Customer Reviews

The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

A truly excellent book. Spencer calls attention to three things we all SHOULD HAVE figured out for ourselves. And it is a book about the science, not at all about the leaked emails (which other books have handled very well).

First, Spencer makes a powerful case for the heretofore largely understated role of clouds. Second, his presentation of material on the feedbacks was outstanding. I had never seen the distinction between amplification of forcings, and true positive feedbacks (in the run-away sense), made. Thirdly, his notion that choosing the wrong (weaker) forcing element for a given warming can result in a large overestimation of sensitivity is clearly right. Every physicist or engineer KNOWS these things, but we may not THINK about them. Luckily we have Spencer to remind us that we do know them.

As for the PDO as a major driver, the evidence Spencer shows is very interesting and well-presented, and is clearly much much better that a CO2 explanation. (To just say it is a better explanation that CO2 would do it an injustice.) The book makes the point that there are indeed many strong sources of internal variability. The so-called "consensus" in concentrating on a flawed, politically popular view (man-made CO2), is certainly effectively impeding progress toward a more rational understanding of the scientific puzzle.

A second excellent book by Dr. Spencer - for the layman (or scientist!) who still thinks.

I have done a fair amount of reading during the last 10 years to learn about how our planets climate operates. I now feel as though the missing "key" pieces have been found to the "climate change" puzzle. For ANYONE interested in our climate this book is a "must read". I would not be surprised if Roy W. Spencer is not the scientist that breaks the hold that the IPCC has on politicians and the media. However we are down to the wire, large sums of money are already being spent world-wide on "fighting climate change". Let's give the climate experts about 30 days to review Spencer's work and provide their feed-back. If this book indeed does get blessed, then I think there should be an all out effort to "educate" the politicians and the "media" regarding the contents of this book. This is a not a general book of information on climate, there are already several excellent books on the market. This book is focused on Roy Spencer's new research results that literally destroy the IPCC's computer models that are predicting climate change disaster as the result of mans greenhouse gas contributions to the earths atmosphere. Thank you Mr. Spencer!

Roy Spencer brings clarity to a debate that has been clouded by ideology (pun intended). It used to be that the only alternatives to the anthropogenic global warming theory were solar and volcanic activity. This book provides another alterative explanation of climate change. Roy Spencer is known primarily for his work on how climate systems are not as sensitive to C02 as many think. Spencer argues that clouds are a major factor. His idea that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a major driver of climate change seems more than plausible. This book makes it obvious, even to a layman (or as Spencer puts it, to an 8th grader), that the AGW theory was never proven beyond doubt, and is now under serious challenge.

This book is important now that Cap and Trade legislation is coming under serious consideration. Proponents of cap and trade tend to assume that the AGW theory is proven beyond any shadow of doubt. Spencer raises more than just doubt over the AGW theory. As Spencer notes, there are larg potential costs associated with cap and trade, and with efforts to restrict the use of fossil fuels in general. We should think very carefully about restructuring tax and regulatory policies according to the unproven AGW theory. Hopefully this book will stimulate thoughtful debate over the causes of climate change. Keep up this excellent work Dr Spencer!

Whether you are a believer in man-made climate change, or a skeptic, Roy Spencer presents some intriguing questions in "The Great Global Warming Blunder". Chief among them - is man really the only explanation for the changes we have seen in the climate over the last 100 years? The real question, however, - and the reason he wrote the book in the first place - is will the scientific "establishment" give his research a fair hearing?

Spencer fully lays out his research and theories in the book. He's clearly a scientist, not a writer; but what he lacks in style, he makes up for in substance. At its core this book asks a question so elegantly simple that it's hard to believe it's never truly been explored before. A question that goes to one of the basic tenets held by most man-made climate change evangelists on the cause and effect nature of temperature change and clouds. How do we know that global warming is causing fewer clouds, rather than fewer clouds causing the global warming?

Think about that for a moment. Spencer postulates that the increase and decrease in cloud cover is not a reaction to the changes in temperature; rather they are contributing factors to the change in the first place. By taking that in to account, his models show that the earth's climate is rather insensitive to man's CO2 emissions. Instead, what he sees is a global climate that is mostly indifferent to man. One that responds more to global variations in cloud cover as driven by things like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), El Nino, and La Nina. As he puts it in the book - Earth's climate "does not particularly care how much we drive SUVs or how much coal we burn for electricity".

