Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's not until page 237 of her 274 page excoriation that we discover exactly what Oreskes is actually excoriating. She spells out the "crux of the issue": it is the heaven-sent shift towards "regulatory environmentalism" to stop the "real, lasting, pervasive damage of unrestricted commercial activity". And it is the realisation that pollution is global and the solution is "not dilution". (Not even one atom of a proscribed substance is OK with Oreskes; she is right up there with nutcase Greenpeace who want to ban (!) an element of the Periodic Table - Chlorine.) Oreskes goes on to finger free market capitalism and what she views as free market ideologues as the villains of the piece and to assure us that government intervention is our one true saviour. Besides denouncing four selected `doubting' scientists (three now-dead and one octogenarian), Oreskes spends much time hammering "right-wing" think tanks, "right wing" Cold War `warriors' and what she simplistically sees as laissez-faire economics. And from this focus we discover who Oreskes is: She is a left-wing ideologue who has conjured every trick in the book to present to the reader a most prejudicial account of her political opponents. Oreskes is supposed to be an objective historian of science; but she is very partisan and biased indeed: a polemicist par excellence. Some of her claims against her political enemies may be correct (tobacco smoking is surely cancer-causing), but Oreskes spends a disproportionate amount of the book employing ad hominem to smear and belittle those opponents. There is little analysis of the actual science underpinning the issues she tackles. Mostly, Oreskes falls into another fatal trap: the appeal to authority. Some "authority" says that this or that is true, so it must be so. Of all people you would expect a 'respected'(in left-wing circles) historian to be a little more curious, to ferret out some interesting and inconvenient facts, and to not swallow the party line hook line and sinker. (If Oreskes bothered to look beyond her ideological blinkers she would discover that `doubt' and scepticism are the foundation of rational science. Proper employment of doubt and scepticism has unmasked so many unfounded (costly and deadly) scares such as SARS, Y2K, Mad Cow disease (BSE), the Belgian dioxin-in-poultry scare, the lead scare, the global cooling scare, listeria hysteria, the mercury in fish scare, salmonella in eggs scare and many more.) But Oreskes is highly partisan and has fallen for the deep green political ideology without so much as a murmur of doubt. It is rather dispiriting having to go through page after one-sided page where the only villains are "right-wing" conservatives and Republicans (the `transgressor's' party is always named - unless the party is Democrat); and all the environmentalists and pro-AGW scientists are saints. I mean, does Oreskes really expect intelligent people to buy all this stuff? (Well, yes she does - and judging by the number of five-star reviews there are lots of true believers for whom this paean to deep-green environmentalism is a sacred catechism). For Oreskes JFK is a god on par with Ghandi, and Paul Erlich gets an honourable mention as the author of the "famous book", "The Population Bomb"; but we are not told how all of Erlich's doomsday predictions of hundreds of millions of dead from starvation never panned out. To Oreskes, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" is a landmark book but anything written by Oreskes' enemies is "infamous". The media she despises such as the Washington Times are "right-wing". None of her favoured `mainstream' news sources are ever given any dubious appellation beyond once being called "allegedly liberal", in the case of the NYT. You get the picture. Oreskes is a far-left eco-warrior. The bias is palpable; it behooves us to be circumspect as we read her claims. And what does she claim? That the banning of DDT did not kill millions in Africa! Oreskes valiantly defends Rachel Carson against all-comers. But this is the old straw man ruse. It's not Carson who is directly responsible for the deaths of perhaps 30 million people (mostly children) from malaria in Africa in the last 40 years. No, although Carson got the ball rolling, it was the heartless, hard-left, immoral NGOs who bullied various African governments into not using DDT (who acquiesced for fear of losing aid money) who were responsible. Millions died, the Africans themselves objected and eventually in 2006 the UN's WHO removed the ban on DDT. Why? Because its use in small doses on the internal walls of African homes, DDT is not harmful and saves millions of lives; but Oreskes will not tell you about what the Africans themselves think (they want DDT) or that the UN lifted the ban on DDT in 2006. Oreskes has kept this little snippet from you. She is an apologist for the immoral NGOs who are the ones with the blood on their hands. You might reasonably expect that those directly involved and their supporters who got it so wrong with regards to DDT, thus causing untold death and misery, would be just a little (or a lot) contrite. Not Oreskes. She's positively Bolshie about what a good idea it was to blackmail African governments into effectively killing their own people. Oreskes has got almost everything backwards. When discussing global warming she thinks that scientists shouldn't have to show `their' (actually: "paid for and owned by the public") data and computer code in response to FOI requests. She thinks that it is a bad thing to allow people to ask questions of what she thinks is `settled science'. Muzzle them is Naomi's advice. She thinks that the climate sceptics are well-funded! What a joke. The AGW industry has had hundreds of billions lavished on it over the last 20+ years to bankroll a desperate and failing attempt to prove a bankrupt hypothesis. Sceptics who ask reasonable questions (for which they are labelled "deniers" (nasty epithet that)) are mostly volunteers operating on a shoestring. Beyond a