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I don't know Dr. It is well worth the small investment in time and money. This book "WORKS" whether you are a student, businessman, or PhD in climatology. This book just magnifies that feeling by at least two orders of magnitude. This is the book that poorly informed main-stream media types should read and is written at a level that anyone can understand. Spencer personally but I have followed his work and I've had some occasional email exchanges with him.
It will provide clarity to many more things than just the climate-change debate. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. The book was an easy read but it was not exactly what I had expected. After they read it, they will thank you for helping them to understand much more than just global warming. 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.
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. 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. 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. But that certainly doesn't mean bad in any way -- the book was a very pleasant surprise.
This review is being written for the second time because an unknown administrator erased all 78 reviews, mostly excellent reviews, yesterday. If the censors had seen the book, they would almost certainly appreciate it. 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. He is also a very witty and comprehensible expositor who has been writing a website with cute parodies.
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. Spencer reveals that the mankind almost certainly contributes something to the climate change and the greenhouse effect is nonzero, too. 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. 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. 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. The book only has 150 pages but there is a lot to learn here.First, a few words about the author.
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. Such a book from a qualified expert deserves at least 4.8 stars and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly. (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). 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.
But even more so, I hope this was not some editorial type exercising company (green flunkey) policy. 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.
If so, and they were deliberately deleted in a bid to discourage readership, I say shame on you, Amazon. I understand this book formerly had 78 reviews.
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. 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. Cutting CO2 would cut the benefits of industry, production, technology and energy use. Spencer points out that alarmism can be lethal, for example the ban on DDT has killed millions of Africans. Kyoto shifts, not cuts, pollution. 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.
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. We should be building nuclear power stations like France, 75% of whose electricity is nuclear. 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. 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. 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. The atmospheric CO2 concentration was 320 parts per million in 1960 and 380 in 2005.
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.
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