Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 At last - Sanity prevails! May 6, 2008
Hosp Doc (Oxford, U. K.)
45 out of 62 found this review helpful
Lord Lawson has stood up to be counted - and great praise is due for this stand. He could not get an UK publisher to touch this book.
He is simply challenging what has becoming the received wisdom of the climate debate - and which has now become "The Emperor's Clothes" syndrome.
As a non-scientist, he is cautious in questioning the basic science but he challenges the way the IPCC has manipulated, extrapolated and projected questionable science.
He, quite rightly, pours scorn and vitriol on the Stern Report, which is mostly a scurrilous rehashing of junk science and junk news.
Lord Lawson portrays the Global Warming debate as a hugely biased and self-fulfilling gravy train. It is being pushed along by environmental fundamentalists and self-serving bureaucrats who have stopped listening to reason.
He portrays a future scenario that bears no resemblance to the promised Armageddon beloved of the ecomaniacs.
Please read his careful and authoritative words - this is the truth of the matter of global warming.
excellent critique April 21, 2008
paul (cheshire)
51 out of 73 found this review helpful
An excellent critique of the current mass-hysteria surrounding anything to do with changes in climate. Lord Lawson doesn't deny that the Earth warmed between the 1970s and the late 1990s. And he accurately points out that temperatures since then have been flat (not forecast in advance by any of the models by the way).
He then goes on to look at what may happen if (IF) the climate models are right. He discusses the great capacity of humans to adapt, even to an IPCC worst case. He examines why a global political solution is frankly not going to happen and why European action only is poor policy.
And then applies basic sound economic theory to explain why, even if the anthropogenic warming theories are correct it is poor economics to damage the current economy by restricting growth given that the costs of doing so would be far better spent in other areas, including poverty relief and health improvements in the developing world. And all complete with full references.
A necessary book which should be required reading for all who seek to govern and tax us.
The Chicken-Littles get a good roasting April 14, 2008
T. Burkard (Norwich, England)
67 out of 98 found this review helpful
Sitting here in Norfolk, shivering in frustration, we are most annoyed at being cheated out of our global warming. Quite frankly, there's nothing my wife would like better. Her date palm, sitting on the window of our conservatory, is a poor bedraggled specimen with a few drooping leaves. We built a walled garden in anticipation of the marvellous things we would be able to grow as the climate warmed up, but last year half of my seeds rotted in the ground. So I turned to Lord Lawson's new book to find out what's up.
As Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor between 1983 and 1989, Nigel Lawson played a major role in transforming Britain from the 'sick man of Europe' to the world's 4th largest economic power. During this time, he had to make sense of the vast amount of economic data which influenced our fortunes, and it was not an easy task. But by comparison to climate forcasting, economics is dead simple. The computer models that global warming alarmists are using in their attempt to scare us all to death are absurd. As Lord Lawson points out, in 1908 no one had a clue what the world would be like now--and they would have been none the wiser had they posessed our computer models.
Lord Lawson gives these models the benefit of the doubt, and shows how overblown the scaremongering is. Even the IPCC admits that all but the most extreme global warming scenarios will result in an INCREASE in food production. And he shows that even if we really were in for catastrophic global warming, as the fat fraud Al Gore would have it, even the most drastic measures currently proposed would make no difference. Surely it is absurd to think that today's politicians, who can't even deliver decent schools and hospitals, can have even the most marginal effect on climate change.
Indeed, there's something fishy about this whole business. Does anyone really think that China and India are going to halt their nascent industrial revolutions and go back to being peasant nations? If the global warming lobby gets its way, the only thing we can be sure of is very high taxes, and a continued growth of the bloated quangos that have already amassed enough power to make a communist commissar green with envy. And that might just be where all this is leading--here's a posting (2 May 2008) from the Guardian: "the only hope that we - and the planet have - is some form of benevolent Green Fascism. People are never going to vote for reduced quality of life, but ultimately -in a post-carbon and therefore post-industrial, post-capitalist age - that's what it's going to take."
For all that the warmists claim a scientific consensus supports their alarmist views, one wonders why they find it necessary to resort to ad hominem abuse. According to some warmists, anyone who is right-wing, male or somewhat elderly must be evil, or at very best, a moron. Calling Lord Lawson a "denier" is a bit rich: I seriously doubt that very many people believe that Lawson (who is Jewish) is morally or intellectually equivalent to those who deny the reality of Nazi gas chambers.
Answering the right questions May 15, 2008
Andrew
19 out of 28 found this review helpful
Adding to the above reviews, the most important thematic point that runs throughout Lawson's book is that this whole subject is not one where we should defer to climatologists. The key inputs that determine the outcomes of their models are economic - climatologists are not well qualified to make those forecasts, and as he shows in the book, do not seem to fully comprehend the implications of the economic assumptions that they make.
Even once we take the outputs from the models, there is still a policy decision to be taken on whether the currently proposed solutions are the best way to improve the lot of humanity over the long term, or if our money would be better spent in other ways - a point Lawson convincingly shows is inadequately addressed by the intellectually bankrupt Stern report.
The more negative reviews that criticise Lawson's scientific credentials really miss the point of the argument. Besides, the fact that the book is endorsed by none other than the professor of atmospheric physics at MIT should be reassuring to readers concerned about the reliability of the information.
I found this a beautifully argued book, and would highly recommend to anyone who is genuinely concerned about how we should respond to the issue of climate change.
At last, the REAL truth about global warming May 23, 2008
T. Hughes (Manchester, UK)
16 out of 24 found this review helpful
A copy of this book should be sent to every school and household in the country. Chapter by chapter it demolishes the lies and half-truths repeatedly told by the media and politicians. I'd love to go through and highlight all the important points that are made in this book, but there are so many that it would basically mean my copying the entire content out! It's presented in a very logical, readable, sensible and level-headed way.
If you've already started to get suspicious about global warming theory, then this book will confirm your suspicions. If you are at all concerned about global warming, then this book will set your mind at rest - or, rather, it will stop you worrying about global warming and start you worrying about the measures that the government are taking supposedly to counter it, which transpire to be doing much more damage than global warming itself!
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