The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with 'climate change' turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history? [Hardcover]

This book covers the history of the global warming movement better and more systematically than any other book I've read on this subject - and I've read many. Like the book Booker wrote with Dr. Richard North, "Scared to Death", its research is immaculate. In particular, I learned a great deal about that peculiar institution, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In my view, the Global Warming scare is one of the strangest movements I've seen during my entire life. I've spent a great deal of time and thought trying to piece out why so many people have accepted as true a hypothesis that is so poorly supported by the evidence. Hans Christian Anderson's tale about the emperor who had no clothes seemed like an amusing fable from my youth. Now I know that it has a solid basis in reality. Christopher Booker shows how this situation came about and how it is now unravelling.

Considering the subject, The Real Global Warming Disaster makes a riveting read. I simply couldn't put it down. Anyone concerned about the damaging policies being proposed to counter this imaginary threat, needs to read this book.

The scientists involved in propagating the hypothesis of anthropogenic(human initiated) global warming (AGW) have failed so miserably to "uphold the principles and disciplines of true scientific endeavour" that their work must inevitably be totally discredited over the course of time. As a result of their secrecy, refusal to release raw data, the actual discarding of data, highly selective choice of data, outright hijacking of the review process and the tendency to massage data so as to get the desired outcome it is little wonder that there have been numerous books and articles written that expose the shortcomings of their work. The book by Christopher Booker stands out from the crowd in that it runs the scientific story, the political story and the UN story alongside each other. It is also different in that it is written in a very fluid easy to read manner which makes the facts accessible to those with only a modicum of scientific know how.
Given the egregious unethical and unscientific be behaviour of the AGW supporters it is little wonder that their reporting and forecasting of climate behaviour has been singularly inept.
The AGW proponents claimed that 1998 was the warmest year on record for the last century and, possibly, for the last millennium. But it turns out, on closer inspection, that the year 1934 was at least as warm as 1998. And in the famous (infamou?) "hockey stick" graph they endeavoured to show that the earth's temperature was currently rising more rapidly than at any time in the last millennium. The graph concerned completely ignored the medieval warming period (from about 900 AD to 1300 AD) which was at least as warm as is currently the case and also ignored the subsequent mini ice age in the middle of the millennium and exaggerated the current rise in temperature by using suspect temperature measurements.
Most strikingly of all they forecast that the most recent decade would see a relentless rise in temperature due to the extra CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere and, as Booker shows in a striking graph on page 328 of his book, there has been no such rise and, in actual fact, a small fall in temperature.
Yet, despite these blunders, the AGW proponents still persist in claiming that they are able to forecast what will happen to the Earth's climate over the coming decades with their computer models. From what Booker says this is simply a case of hubris gone mad. For all we know the next few decades will exhibit significant cooling which is far more dangerous than warming when it comes to the well being of human and other life on earth.
All in all an excellent book for anyone who wishes to come up to speed on the global warming issue in a painless manner.
At the end of the book the author says that the AGW warmers are likely to claim that because he has "this or that point wrong" the "whole book can be dismissed as worthless". But he goes on to ssy that "what will really annoy then more than anything is that I have at least got most of the story right. And, with that, I heartily agree.
I have awarded the book four stars rather than five not because of shortcomings in the book but because, although it has been recently published, it does not cover the "climategate" story which involved the release, by a whistle blower, of thousands of emails, computer code an other documents from the Climate Reseach Unit at East Anglia University which exposed the secret machinations of the AGW researchers.

This book makes it abundantly clear that the discussion about anthropogenic global warming has been controlled by political interests from the mid-seventies until the present day. The degree of political involvement has been such that it is completely impossible to judge whether there is any science at all behind the allegation that the burning of fossil fuels is the dominant contributor to the global warming experienced during the period 1970 to 1998. The most objectionable feature of the current global warming orthodoxy has been the generally successful attempt to silence any and all questioning and to slander those who dare to raise doubts of any kind. What is remarkable about this book that its publication preceded the release of the so-called Climategate emails, which have fully confirmed what can only be described as the utterly unscientific attempts to block publication of any contrary information. I heartily recommend this book to anyone has any interest in the subject of climate change and who believes in the free exchange of scientific information, rather than in the manipulation of the general public. It exposes the current orthodoxy for what it is, a quasi-religious belief system rather than the science it claims to be.