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Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor | 
 enlarge | Author: Roy Spencer
Publisher: Encounter Books
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $10.92
You Save: $11.03 (50%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 2587
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 184
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 2008 Hardcover.
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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 69 more reviews...
 climate confusion September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is one of those books once you open the cover you put it down when you get to the back cover, I have been suggesting to everyone I know to read this book.
 He's the one trying to create confusion September 17, 2008
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
It's not difficult to discern University of Alabama meteorologist Roy W. Spencer's bias. He writes forthrightly on page 5, "I believe that the only rights that the natural world has are those conferred upon it by humans."
This sort of God-like arrogance characterizes much of what he writes. He ridicules science and beats up on the usual right wing bogeymen, Al Gore, actors, Hollywood, etc. What he doesn't mention here is that he had a conversion a few years ago when he rejected biological evolution in favor of Intelligent Design. While it could be argued that the author of a book on climate need not mention that he is a creationist, it does give the reader pause to realize that Spencer not only is a global warming denier, he is also in that very tiny minority of scientists that deny biological evolution. Well, actually Spencer admits to being a global warming "skeptic," not an out and out denier.
He has also admitted giving talks funded by Big Oil (see page 6), and he is the same Roy Spencer who along with John Christy in 1992 reported that the lower troposphere had cooled over the preceding thirteen years, more or less refuting global warming. However those findings have been refuted in three separate studies, and Professor Christy has admitted that his results were incorrect and that the atmosphere has warmed. (I am paraphrasing from George Monbiot's book "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" (2007). Monbiot gives the references for the studies that refute Spencer and Christy in footnotes on page 223.)
What I was looking for here was Spencer's admission that he had misread or misinterpreted the data. I didn't find it.
His philosophy as a "scientist" can perhaps be summed up by what he writes on page 10: "...it is not a question of whether bias exists--for we are all biased. It is a question of which bias is the best bias to be biased with." This reminds me of the idea that my God is better than your God in that a preconceived bias based on notions that have nothing to do with scientific inquiry are what is important in reaching a conclusion about what is true and what isn't. It's really just a faith-based approach to reality.
Here's an example of how Spencer presents his case against "global warming hysteria": "And while you may believe that the all-time record high temperatures in the United States were set in the last ten years or so, the truth is that the decade with the largest number of all-time state record high temperatures was the 1930s." (p. 13) He doesn't mention the salient point that the new records top the old ones. What he writes is similar to saying that more records (in an earlier time: pick the decade) were set in (you name it: basketball scoring, computer processor speed, rainfall, etc.) than during the last ten years, which is hardly surprising since it gets harder and harder to set records as the bar is raised higher and higher.
This sort of sophistry (or sly of hand) is what one would expect on say the Rush Limbaugh Show or Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, just slipshod BS to feed to the faithful. Note too that it's no longer "global warming is not true." Even the Bush administration now concedes that the planet is getting warmer. Instead it's global warming "hysteria"; in other words, Spencer is making a value judgment that we are overreacting.
The very title of Chapter 2 "Science Isn't Truth" is another example of Spencer's tricky presentation. While it is true that science does not lead to--nor pretend to--absolute truth the way the God of Intelligent Designer does, science is our best tool for increasing our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. Its track record dwarfs all other approaches to truth. Woe is the culture or nation that tries to replace science with "authority" or some other measure of truth.
As an example of the ridicule of scientists mentioned above, there's this from page 14: "A number of scientists, apparently frustrated historians, have created a discipline called 'paleoclimatology.' This is where scientists look at tree rings or ice core layers and magically divine the historical temperature record." Well, they don't "magically divine" anything. They use that evidence to make valuable estimates of past weather patterns.
On page 39 Spencer creates some cartoon dialogue to further his ridicule:
"Scientist: Honey, I'm home!
Spouse: Hi, dear. Did you discover anything exciting today?
Scientist: Oh, yeah! I found that the tsetse fly actually does a little dance before mating! I can't wait to tell everyone at our next international conference!
Spouse: That nice, dear."
This is the sort of distorted view of science that one would expect from a creationist, not a real meteorologist.
