, ecology offered liberal-minded people what they longed for: a safe, rational, and peaceful excuse for remaking society and developing a stronger central state. Environmentalism became the anti-freedom vehicle of choice, drawing cash and adoration from leftists in business, Hollywood, media, social elites, and the government. Environmental activism today is one of America's biggest industries. No longer is David fighting Goliath; David now is the Goliath.
Most pollution issues are local, however, and thus the effects of policies regarding them are relatively confined. Global warming possesses no such weakness--it can link alleged problems in Ohio to those in Paris, thereby demanding global solutions and bypassing sovereignty and democratic practices.
That's how environmental activists get away with telling us worldwide deindustrialization is critical if we are to live with declining energy consumption.
We are daily told of an alleged "consensus" on the issue--a concept actually foreign to science--and global warming alarmists want to put disbelievers on trial. They want to control our lifestyles without anyone being allowed to question their cause. This book will give you the details about the issue and convey the debate they want to hide from you.
'People Are Pollution'
Horner shows how the demands placed on business extend from the broadest business decisions to the smallest minutiae, while the green groups operate in a world free from accountability.
Their senior leadership, despite all evidence to the contrary, deeply believes human economic activity is enormously destructive to our planet. Horner observes, "It is important not to glaze over the green antipathy toward people. In the eyes of an environmentalist, people are pollution."
That is why you must read and distribute this book. Those who consider themselves "environmental activists" sincerely believe human development and prosperity hurt the environment in general and the climate in particular. Busy people relying on superficial, breathless media stories about these issues can hardly help succumbing to this view.
Fortunately, with books such as this, their education and experience will enable them to understand that wealthier is indeed both healthier and cleaner.
Despite this correlation between wealth, health, and a clean environment, the greens worship from afar the primitive lifestyle, while those mired in such poverty would do anything to escape it.
Science Under Attack
Nowhere is Horner more brilliant than in convincing the reader of the odious concept of consensus taking root regarding climate science, where alarmists and the rest of the global warming industry assail scientists and other experts with ad hominem campaigns to discredit them.
History, Horner reminds us, is "full of efforts to stifle innovation by reference to unchallengeable authority of consensus." Galileo and Copernicus come quickly to mind.
Science requires observation--not just selectively pointing to compliant glaciers or to computer models whose outcomes are directly dictated by the assumptions behind them. Science requires the testing of hypotheses. In other words, science is skepticism; it is the practice of holding out a hypothesis for others to challenge. Real scientists welcome that challenge.
Science Bringing Optimism
Horner repeatedly shows the amusing sides of global warming alarmism, but he also points out with great gravity the alarmists' desire to use government and law at every level to restrict our freedoms and raise our cost of living with obvious and significant human consequences, all of which are ignored by the prophets of doom. Despite the short-term profits envisioned by the green enablers, we all stand to lose big from their policies.
As the curtain descends on the remnants of scientific inquiry, while governments seek to expand their power further, and while businesses move to profit from people's gullibility, Horner remains optimistic.
"The future does not have to be like the recent past," Horner concludes. "Simply opening the debate and holding it in the open air moves the ball from the alarmists' court--no time for questions, we must act now--to the skeptics' court."
Horner explains how to do that: "Exercise your rights, ... indeed your duties of inquiry and speech, and demand that the future remain free, and full of energy."
MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen, in praising this book, said, "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggeration of highly uncertain computer projections combining implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age."
Through both the laughter and tears provoked by this book, it can arm a large army to fight our way back to sanity.
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Dr. Jay Lehr ([..]) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
According to Horner, global warming is about a scientific-government complex that exists in the world. If you believe in anthropogenic global warming, do your blood pressure a favor and skip this review.
You've got five seconds to skedaddle: 5...4...3...2...
Okay, here we go.
Of the several Politically Incorrect Guides (P.I.G.) I've read, I don't think any compare with the level of rhetoric in this book. The author, Chris Horner, is cutting in his criticisms of all things global warming related. If you happen to come down on the same side of the debate as Horner, this makes for an incredibly fun and humorous read. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you'll hate this guy.
