Review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, by Mark Morano (Regnery Publishing), 2018, 413 pages, ISBN-10: 1621576760, ISBN-13: 978-1621576761; $17.59 on Amazon
Mark Morano has worked in the climate change trenches for more than three decades, and it is safe to say he has talked with almost every prominent person on both the science side and the advocacy side of the climate debate.
Morano began as a documentary filmmaker exposing environmental scams, then worked for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Morano now leads the award-winning website ClimateDepot.com for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. He has traveled the world, attending many of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summits. This book is Morano’s story of his “adventures in climate change,” presenting a Who’s Who of the climate warriors my regular readers love and those they (justifiably) don’t like, plus an evaluation of their scientific and policy positions.
Comprehensive Climate Coverage
Morano’s book covers almost every climate change topic imaginable.
Morano examines, for example, climate scares throughout the centuries, the historical waxing and waning of the polar ice caps and glaciers, IPCC shenanigans, the weaknesses of climate models, why there is no true consensus humans are causing climate change, the gravy train of funding for climate research, and more.
Morano interviewed as many IPCC members as possible, to show how the climate change sausage is made.
I am confident the vast majority of those who read this book recognize science is not to be done by consensus but by honest and thorough testing of hypotheses. Morano quotes eminent scientists and scholars such as Princeton physicist Will Happer, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, meteorologist Anthony Watts, and the standard bearer of climate skepticism, Lord Christopher Monckton, to make that point in spades.
Importantly, Morano documents the false use of statistics behind the fraudulent claim 97 percent of scientists agree humans are causing catastrophic climate change, citing numerous studies demonstrating there is no such consensus.
Anecdotes, Quotes Tell Story
Morano sprinkles anecdotes and quotes throughout the book, which by themselves tell nearly the whole scandalous story of the greatest scientific fraud, in my opinion, ever perpetrated on the world. Morano nails the scientists responsible for this travesty, hoisting them by their own petards. For example, Morano takes the reader step-by-step through Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann’s development of his notorious “hockey stick” presentation of the global temperature record, which critics have determined to be fraudulent. Morano also exposes unethical scientists’ attempts to fool the public into believing some of our recent years have been the warmest on record when they do not come close to many temperatures from the 1930s, also documenting the vilification of those who exposed the discrepancies.
Morano does an equally good job of recounting the dark “Climategate” scandal in which scientists dropped inconvenient data from their analyses, attempted to suppress the publication of research undermining their claims humans are causing climate change, and schemed to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests to provide their underlying data for confirmation and analysis.
Morano uses quotes from prominent scientists to expose the numerous weaknesses inherent in climate models. For instance, the late atmospheric scientist Augie Auer said “most of these climate predictions or models are about a half step ahead of Play Station 3,” and renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson calls climate models “rubbish.” Prof. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania states IPCCs procedures “clearly violate 72 of the 89 scientific principles of forecasting,” Morano notes.
Vying for Control
Morano’s chapter on icecaps and sea levels is a fun read, as he covers the many instances in which alarmists sailed into supposedly open waters to demonstrate the melting of the polar ice caps only to have their ships become trapped in ice. Morano also uses the centuries of existing data to expose pseudo-scientists’ attempts to scare the public about rising seas.
Morano convincingly argues the climate change war is all about activists’ and governments’ lust for central planning, global governance, and redistribution of wealth. “It’s just the most recent in a long chain of eco-scares—overpopulation, deforestation, the ozone hole, resource scarcity, and so forth—for which the solution is always the same: global regulation by central planners,” Morano writes.
As Morano notes, Richard Lindzen of MIT concurs, saying in Senate testimony in 2007 “controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.”
Big Money for Alarmists
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change makes clear the idea climate skeptics are Goliaths battling alarmist Davids has it backwards. Funding from governments and billionaire donors dwarfs the financial support for real science in the climate change debate. Australian researcher Joanne Nova documented climate realists are battling a multibillion-dollar industry, with $79 billion spent on alarmists’ behalf just through 2009.
Morano ends the book on a positive note, expressing hope for the future, which he sees as justified by the election of Donald Trump as president. Trump publicly rejects alarmists’ climate claims and the big-government actions promoted by those pushing them. Morano argues Trump’s presidency provides the opportunity to begin a sober, factually grounded, assessment of climate science and climate policy, which, he says, could bring the United States back from the brink of economic disaster.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
Jay Lehr was an internationally renowned speaker, scientist, Senior Policy Advisor with the International Climate Science Coalition and Senior Science Analyst at CFACT.
