I highly recommend this book. I’m not sure why another reviewer described the writing as awful. The book is well done. It is comprised of multiple short, concise, clearly written chapters covering all the facets of climate change science in just the right amount of depth. The accompanying graphics are excellent--- better in color on my Kindle Fire versus my black and white. I didn’t notice any distracting ebook issues at all. It is a science book, as advertised, which is what I was looking for.
In my view, the discovery of empirical methods has been the key driver of modern human material prosperity. That’s kind of a truism, but it is intriguing to observe how even very smart people can sometimes lose the focus on basic principles of valid statistical inference. A strength of this book is the focus on those very basic principles as applied to climate science.
The scientific proposition driving climate change alarmism is that we can predict the future---that climate is predictable to a level of accuracy and precision on the relevant timeframe such that public policy can reasonably be based on those predictions.
In light of current understanding of complex non-linear systems one may reasonably ask: What is the prior probability that human-made computer algorithms starting around the end of the 20th century will accurately predict global temperature 20, 50 or 100 years into the future? It’s an extraordinary claim. It’s a hypothesis requiring robust empirical validation by out of sample prospective data. Stated more technically: the prospective data must reject the null hypothesis that climate is unpredictable. In any other discipline that last sentence would be uncontroversial. But somehow, along the way, in climate science the null hypothesis has now shifted to imminent dangerous anthropogenic global warming. It’s as if the burden of proof is now on those that doubt predictions of climate catastrophe.
As very well reviewed in this book, the climate models used for the IPCC consensus reports are predicting substantially more warming than is actually occurring. There is a systematic error in the climate models. To my view, this is the nut of the problem with climate alarmism, casting real doubt on the myriad predictions of all sorts of severe climate related problems. But now that the null hypothesis has somehow shifted to dangerous global warming there is no failure of the models that can ever disprove the null hypothesis. All of the multiple retrospective explanations for failure of the models are presented as refinements of our understanding of global warming instead of post hoc reasoning. It is argued that the models are good enough. We can’t wait 50 years for them to be validated. Because global warming. Objecting to the lack of empirical validation of predictions of catastrophe now becomes anti-science and immoral.
1.3 billion people live without access to electricity, mostly living in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. The attempts to block the construction of coal-fired power plants in Africa and India because of predictions of dangerous global warming decrease the chance that young people in these regions will have access to electricity in their lifetimes. Poverty kills people. Lack of access to affordable electricity shortens lifespans. The WHO estimates that 3.2m million deaths per year are caused by indoor biomass burning. This is real harm to real people in the here and now.
Humans have a strong proclivity to predict the future, especially apocalypse. It’s been a feature of humankind since the beginning. Environmentalists don’t have any better track record than others in making accurate predictions, although they may be the champs on the apocalypse scale. We need to be very sure that climate alarmism in not just another chapter in the story of human evolutionary psychology, with the digital computer as the latest Oracle of Delphi.
The other driver of modern human material prosperity is exploitation of energy concentrated in fossil fuels. Decision makers in the rich nations owe it to people living without energy security to be scrupulously scientific when examining predictions of climate catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels. This book presents a thorough discussion of the quality of the science from an appropriately skeptical stance.
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