Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I haven't made my mind up regarding man's role in climate change, and bought this book looking forward to listening to the arguments from "the other side". What a disappointment that instead of a book written by scientists explaining the ways in which the case for man-made climate change may have been exaggerated I ended up with this pamphlet written by a bunch of emeriti professors who studied climate science in the 50s, several journalists (including the executive editor of Breitbart.com in London) and an 86-year-old former Conservative MP in the UK whose claims---including that global temperatures have been cooling since the 70's---have been repeatedly shown to be false. I'm a researcher by training, with a PhD in Statistics. My specialization has nothing to do with climate science, but it has trained me to distinguish snake-oil peddlers from true scientists, and the writers of this book fall in the first category. You see, when true scientists speak, they do so in terms of probabilities. They recognize that the consequences of climate change are difficult to predict many decades in advance, and hence give us lots of "maybes" and confidence intervals. Charlatans like the ones who wrote this book are full of certainties. The introduction presents the coming chapters as "dismiss[ing] the possibility of devastating consequences" from climate change, "showing that any human effect on climate is trivial", "exploding the myth" that the majority of scientists believe that human-induced climate change is likely and serious. Oh what a joy it must be to live in a world devoid of doubt and uncertainty. The best part of the introduction is that which says that "we cannot have intelligent public discourse until people set aside appeals to expertise and develop some expertise of their own". I suppose that if the editor ever has to (God forbid!) deal with an accute case of appendicitis he will follow his own advice and set aside appeals to expertise from the hospital's head surgeon, waiting to decide whether to have the appendix removed until he has developped some expertise of his own. I'm still on the look for a compelling case against man-made climate change. This pamphlet is not it (unless, of course, you believe that evolution is a hoax made up by evil scientists).