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Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor | 
| Author: Roy Spencer
Publisher: Encounter Books
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy Used: $13.41
You Save: $8.54 (39%)
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Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 2296
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 184
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 1594032106
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.73874
EAN: 9781594032103
ASIN: 1594032106
Publication Date: March 27, 2008
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Product Description
If you listen to the media, you would think that man-made environmental catastrophe was about to engulf the world and imperil civilization. From Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to nightly jeremiads about CO2 emissions and carbon footprints, we are bombarded around the clock with alarmist reports that disasterous global warming is on the rise and that it's our fault. In Climate Confusion, noted climatologist Roy Spencer shows that fears about global warming are vastly exaggerated and are driven by politics, not truth. He shows that a global superstorm has already arrived-but it is a storm of hype and hysteria. Climate Confusion is a ground-breaking book that combines impeccable scientific authority with great wit and literary panache to expose the hysteria surrounding the myths of global warming and climate change. Spencer shows that the earth is far more resilient than exopessimists pretend and that increasing wealth and technology ingenuity, far from being the enemies of the environment, are the only means we possess to solve environmental problems as they arise.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 ESSENTIAL TOOL FOR YOUR BRAIN November 4, 2008
John W. Brosnahan (Texas)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
IT IS VERY TROUBLING TO DISCOVER THAT 78 REVIEWS HAVE VANISHED. ACCESS TO INFORMATION SEEMS TO BE "MANAGED" AND THIS RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT WHO IS DOING IT AND WHY? AT THIS POINT ALL I CAN DO IS TO RE-POST MY REVIEW OF MARCH 31, 2008 AND PROTEST THE ACTIONS OF CENSORSHIP OF AN INDIVIDUAL OR SOME ORGANIZATION.
I read Roy Spencer's book, Climate Confusion, this weekend. I don't know Dr. Spencer personally but I have followed his work and I've had some occasional email exchanges with him. I have found him to be the kind of personable ("really nice") guy with whom I would love to have a beer and discuss a wide variety of different topics. This book just magnifies that feeling by at least two orders of magnitude. The book was an easy read but it was not exactly what I had expected. But that certainly doesn't mean bad in any way -- the book was a very pleasant surprise! It provides an excellent foundation of weather/climate in layman's terms and then it goes into the philosophy of science, economics, politics, and religion and the implications of their interrelationships not only with climate science but also with science in general.
The key to this book is the subtitle: "How Global Warming Hysteria leads to bad science, pandering politicians, and misguided policies that hurt the poor."
I had anticipated that Roy might drive the nail into the coffin of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but he did not! Rather, he gave the average guy a hammer and a lot of nails so he could decide for himself and then drive the nails into anything he wants, because the insights Roy provides are equally valid for many different government programs as well as human emotions and reactions in general. Even if your passion is NOT the global warming debate this book will help to make you think more rationally about any topic and just happens to use global warming as the example.
This is the book that poorly informed main-stream media types should read and is written at a level that anyone can understand. It is short, it is funny (at times), and it sets the stage for the reader to make his own decisions about AGW as well as many other issues in the complex climate-change SYSTEM -- where the climate-change SYSTEM also includes the politics, religion, economics, etc of climate.
The book is inexpensive enough at Amazon that everyone should buy multiple copies and pass them around to people who would never buy it themselves. After they read it, they will thank you for helping them to understand much more than just global warming. I bought two copies and one of them is getting mailed to a friend of mine who teaches climatology and is chairman of the earth science's department at a well-respected university. This book "WORKS" whether you are a student, businessman, or PhD in climatology. It is well worth the small investment in time and money. It will provide clarity to many more things than just the climate-change debate.
The best popular account of global warming science November 4, 2008
Lubos Motl (Cambridge, MA United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This review is being written for the second time because an unknown administrator erased all 78 reviews, mostly excellent reviews, yesterday. The book only has 150 pages but there is a lot to learn here.