Spencer's theory will not be without detractors - and that's okay. All Spencer is really after is a fair hearing in the scientific community, and an objective testing of his research. All too often, however, the global climate change debate has been charged with politics and decisions based on faith, instead of fact. (In fact, British courts recently held that environmental beliefs have the same weight under the law as religious beliefs). We owe it to ourselves to look at all possible explanations for climate change. After all, there have been demonstrable changes in our climate for thousands of years - long before man industrialized. To think that we are the only explanation for what we see now, smacks of hubris.

Read the book and take an objective view of the science Spencer presents. It's a compelling case. Ask yourself - does the data support what Spencer is claiming? Is Man truly to blame for global warming? Most importantly - make up your mind for yourself. Don't just accept manmade global warming because there is a "consensus". Ask questions. Gather information. After all - there used to be a consensus that the Earth was an immovable object at the center of the Universe - until Copernicus showed that it wasn't. That consensus was vigorously defended by the establishment of the day, and played in to Man's ego and hubris about his place in the cosmos. Sound familiar?

By Steve Goreham, author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century's Hottest Topic.

The Great Global Warming Blunder is an explosive book. It has the potential to bring down the castle of Climatism built by the IPCC and many of the world's top climate scientists. The author is Dr. Roy Spencer, scientist at the University of Alabama Birmingham, and leader of the team that uses NASA's Aqua satellite system to measure global temperatures. Dr. Spencer is co-inventor of the method to measure global temperatures from satellites and holder of NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

In an easy-to-read style, Dr. Spencer educates the reader on many facts about Earth's climate. These include the fact that cycles, such as El Nino and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, have dominated Earth's climate for thousands of years, that carbon dioxide is responsible for very little of the Earth's greenhouse effect (Spencer estimates only 3.5%), and that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will raise global temperatures only about one degree Celsius.

Throughout the discussion, Spencer describes the foolish assumptions of the IPCC. These include the assumption that global temperatures were unchanging prior to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to man-made emissions rather than natural causes, and that climate feedbacks are positive and will amplify greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide. At one point he states, "We are now at a bizarre point where carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant rather than a scarce nutrient that is necessary for life on Earth to survive."

Dr. Spencer spends much of the middle of the book on the core assumption regarding feedbacks of the climate system. All climate models relied on by the IPCC assume a strong positive feedback to boost the warming from carbon dioxide. Without this positive feedback, catastrophic projections such as Greenland icecap melting are not possible. Spencer uses satellite data and simple computer models to point out that alarmist scientists have miss-characterized the effects of clouds and that climate feedbacks a more likely to be balanced to negative. He therefore concludes that global warming is primarily due to natural effects, rather than man-made emissions.

The book spends many pages discussing the bias of the news media and the IPCC, and the control of climate alarmism over scientific journals. Spencer states, "...it has now become next to impossible to publish research results that conflict with the IPCC's official line, partly because of the political muscle exercised by the IPCC and its supporters in government." Since the news media has not reported his scientific analysis on climate feedback, he has written a book to bring the facts to each citizen.

Every citizen should read The Great Global Warming Blunder to learn how climate science has gone down the misguided track of Climatism.

It is always amazing the number of koolaid drinkers that attack the messenger rather than actually read the book and refute the arguments. Spencer has a unique take on the GW observations. Even for the adherents this is an interesting read.

I suggest that only people that buy the book should review it. It would cut down on the chaff. It is kind of amazing that none of the negative reviews are from people that actually own the book!

The thing the global warming crowd does that is flat out wrong and makes no sense is make the claim that since man began using fossil fuels the planet has gotten hotter than any time in the past. This is nonsense, of course. There are many times over the last thousand years the planet was warmer. At one point in the 1800s you could take a sailing ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the North coast of Canada. We were taught in grammar school how Greenland got its name. Then of course in the pre-historic record we have dinosaurs roaming the north of Canada and Alaska.

So the real scientific inquiry should be what the heck causes natural climate fluctuations. This needs to happen before we can even come close to understanding what, and if, man's CO2 emissions do a darn thing. In fact when you look at the global warming proponents (hide the decline) you observer that their models predicting the future do not even accurately back test properly. A huge no-no.

Dr Spencer's book takes a look, refreshing, at trying to understand the natural fluctuations in climate. This is way overdue.

The result is in retrospect interesting - there is no normal. Normal is all over the map and to trying to pin the climate change we observe on man has simply not proven or even likely.

If you are interested in a scientific analysis of the Earth's climate system, then this is the book for you. However, if you have already made up your mind based on what a political body has told you to believe, then perhaps you should look elsewhere.

Roy Spencer, one of the nation's leading climate scientists, says he's frustrated that activists have hijacked the peer-review process to prevent the publication of sound science contradicting global warming alarmism.

