Climate Data Information

This book was better than I expected. My expectation was based not on Mann’s reputation/caricature, but on his previous book “Dire Predictions” co-authored with Lee Kump which we have reviewed previously. On this site and in blog contributions I’ve recently been trying to promote two themes. The first is that the climate science community is weakening its case by trying to ignore inconvenient facts and data; it then gets doubly blamed for the cover-up and the inconsistency between their claims and the data. The second theme is that when presenting climate science to a largely lay audience, as Mann does here, a scientist has to be more careful than in a published paper. A paper will be thoroughly scrutinised by other scientists; lay people will not know if the wool is being pulled over their eyes. Much of the book deals with the ‘climate wars’ aspect of title and the fact that few attacks on climate scientists fail to include Mann or his ‘Hockey Stick’. In the USA the whole issue of cl...

The Reader’s Digest magazine used to publish what they referred to as “unexpurgated abridgements.” By this they meant that they had left in the exiting bits and cut out the boring bits. This book could be considered an “unexpurgated abridgement” of the IPCC 2004 Technical Assessment Report. A lot of the detailed science has been left out but the elevated temperatures and other symptoms associated with an attack of ‘dire era’ are given lurid prominence. The book does give a clear and approachable synopsis of how our climate operates and how human activity can lead to changes. As an introduction to the science, the book is quite good. It is clearly written and has good supporting material. It also tackles some of the issues raised by sceptics. In a recent double interview in Discover magazine with Judith Curry and Michael Mann, Judith Curry drew a nice distinction between ‘political sceptics’, who do not want climate change to be true, and ‘scientific sceptics’, whose opinions are based ...