The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism

Horner's politically incorrect book against both the myth and quasi-religion of global warming (on account it's based on nothing but philosophy as opposed to facts or science!) is a long overdue godsend and point-by-point refutation of Gore and environmentalist hysteria. The point with Horner's book is not that it totally massacres the talking point-propaganda from the liberals, it's the airtight specificity with which it does!!!! Since I'm a fair and balanced human, I actively read Gore's Inconvenient Truth to get the liberal side of the argument (which is regrettably infested with hardly any sources, lots of prevarication and much alarmism). Horner's book is such a juggernaut because it analytically pursues each and every false charge by the global warming alarmist lobby and cruelly dissects it, piece by piece. Here are some examples of Horner's skewering: 1. Environmentalism is the new authoritarianism because Greens plot to run your way of life, as verified by infamous examples. The Greens' motive is to shift energy policy from the sovereign to the multinational level, and one way of perpetrating this is via unelected judges and international tribunals. Law firms like Freshfields actually plan to sue companies for "causing" global warming, misusing lawsuits to force industry to cede profits/control. 2. Environmental improvement is actually occurring around the world, asserted even in studies by former, radical environmentalists like Denmark University's statistics professor Bjorn Lomborg. Contrary to environmentalists and the lib media's complicit misinformation, Lomborg concluded that air pollutants are less over decades, and global warming's "impact" would be "rather slight." Juxtapose this with alarmism spread by newspapers always questionably attesting to various cities having the "worst" air quality. 3. The temperature is NOT getting hotter because the environmentalist lobby and the lib media connivers merely select doubtful baselines for such warming, baselines which impersonate a reinforcement of "warming." Take other baselines by comparing today to 1000AD or the 1930s, and there's actually evidence of global cooling. 4. Gore abuses the chicanery that the 90s were the hottest decade on record to scare up misdirected support for global warming alarmism. Yet, the National Academy of Sciences contemptuously dismissed this in 2006 in part due to an inequality in the methodology of measuring stations after an uptick in population growth. 5. A surreptitious reason for the misrepresentation of warming globally is the close of many measuring stations in specifically colder areas such as the former Soviet Union. What Gore and the lib media connivance refuse to confess is when the USSR fell, record-keeping from their measuring stations was neglected. Therefore, removing those stations from the average measure would manufacture an artificial increase in "warming" globally. 6. The science is anything BUT settled regarding the fable that CO

Mr. Horner did a very thorough analysis of current popular and widely believed commentary about global climate change. Due to the fact that the media tends to oversimplify the topic in order to create fear and impact for ratings, most of his work was about putting cogent, rational perspective into this debate. Science is complicated, tricky and slow and also its method is part of a long tradition of cautious inquiry. Suffice it to say that to think of it in terms of the Academy Awards, ratings or popularity is to trivialize science. This trivialization is due to the fact that those who propagate presumed facts about the earth and even probabilities of future events are not always, in fact, scientists. Nonetheless, Mr. Horner does the IPCC great justice and shows it great respect because the oft-quoted political summary of that report does not refer to the lack of scientific consensus and even very deliberate, reasoned language that is not alarmist contained in the report. I was also not aware that the vast majority of scientists who commented on this were not specialists in the earth sciences. (I recall the mention of OB/GYN.) To claim that the science is unsettled is not denying anything. The temperature of the earth, the average will always change, either up or down. Stasis is not the expected condition of nature. Although I don't regard it as a demerit, there is some repetition of facts throughout the book. One example is the closing of the Siberian temperature stations after the collapse of the Soviet Union which made the average global temperature, predictably, go up immediately, showing higher averages for the 1990's. In Mr. Horner's defense, the book is divided into distinct sections that could be read independently and would be complete unto themselves. One extremely important lesson in Mr. Horner's work (and one that immediately shows that some reviewers haven't read the book, and if they did, something was lost in the translation from English to English) is that big oil and government (meetings with the Enron, President and VP in 1994, Ken Lay, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, respectively) were designing plans to basically create a government supported cartel of domestic oil producers. On top of this, energy companies are the ones who get the big taxpayer funded subsidies for alternate energy research and development. To further sweeten the icing, one of the plans in this meeting was to get the energy industry more involved in the trading of carbon credits, which effectively means that the government would help them diversify their own industries. (Add ag corporations) It's kind of like what would happen behind the scenes with national health insurance. Employers would love it. They would be relieved of the costs of keeping personnel to search for the best insurance plans, to administrate claims, changes. Larger companies and insurance companies could lay off lots of people, thanks to the government, who would absorb onl

