Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition

This book persuasively argues that:
* Global warming is a fact.
* Global warming is largely driven by natural phenomena. (i.e. is not heavily driven by human industry.)

This book is also structured well to make it ease to use as a reference. A few facts that you will learn from reading this book are:

* The case for that global warming is largely driven by solar activity and global warming occurs in natural cycles.
* How the CO2 explanation for global warming fails to explain the Roman Warming Period, the Dark Ages Cooling, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age.
* How CO2 appears to be more of an effect of global warming rather than a cause.
* Various ways how historic temperatures can be monitored, including seabed sentiment cores, cave stalagmites, fossilized pollen, human migratory patterns, tree rings and ice cores.
* How the Earth's lower atmosphere as well as the south pole have cooled over the years.
* Scientific publications supporting the solar-driven global warming hypothesis.

This book also goes into extensive detail refuting many alleged dangers of global warming, such as that it will destroy ecosystems or that it will lead to many human deaths.

My main complaint about this book is the tone. The authors often address claims with snide remarks such as "Reality-based skeptics say...". Although it is fun to mock global warming hysterics, some of the claims they refute are seemingly plausible to an informed audience and are unworthy of an automatic derisive response in my opinion. In my perception, using sarcasm in such a fashion connotes more of an emotional and partisan response and detracts from the scientific objectivity that all researchers should encourage.

Nevertheless, this book is a serious and very informative read on an important topic.

Functionally, this book is divided into two parts. The first part, Chapters 1 through 4, contains the science the authors present to support their hypothesis that natural temperature peaks every 1,500 years fully explain the current warming. They present a great deal of data intended to support that hypothesis. This data largely consists of evidence for regional changes in the past; the authors make not attempt to synthesize a coherent global picture able to supplant the mainstream view that CO2 released by human activities is responsible for the current warming.

The periodic modest peaks in temperature are real enough; they are known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events and they typically occur at intervals of 1,500 years +/- 500 years (except sometimes they skip an interval or two.) However, they do not occur in synchronization worldwide.

The remainder of the book makes up the second functional part. This is where the authors attempt to knock down the mainstream climate consensus and the projected effects of global warming based on that consensus. And it is in this second part where they reveal their true colors. Consider this quotation from page 103:

"Despite all the evidence that the recent warming trend is natural and unstoppable, millions of well-educated people and many respected organizations—and even the national governments of major First World nations—are telling us that the Earth's current warming phase is caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from power plants and autos and methane from rice paddies and cattle herds. The alarmists say these gases are causing Earth's natural "greenhouse" to overheat, with deadly effects. They tell us modern society will destroy the planet unless we radically change human energy production and consumption."

Here we see the standard talking points: the assertion that the mainstream climate consensus is based on a delusion and that advocates of that consensus are fostering baseless fears of imminent catastrophe.

The authors assert that there is little evidence to support the mainstream view and go on to pooh-pooh projections of danger due to rising sea levels, species extinction, famines and droughts, increasingly violent weather, and human deaths from heat. In fairness, they do get some things right. For example, they appear to be correct in saying that climate change is not the primary cause of the Golden Toad's demise. However, they never mention the chytrid fungus which is almost certainly a contributing factor. Nor do they mention ocean acidification anywhere in the book. Scientists estimate that the oceans have become 30% more acid since preindustrial times. This is referred to as "the other CO2 problem" and there is general agreement that at some point the greater acidity of the oceans will prevent many marine food species from forming shells.

So Unstoppable Global Warming, though reasonably well written, is nearly devoid of science that applies to the current warming. Quite simply, it fails to make its case. My recommendation is to pass it by.

[[ASIN:0971484546 The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World, Second Edition]][[ASIN:0971484562 A Primer on CO2 and Climate, 2nd Edition]]

Asking good questions often results in good answers. The authors, without pre-conceived answers, review the history of Earth's climate, challenge the modes of predicting future climates, attack the claims of immanent disasters, and then examine responses.

I needed some rationality to counter the one-sided, "it's all your fault" propaganda my child was constantly receiving in school, and this book is the answer. (For her, I bought "The Sky is NOT Falling", another great book.) Read this book and make up your own mind....but if you have even the slightest gut feeling that you are being "had" by the Al Gore crowd...or if you have lived long enough to remember "global cooling" doomsday scenarios back in the '70's, I would highly recommend this book. Is "global climate change" happening? Sure. Is it man's fault? Not so much. Could we be doing better things with our time/effort/energy to improve the world's biggest problems? Absolutely.

I was "lucky" enough to receive a free copy of this book when it was sent to my organization by The Heartland Institute. Of course, since it came from a group that I had never heard about I did a little research and found out that the nonprofit Heartland Institute, which receives funding from individuals, foundations, and corporations, has been linked to the tobacco industry (incidentally they deny the detriments of 2nd hand smoke), and funding from Exxon. Aha!