Spencer, a Ph.D. meteorologist, currently a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, and formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, decided to write a book for everyone willing to take a little time to understand the basic physics behind the issue.

That book, The Great Global Warming Blunder, is a must-read for anyone interested in the scientific facts about global warming. Spencer documents that the science clearly shows man does not in fact control the climate in any significant way and the natural forces that continually alter the Earth's climate are relatively easy to discern and understand.

Spencer breaks down complex science into easily digestible facts understandable to anyone willing to read slowly and absorb his simple, real-life analogies. The latter include the effects of heating water in a pot on your stove and opening or closing your windows to moderate heat in a building or car.

Climate Model Flaws
Nobody understands better than Spencer the multitude of incentives that have both caused and allowed the anthropogenic global warming delusion to grow and prosper during the past two decades. I can assure you that anyone with honesty and an IQ exceeding plant life will, after reading Spencer's book, at last understand the workings and proper role of mathematical climate models.

If the only thing you gain from The Great Global Warming Blunder is a better understanding of the positive and negative climate-factor feedbacks that are still in great dispute but are central to alarmist global warming computer models, this alone will justify your purchase of the book. Spencer powerfully explains how carbon dioxide-induced global warming is mitigated by many negative feedbacks that keep temperatures from rising as rapidly as alarmists predict. This is perhaps the central flaw in alarmist global warming theory.

Spencer explains with easy logic how climate modelers relied on by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have mixed up cause and effect. The IPCC decided that when warming coincides with reduced cloud cover, the warming must have reduced the cloud cover. However, it is far more likely that reduced cloud cover actually produced the warming, Spencer notes.

Getting cause and effect right corrects many of the overly alarmist flaws in the IPCC's computer models.

Hidden Agendas
Spencer expertly explains that the IPCC, which employs some talented climate scientists, has its hands tied by bureaucrats who control the process and have financial incentives to continue asserting a global warming crisis.

Spencer is equally and rightly upset with the corporate pandering done to look "green" in the eyes of the public on the global warming issue. He writes, "when big business poses as being on the `CO2 is evil' bandwagon the public perceives it as an acknowledgment that CO2 is a real problem and that something must be done," when in reality it is just clever and dishonest marketing. Sadly, it all supports legislation that ends up hurting the public interest.

Planet's Outlook Not Alarming
The Great Global Warming Blunder challenges our nation's leaders to perform a critical review of the IPCC and its alarmist claims before making any policy decisions to redirect scarce resources from important needs and spend them on a phantom crisis.

Instead of fearing more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Spencer argues, we should consider the possibility our use of economically productive fossil fuels improves human wealth and well-being and that the resultant carbon dioxide emissions may actually be beneficial to life on Earth.

You should buy this book as a belated Christmas present for anyone interested in global warming science. We all owe Roy Spencer great thanks for his courage in telling it like it is from his position as one of the most prominent and accomplished climate scientists of our day.

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Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.

This book should be read by all of those who think that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere is causing global warming.It is a rational review of the current science of why and how the climate changes. It shows that natural changes in the climate are not caused by humans releasing CO2 into the atmosphere but by Nature itself.

I especially appreciated Dr. Spencer's excellent presentation of the empiricist viewpoint on the climate change debate, approaching the subject from the point-of-view of the measurements. This is a complex subject and I applaud his effort to bring it to a non-technical audience. He keeps the focus on the most representative data set - temperatures and radiation measurements from polar-orbiting satellites. Through both analysis and a simple model calculation he demonstrates the role water vapor plays as both a forcing and feedback agent in climate change. Yet, he does not minimize the complexity of the climate issue, (The cover illustration is very descriptive of our current understanding.).

Nevertheless, the book has short comings, thus the 4 star rating. In my opinion the text is excessively verbose and redundant, spending too much time criticizing the IPCC report. The reader would be better served by a more through discussion of the important climatic cycles and the feedback processes. This said, "Blunders..." is an improvement over Dr. Spencer's first book, "Climate Confusion", in that it makes a strong case for natural forcing and it contains references and endnotes. (I am not really convinced Mother Nature fooled the modelers, they need positive feedbacks to get the desired results.)

"Blunders..." presents the climate change problem, in all its complexity, from the viewpoint of the measured data base, giving water vapor due consideration. It should be on the reading list for all those in graduate programs of "Environmental Management" (Well, at least Ch, 4-6 and the Summary and Conclusion). I am reminded at this point of the answer given by the prominent climatologist, Henry van Loon, to a question concerning AGW, "Climate changes on all time scales, because a particular change happens on our watch doesn't necessarily mean we are responsible."