I am a former environmentalist. Quotes like the one in my title (from Tim Wirth, a former Clinton State Department official) pushed me to be a FORMER environmentalist. Now I am a conservationist. I do believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there! Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance". I am now embarassed by that. I did not listen to other sources. I ignored my training as a junior historian. I did not look to see if this has happened to us before. Santanaya's famous quote about learning from history went right over my head. Even worse, I was ignoring my poli-sci training and not looking at the motivations of some of these reports. The globe cools. The globe warms. We've had recent periods of global warming, recent periods of cooling. Just like your body is not always 98.6 degrees, the earth's temperatures deviates. Now, on to the book. I bought this book because of an extensive radio interview I heard with the author, Chris Horner. He has a wickedly sharp sense of humor. He marshals his facts and takes it to his opponents in an entertaining, yet effective manner. Even if you are absolutely dead-set against Horner's point of view, it does provide a useful counterpoint to Al Gore's more prominent "Inconvenient Truth." To be honest, I would equate the book with that movie. The science is not mind-numbingly detailed and complicated. It is boiled down to the essentials so that the average reader doesn't fall asleep. If I were to return to my old habits and show environmentalist panic material I would also have my students read this book. Horner's strengh is not going after the science. Rather, it lies in going after the policies that some politicians and groups are advocating in the name of the science. On that score Horner is a bulldog - relentless and effective. His ability to dig up the most damning quotes is quite impressive. This is a great read. I'll try to share it with others, but I doubt that the ones who really need to read it will want to. It's hard to shake those old beliefs. I know, I've already made this trip from Envir

What a shame that this penetrating, sarcastic yet accurate polemic has to be made available as something "politically incorrect". Since it was written by a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Insitute, this by itself might have been enough to make an old "tree-hugger" avoid it. Part I is an exposé of the true motivations of today's self-proclaimed enviros, who are shown to take seriously the line: "We're from the government, and we're here to help you!" Their priorities are shown by Horner to be global government, tight controls over individuals, and, very oddly for Americans, leveling the playing field for business by transferring wealth from developed countries to the rest. This is shown to be the only result so far among the 15 countries participating in the Kyoto Treaty to lower carbon dioxide emissions. Actually the Treaty is said to be aimed at lowering carbon dioxide concentrations, which is a stretch. Emissions among the 15 have not been lowered at all, but wealth has been transferred. Since human-caused warming has little basis in science, as shown below, enviro beliefs must be considered to be a strange religion, according to Horner. Claims of consensus for the enviros' alarmist views are dismissed by showing how certain literature searches were woefully incomplete and how many climatologists with credentials, as well as other scientists, do not agree with the alarmist view even though they are not "Holocaust deniers". Part II deals with the claims made for the effect of carbon dioxide on "global warming". Changes in near-surface temperatures of the Earth are presented in clear form with adequate graphs. Horner depicts enviro efforts to control temps as requiring lying about what actual temps are and have been. According to Horner, enviros have "eliminated" the global cooling from 1940-1970, tried to hide the warming from 1900-1940 and the "Little Ice Age" from 1450-1850, and especially the "Medieval Climate Optimum" from 1000-1450 AD, when temps were warmer than now. The most extreme fraud was said to be that of Michael E. Mann in his "hockey stick" graph of temps from 1000-1998, published in 1999. Two Canadians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, found data selection and computer massaging of the data series used, and persuaded the Editor of Nature to demand a "correction of error", which was done with ill grace. Yet the "hockey stick" graph is still presented as the temp record of 1000 years by alarmists. Many other details are given of disappearing ground stations for temps, no correction for urban heat island effects, general cooling in the southern hemisphere for 50 years, and the total non-correlation of temps with carbon dioxide concentrations. Like old Communist re-writing of history, the Medieval Climate Optimum during low carbon dioxide concentrations had to be written out of history so the innocents would think there is unprecedented warming NOW. Part III shines light on the complicity of most mainstream medi

As this book shows, the debate over global warming is not as one-sided as the media would have you believe. The authors do a great job showing that there is great debate on whether it even exists and the problems they have telling this version. As the book shows, there is still much on weather and climate scientists do not understand and can't be predicted. Al Gore's "An Inconvient Truth" is focused on, showing the various mistakes and errors it made and that, despite what Gore claims, not even a vast majority of scientists agree on global warming. As a liberal but a doubter in the phenomenon, I would urge people to at least read over this side of the argument rather than do what the authors accuse many "lefties" of doing and simply ignoring any data that doesn't prove your point.