Honestly, how you can blame Horner? People who question the science behind global warming are regularly labelled "deniers" a la the Holocaust deniers. The moniker has been used frequently enough that were there any prior misgivings about the veracity of Godwin's Law, surely that doubt has now dissipated. Further, journalists like Scott Pelley state that "striving for balance becomes irresponsible." In such extreme circumstances as these, extreme measures like Horner's rhetoric are perhaps necessary in order to secure a hearing.
The book divides into four parts. Horner deals first with the authoritarian nature of the global warming movement and the main players who seem to want to centrally plan our lives. Former French President Jacques Chirac, for example, once referred to Kyoto as "the first component of an authentic global governance."
In the second part of the book, Horner deals with the "lies" of global warming such as the infamous Hockey Stick graph, the alleged consensus of scholars on the science, etc. Horner then addresses the media, big businesses, and Al Gore, all of whom he affectionately calls the "false prophets" of global warming. The book ends with a look at the cost of global warming policy in terms of money and personal liberty.
Despite the heavy rhetoric, The P.I.G. to Global Warming and Environmentalism is a well-documented contribution to the climate change debate. It is extremely well written and Horner's abilities as a trained lawyer surely don't hurt as he presents the data.
Some of the key points to take away from the book are the political aspects to global warming and the need to account for measurement artefacts. Without going into a lot of detail on the latter point, there are several areas where the evidence for global warming may simply be a function of the way things are measured.
In a word, global warming is about a scientific-government complex that exists in the world.
For "skeptics" and "deniers," I would call this a definitive guide. If you were to read just one book on the subject, this would be it. To the "believers," stay away from this one. The chances of you making it through the book are slim to none given the aforementioned rhetoric, nevermind everything else. Need logical thinking Why would a genius volunteer go to the North pole or the South pole to find/experiment the reasons/the cures of global warming?
they have Ph.D's and good life on land.
Why? because they know and they care and most importantly, they see the evidence!
Ok. let's say we buy the author's view that there is not evidence the high dioxide level actually contributes to the global warming. However, you still achieve clean air and the wonderful nature by protecting the environment. Of course, your finance as well by spending less!!
Why UAE, Saudi Arabia - they have plenty of oil and gas - decide to build nuclear plants? that is dead simple. They watch every day the oil production diminishes. Is there a better proof that the oil production is also going down? Before his time I picked this book up to try to understand why the enviro-hysterics flipped from preaching the dire coming ice age - back at the first Earth Day in 1970 - to now claiming the sky is falling due to man-made global warming. Horner does an excellent job of exposing the arrogance and deceptive and outright falsified science of the enviro-extremists. Horner explained how data was massaged to get Al Gore's hockey stick curve, several years ago - and that fraud is now today's headlines. I had not realized that the enviro-extremists had been predicting global warming due to pollution back in the 1940's, before flipping to global cooling in the 1970's .... nor that prior to the 1940's global warming hysteria, the fad-fear in the 1920's was the next ice age. This is too much like George Orwell's 1984, where Big Brother redefines history at will. Horner also presents the solar flare data, which has been tracked for over 150 years, that shows excellent co-relation with the recent warming trends, and with the cooling trend of the last three years.
I read an article last year by the Wall Street Journal science editor, which stated that 85% of new scientific research published is later refuted. Thank you to Mr. Horner, for exposing the bad science that has caused so much hysteria in the last few years. Interesting, Informative Book That Lacks Some Readability I started this book already as a skeptic of "global warming." I was looking for a book that would give me more facts with which to debunk "global warming" proponents.
And this book did give me that. Unfortunately, it did so in a less than optimal way. For one, this book is clearly geared more towards people who have a penchant for politics as opposed to science. In fact, there are only a few short chapters that are dedicated solely to the scientific aspect of "global warming." The rest mostly talks about politicians and/or political organizations and after awhile, it gets boring. Some of it IS interesting (like Europe's failure to implement energy control measures), but a lot of it isn't.
Secondly, while the book does have a very clear, focused message, it does get a bit redundant after awhile. Like after the fourth time the book talks about how 'energy rationing is just an excuse for more government regulation,' I think the reader gets it. The fact that some of the content doesn't always stay focused within the context of the chapter title doesn't help this any.
However, if you can get past the (sometimes) insipid writing style, redundancies, and political-bent, then you should learn a lot from this book; enough to impress friends and family at least.
3.5/5 |  |
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