piddling amount, the supposed Big Oil/Coal substantial financial support for sceptics is a flat-out lie (and Big Oil/Big Coal gives way, way more money to green groups and feel-good pie-in-the sky projects). As for the volunteers, I know many AGW sceptics personally, and there is not one cent of Oil/Coal money between them. Oreskes thinks that the "Cold War warriors" had to find a new enemy once the Cold War was won and so picked on environmentalists! This is exactly a** backwards. Once the socialists/communists realised they had lost the Cold War they wanted to keep up the fight against evil capitalism - and so they moved into environmentalism and AGW scare-mongering as a way to slow down and/or kill off our capitalistic/industrial society and usher in a utopian (ie dystopian) age of (global) socialism. The Club of Rome expressly says so. The numerous red, hammer and sickle-emblazoned flags at Copenhagen say so. (And note that the thankfully not-adopted agreement presented to all countries at the beginning of the Copenhagen talks would have established supra-national socialist governance.) The environmentalists say so themselves. It was the socialists who moved into environmentalism at the end of the Cold War en masse. Believers in the free market and personal freedoms have been fighting a rear-guard action ever since. In her most preposterous claim Oreskes thinks that the "right-wing" foundations and free-marketers are Orwellian because they oppose the `science' that is being rammed down their throats. Au contraire! The Orwellians are those scientists and their facilitators who have corrupted science by polluting it with left-wing, political ideology. Calling CO2 a "pollutant", denying that "the toxicity is in the dosage", producing fraudulent graphs that `hide the decline" and incorporate algorithms to mine for `hockey sticks' and then denying it, is Orwellian. The closet totalitarians on the left are showing their true colours: winning is everything, the end justifies the means, and any lie is allowable in the service of "The Cause" (as one M. Mann, he of shonky hockey-stick fame, so revealingly calls `belief in unprecedented, catastrophic AGW' in the Climategate 2 emails). These people are the true enemies of humanity, the ones adept at employing every Orwellian trick they can conjure to coerce an unwilling public. Oreskes keeps on claiming that her `right-wing' opponents are "anti-science". Wrong Naomi! They oppose politicised, post-normal, anti-Enlightenment science - not real, honest, rational un-politicised science. Big difference; a difference to which she is wilfully blind. Oreskes claims that these same opponents say that global warming does not exist. Rubbish! They know that the globe warms and cools and the climate changes all the time. The question is 1) whether humans are causing warning, 2) if so, how much and 3) whether or not it is dangerous. Oreskes is disingenuous at best in conflating doubt about humankind's role in global warming with doubt about the mere fact of global warming. For an historian Oreskes is spectacularly incurious. Oreskes' discussion of the global warming issue never once mentions that since 1998 the globe has stopped warming and that the IPCC has been shown to be corrupted (as the Climategate 2 emails now convincingly confirm); she does not let on that the peer review process has been corrupted and makes not a single mention of the Climategate (1) emails. She won't tell the reader that there is no empirical evidence that humans are dangerously warming the planet, only models that say so. She won't tell you that the models are flawed; that they incorporate an amplifying factor of three, without which the whole scare evaporates like, well, so much hot air; and the positive feedback mechanism from water vapour which gives rise to the amplification cannot be found. No, for Naomi she will hush all these issues up and keep the reader in the dark. Oreskes' book is partisan and biased in the extreme. The untruths, half-truths, misstatements, exaggerations and critical omissions would fill several pages. (For example, she claims that big government is good and has made many advances that the free market would not have otherwise provided. Like the creation of machine tools, which she says had their genesis in the military wanting quality armaments with interchangeable parts during the US Civil War. Poor Naomi! What a terrible historian she is. Hasn't she heard of the Industrial Revolution which started in Britain in the late 18th century? It was the Industrial Revolution and the engine of capitalism that gave us machine tools, not big government. It occurred in Britain and not the US; and it occurred decades before the US civil war. What is she thinking? Perhaps she is not thinking.) Read the book if you like by all means. For the true believers whose world-view is that humans are a race of two-legged rats who should be exterminated (except me, says the eco-nazi!) this book will confirm all their prejudices. In the echo-chamber of anti-capitalist, misanthropic, feel-good moral-vanity narcissism that passes for an ideology on the left this book will go down well. The book will also go down well with the fair-minded who wish to see a pristine example of extreme bias that will actually tip the scales the opposite way to what the author intended: the bias is such that the fair-minded reader is likely to come away solidly unconvinced of Oreskes' conspiracy theories and be more likely to look favourably upon those who dared to go against The Establishment and ask awkward questions. Perhaps they might even defend some of the scientists Oreskes has maligned. Heaven knows they need defending. Three out of four are dead and cannot speak up for their reputations Oreskes so capriciously seeks to trash; and the only living member of the group she despises so much is nearing ninety - Oreskes calls him a "superannuant". This is yet another snide slur designed to belittle and de-legitimise - it gives you a final flavour of her mean-spirited tome; and it's rather disagreeable.