Customer Reviews

Global Warming - Myth or Reality?: The Erring Ways of Climatology (Springer Praxis Books / Environmental Sciences)

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Aside from the first four chapters (which provide an excellent, if strident, history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), this is a thorough text book on climate analysis for the layman. It develops a cogent theory of how the atmosphere works and explains each of the issues involved from the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, the tilt of the poles, the impact of the solar cycle, to a detailed look at the defects in climate modeling and how one might expect the atmosphere to react if, indeed, the earth were warming or cooling. Great care is taken to explain the impact of each of the green house gases (including the most significant, water vapor, and how its omission from IPCC studies impacts the conclusions). Not light reading, but well worth the effort.

This is a comprehensive and detailed review of what the author, who heads a French University atmospheric science department, views as the co-option and corruption of good atmospheric science by political influence. Leroux not only shows specific faults with various assertions of global warming alarmists, but he puts his criticism in context with discussions of a variety of phenomena. He demonstrates multiple misstatements of past events by people asserting that radiative forcing from human activity has major influence on the earth's climate. He demonstrates the frailty and simplistic nature of existing "models", and offers some interesting theory of his own on how earth's climate and weather work. Do not read this book if you want a short or easy summary of evidence (for that, look up the NIPCC report (Singer ed.) in early March 2008). However, if you want a comprehensive look at the complexity of atmoshperic and meteorologic science and climate change, this book is truly excellent.

Anyone who claim having an opinion on the issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming cannot ignore this book. This is no journalist romanced account nor a guru dire predictions. This is a scientific demonstration based on observations and accute scientific understanding and reasonning. It should be in every school library and science teachers should have read it answer students' question with knowledge. True it is not light reading but there is no other way to explain the fundamentals of atmospheric circulation, its relation to climates and expose the perversions of cooky cutter science. Should you read one book, this one is the one.