Chapter 6 is Spencer's take on economics. He reprises a lot of what one might find in an undergraduate course taught by a conservative economist. Spencer's point is that it is poor economics to take measures against global warming. Why spend money now to help prevent something that we do not entirely understand the consequences of? But this ignores the potential costs down the road--a kind of "let the future take care of itself" mentality that underlies so much conservative economic thought. It also ignores the essence of what it is to be human, which is the use of knowledge and insight to improve our prospects for the future.
But more than anything, a head in the sand attitude toward global warming is dangerous since the worst case scenario suggests a balmy summer day on Venus, and even lesser consequences may bring about enormous suffering to hundreds of millions of people. We owe it not only to ourselves but to our children and grandchildren to stop the denial and obfuscation and work toward understanding global warming and how it is changing this planet.
Telling the truth behind the Global Warming RELIGION September 13, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As one person who believes we should reduce pollution for the betterment of our lives, but does not believe in the hysteria of Global Warming as the Al Gores of the media and entertainment believe, it is refreshing to FINALLY get a clear understanding of the this MADE-UP religion of lies and scare tactics na dbad political pandering.
I always knew from a young age that the environment and its system of controls will always balance out and that man, even though he has the power to alter his environment, does not have as significant an impact as is believed. To assume that we have that kind of power is placing humans on a even level with the universe or God if you want.
Roy Spencer takes the reader though a basic understanding of climate models and how they could never acurately model a complex system like the earths due to the shear fact of multiple variables that effect each other, regardless if science was able to model a single elemnt of the system preceisley. He ties the environmental movement to econmic greed and shows how thes environmentalists use gaining more money and power to push junk science and misinfomation to the public in the form of fear and ridicule.
Spencer tells the reader how most scientist actually believe that global climate change is not happeneing, but if they stray too far from the dogma, they are ostricized and shuned. He shows how entrenched the environmentalists are with the media, politics and educational system, and how with that power, they control what people hear and think.
This is a great read and easy for anybody to understand. I highly recommend this book and have done so already.
Credibility September 6, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Considering that he has a PhD and has been working with NASA for a long time, the author has high credentials, unlike Mr. Gore. He explains science is still in it's primitive state, that scientists have only scratched the surface. Therefore it is highly unlikely that CO2 can be the blame. The Earth contains far too many factors to consider. What he does explain though, is that nature has it's own check & balance. When CO2 increases, temperature increases a LITTLE, but this increases water vapor. Water vapor is the gas that will form cloud, which block out the sun. This in the process prevents the sun's UV light from entering the atmosphere and reflect back to the Earth continuously with infrared, thus negating the greenhouse effect. The author also shows acute understanding of economics, and how dangerous it is to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money to put scientists on a ghost chase for alternative energy. His work also provides graph and some humor to show how stupid your Gore worshiping friends are. After all, radical liberals don't need scientists when they have Al Gore. But I do have an energy conservation recommendation, let's keep Al Gore's private jet on the ground.
Inspiring and Needed September 4, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Dr. Roy Spencer is an atmospheric scientist whose wonderful voice has added much to the global warming debate. This is a brief primer on the nature of the battles whose outcome may soon cripple our economy and jeopardize our individual rights. I was excited about the prospects of reading it long before it got released. That the US is currently squandering billion of dollars for no provable reason is indicative of the type of hysteria that has taken hold over the minds of our elites. He, like the 500 Scientists the Heartland Institute published whose research refutes man-made global warming
[...]
is not a "global warming denier." He is a "man-made global warming" questioner which is a distinction that Al Gore does not acknowledge or appreciate. What's imperative is that we determine how much of our temperature fluctuations are caused by humanity, and, no, there is no "scientific consensus at this time." As Spencer jokes in Chapter One, if you want perfect measurements...take them only once.
While Climate Confusion is not long it debunks many myths. First and foremost, the "follow the money" trail leads to government and the side of the climate hysterics not to Big Oil which does not have the type of money the federocracy possesses (it takes in over 20 percent of our GDP on an annual basis). The Leviathan now funnels over $100 million each year to environmental lobbyists. I write this just after the hullabaloo over Hurricane Gustav and the author convincingly refutes the notion that hurricanes are a result of global warming. He notes that there have always been hurricanes which threatened the United States and will continue to be irrespective of fluctuations in temperature. I found his chapter, "How Weather Works," to be the one most educational. Much of it is inside baseball with which laymen like myself are fairly unfamiliar. Overall, this is a wonderfully entertaining book that provides solid arguments to wield against the enemies of capitalism and freedom.
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