First, a few words about the author. Roy Spencer is one of the main people behind the technologies and algorithms to measure the global temperatures from the satellites - achievements that have been rewarded by various awards and that may be giving us the most accurate data about the global mean temperature that is available, even more accurate than James Hansen's GISS data, indeed. (But, despite some people's prejudices, Spencer has been funded from pretty much the same government sources as Hansen, except for those USD 250,000 from Heinz Kerry that Spencer sadly didn't receive.) He is also a very witty and comprehensible expositor who has been writing a website with cute parodies. Recently, he co-authored potentially important papers about the regulating role of clouds for the climate and about the uncertainty about the direction of the causal relationships between the clouds and the temperature.
In the book, he first introduces some basics of climate science and explains the nature of the scientific consensus. If the censors had seen the book, they would almost certainly appreciate it. Spencer reveals that the mankind almost certainly contributes something to the climate change and the greenhouse effect is nonzero, too. I know he has also patiently explained many of these well-known things to some of the less educated and more "radical" skeptics and his balanced treatment in the book wasn't a surprise for me. He is clearly no biased partisan.
However, he quickly turns his attention to a more important question, namely whether the human activity poses a danger for the climate. He explains that there exist no scientific papers that would offer reliable evidence of such a threat and he exposes various political, ideological, profit-driven, and other non-scientific factors that allow the irrational alarm about global warming to thrive and solid science about these questions to be suppressed and neglected. There is clearly no consensus about a dangerous global warming and after reading the book, you will see why.
If I were rating the author's opinions about the origin of the species, he would get less than 5 stars but I suppose this is not what readers should be rating here. This review should be about the book which is witty, technically solid - although avoiding equations -, and revealing the true major scientific and social aspects of the whole debate. Such a book from a qualified expert deserves at least 4.8 stars and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.
Where are the reviews? November 4, 2008
Jimmock
Re the 78 missing reviews: I hope this was part of the normal process for clearing old stuff on the site and not some worker (with green flunkey tendencies) exceeding his/her authority. But even more so, I hope this was not some editorial type exercising company (green flunkey) policy.
 A subtle case of censorship? November 4, 2008
A concerned customer
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I understand this book formerly had 78 reviews. If so, and they were deliberately deleted in a bid to discourage readership, I say shame on you, Amazon.
Excellent study of Green lies October 31, 2008
William Podmore (London United Kingdom)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dr Roy Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama and was formerly a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA.
He says that we should ask - how much of global warming is the result of natural processes? Every scientist-sceptic believes that global warming is a fact, but it is not a fact that is manmade: scientists just do not know how much warming is due to natural climate change.
He explains why global warming is unlikely to be a serious threat. The atmospheric CO2 concentration was 320 parts per million in 1960 and 380 in 2005. The rise was one extra molecule for every 100,000 molecules of air, every five years.
He advises that we should also ask - how much will any `Green' proposal cost? Cutting CO2 would cut the benefits of industry, production, technology and energy use. Isn't Gore just another US billionaire telling the rest of us to stay poor?
The Kyoto Agreement encourages firms to move to developing countries, which have fewer environmental controls, so the firms can pollute more. Kyoto shifts, not cuts, pollution.
Kyoto is also causing the destruction of old-growth forests - which do not soak up carbon - because some third world governments cut them down and replace them with plantations that do soak up carbon. Kyoto has also made countries turn farm land over to growing biofuels like ethanol, which are very water-intensive, taking water from crops and people.
The world has enough coal reserves for 1,000 years or more. We should be building nuclear power stations like France, 75% of whose electricity is nuclear. So we don't need `alternative energy resources' - the hope of some new non-fossil fuel - which anyway is about as likely as some new alternative range of food.
Spencer points out that alarmism can be lethal, for example the ban on DDT has killed millions of Africans. Restoring residual spraying of African homes with DDT would save a million lives a year, but the EU threatens to impose trade sanctions on any country that does so.
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