Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know

Michaels revisits and updates Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media. The authors explain why you never get the straight scoop about global warming. They refer to Robert Rosenthal "file drawer problem." For any given research area you get only to see the 5% of the studies that support the current view, and you don't get to see the 95% that do not support it. They also mention Edward Wegman in "Controversy in Global Warming" who indicated that any paper promoting the global warming theory will be reviewed very leniently by peers meanwhile one debunking it will be reviewed most critically. To improve the quality of peer review, they propose that scientific articles submitted for review be released on the Internet so that any scientist could comment on it. Instead, such articles are reviewed by familiar and supportive peers. Near the end of the book, the authors study the global warming bias by reviewing 116 papers published in Science and Nature in 2006. The authors indicate that the scientific community thought so far that existing models did not underestimate global warming. This suggests going forward there would be a 50/50 chance that new findings indicate that global warming is either better or worst than we thought. Instead, the authors uncovered only 10 papers (less than 9% of the 116) that suggested that global warming was moderating. All others suggested global warming was worst than thought. The authors also refer to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first published in 1962. Kuhn states that scientific research supports contemporary paradigms. And, scientific work tries either to explain anomalies or to show that anomalous data are wrong. The authors suggests Kuhn's framework perfectly anticipated the behavior of the scientific community in their supporting the anthropogenic global warming paradigm. First, this community found a weak argument (CFCs) to explain out the cooling of temperatures during the mid of the 20th century. And second, it revised the data numerous times in an attempt to entirely get rid off the embarrassing mid century cooling all together. Now, you can't even trust the data. Temperature data series have been adjusted 6 times in just the past few years. They were to factor the urban island effect and the related effect of agriculture, deforestation, and zoning changes. They all lead to artificially raising recent temperatures. So, adjusting the time series should have lowered recent temperature levels. Instead, they lowered earlier temperatures. As a result, instead of the adjustments showing a reduction in global warming, they show an acceleration. Thus, you get more warming from the same data series! The ones who don't go along with the global warming paradigm pay dearly for it. A bunch of State climatologists (Delaware, Virginia where Michaels the co-author got fired, Oregon, Washington) have

This is one of a small cluster of books that courageously and accurately expose the false science behind Al Gore's hoax of imminent planetary collapse if we don't - right now!!! - heed his strident warnings and ban greenhouse gases. It's written by one of the several respected State climatologists who suffered a political gag order (this one from Virginia State Governor Timothy Kline) banning him from publicly speaking about Global Warming in any way that might imply he was the State's Climatologist. The title was changed from a lifetime honorific to an alleged political appointment. Several other governors, including Oregon's, have followed suit, and this is related in the book, which is, in fact, dedicated to three of these "politically correct" State Governors. This book is the greatest treasure trove of current Global Warming data from behind the scenes that I've seen. The price Dr. Michaels pays for publishing it is high. He will be resigning his position as State Climatologist and his tenured position at the University of Virginia in June 2009, "as fine a public school as there is in the world." The title, Climate of Extremes, comes from a sadness that science has become so politically polarized that gag-orders are issued and misleading lies are what the public is told. It is the political climate that has become one of extremes, and the authors' prose is surprisingly gentle about this outrage. The politics have poisoned the science. "The rhetoric has changed. Discourse has degenerated into demagoguery. Threatening demagoguery." The author asks, "Why has it become so politically risky to not view global warming as an unmitigated disaster?" The climate turned especially nasty when Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote in November 2006, "Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." Originally that was applied to all who didn't believe in Global Warming. The problem was that there were few if any such people. Most informed and knowledgeable on the subject agree that there has been a small amount of Global Warming, about 0.6 degrees per century. Most see this as no big deal, and certainly not a threat of any global apocalypse. So the definition was expanded to better target Gore's critics. "Deniers" are those who don't believe in Al Gore's manmade (Anthropogenic) Global Warming (AGW). As it turns out, the authors of this book are NOT in that class either. They believe some of the Global Warming is indeed AGW, but they don't see it as a threat. "We're not arguing against Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), but rather against Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (DAGW)." No matter, they are deniers too, and thus to be destroyed and cast out. The authors ask, "How did we get to a world of apocalyptics and deniers, a world that is also one of impossible or ineffective policies of climate change?" The book gives answers, and lots and lots of data to support them. The climate history records ha

An excellent book that should be compulsory reading for all of those people that think that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing dangerous global warming. After reading this book they will become "skeptics" and realise that the whole idea that humans are causing global warming is the greatest scam that has been inflicted on the population of the planet.

What are climate skeptics skeptical about? Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, Jr. do not doubt that manmade global warming is occurring, in fact, they are skeptical about claims that the global warming of the past 50 years is entirely or predominantly due to natural cycles. Early in their new book, Climate of Extremes, they counter these claims with evidence that the observed warming, while not entirely manmade, has the fingerprints of manmade global warming. But, they are very clear that there are natural cycles--local, regional and global--and that the hysterical predictions of imminent climate catastrophe are based on either the confusion of natural variability with anthropogenic causes, or are based on faulty and biased computer models. Following the theme of Michaels' earlier book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, they examine the record of the climate and of climatologists. Both records argue for much more calm than many media, politicians and scientists exhibit. Michaels and Balling debunk the signs of climate doom. The arctic ice cap melting is not unprecedented. The much-hyped melting of Greenland's ice sheet is .008% per year, which would lead to a sea-level rise of two inches per century--not the 20 feet projected in An Inconvenient Truth--and even that is overlooking the actual net accumulation of ice that occurs inland. Increasing and increasingly deadly hurricanes, disappearing glaciers, droughts, floods, killing heat waves and more are shown to be misrepresented, misdiagnosed, or wildly exaggerated. If global warming is not such a big problem, then why are we constantly being warned of (scared by) predictions of climate Armageddon? Asserting that non-problems lead to non-funding could be viewed as sour grapes if Michaels and Bolling stopped at assertion. They don't. In the final chapters they look at the data on publication patterns to back up the serious charge of academic bias in favor of exaggerating the case for impending and dire climate changes. Actual climatologists with Ph.D.s and published research, Michaels and Balling examine the data and make a strong case for non-hysteria on the climate front. While the data, detail, charts and figures make the read a bit wonkish at times, it is very interesting and well worth the effort if you are at all interested in the climate debate.