Heartland has prompted criticism by employing executives from such corporations as ExxonMobil, General Motors, and Philip Morris on its board of directors and in its public relations department. The institute has accepted more than US$500,000.00 in funds from Exxon and more than US$200,000.00 from Philip Morris.

I then read through the Dedication, Foreword, Preface, and Prologue, which all spend a great portion of their space attacking Anthropogenic Warming. Instead of presenting the facts and easing into their argument, or letting the reader draw their own conclusions, they blatantly let you know where they stand from the start.

This book was really starting to sound like more Conservative brainwashing so I then did some research on Fred Singer. This from Wikipedia:

A 2007 Newsweek cover story on climate change denial reported that: "In April 1998 a dozen people from the denial machine -- including the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer's group and Exxon -- met at the American Petroleum Institute's Washington headquarters. They proposed a $5 million campaign, according to a leaked eight-page memo, to convince the public that the science of global warming is riddled with controversy and uncertainty." The plan was reportedly aimed at "raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom'" on climate change. According to Newsweek, the plan was leaked to the press and therefore was never implemented.

In 2007, the nonprofit advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists called Singer a "climate contrarian."

If you really want an argument on global warming being caused by the sun do a little research on Henrik Svensmark. If you are in to reading biased science then I'm sure you'll enjoy this book.

For those looking for something between Roy Spencer and inaccessible climatology and econometric studies, this book may be perfect.

Singer and Avery provide not only arguments but also analysis of data from both climate change adherents and climate change skeptics. Their writing is accessible for those without a background in climatology or statistics, but the it does not suffer from the unfortunate "watering down" that afflicts many widely-marketed books dealing with science.

Though not footnoted quite as much as I like (I prefer Bjorn Lomborg's incredible numbers of references), Singer and Avery provide either in-text or footnote citations with more than enough information to bring both sides of the debate into focus.

Hearing about climate change day-in and day-out during graduate school, I have needed a primer on the topic--and this has been absolutely perfect. If you're looking for a book that will brief you on climate change and deal fairly with the all-too-frequent anthropogenic (human made) warming arguments, you can stop your search now. I would gladly buy Avery and Singer again and likely will, as gifts for like-minded friends.

Book is well written and easy to understand. Presents the facts and not the emotional prattle we have become used to over the last several years. It is easy to accept the new information presented when it dovetails with facts that have been known, uncontested and documented for centuries. If you can read this book and still retain the arrogant belief that humans have anything more than a random effect on the climate of this planet, either reading is not your forte or you are in denial.

With their new book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery skewer all the misinformation that has been used for so long in an attempt to convince society that mankind is the root cause of all global climate change.

The book is truly amazing! It meticulously supports, with hundreds of detailed, published references, the clear facts and conclusions that the Earth's climate has been traveling a well-defined rollercoaster path of temperature change for at least 900,000 years.

Everyone reading this review should buy two copies of the book, keeping one in plain view at their home or office while sending one to a friend or government official who may be called upon to make a decision regarding CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.

An Inconvenient Antidote

In almost a point-by-point refutation of Al Gore's unsupportable rant that "the debate is over; man is warming the Earth," Singer and Avery explain technically but lucidly why nearly every cherry-picked fact in Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is contradicted by science, which weighs heavily in favor of a very different truth: Man is in fact all but irrelevant to global climate, as the sun and its accompanying solar system rule.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming has been the scare du jour of the collectivist environmental movement, socialist countries, and academic money launderers for nearly a decade now. Unlike the past Y2K scare, ozone elimination, and avian flu, efforts to combat global warming will have long-term, serious, negative impacts on the citizens of the world, whose quality of life, especially in the poorest nations, will be disastrously worsened.

It will not be possible to read Unstoppable Global Warming without being convinced a sham is being perpetrated on society. Even a 30-minute perusal of the text will impress the average unbrainwashed person that despite Gore's beautiful pictures of heaving ice flows in both his movie and book, man is not the culprit behind climate change. Singer and Avery's well-chosen book title alone should give the thinking person pause.

Data in Ice Cores

In the opening chapter, "Is Humanity Losing the Global Warming Debate?" Singer and Avery explain how the ratio of two isotopes of oxygen allows us to date the age in which air bubbles were trapped in ice, and that with almost a million years of ice cores we can readily tell that periodic warming of the Earth has occurred persistently almost every 1,500 years.

That obviously does not square with efforts to get us to reduce our use of cars, air conditioners, and fertilizer in order to reduce carbon in our atmosphere. Technological advances have increased our life expectancy by 30 years during the past century, but now we are being asked to give much of it up and return to organic farming, which was able to support only 1.5 billion people 100 years ago.

If we gave up high-yield farming, as many global warming alarmists desire, we would need to clear all the world's forests to sustain our current food demands, and thus eliminate about half of the world's wildlife.

This brings up a key question: Do environmental zealots really care about the environment, or do they simply hate people? Singer and Avery make it clear: "Humanity and wildlife may both be losing the debate."

Climate Cycles

Singer and Avery document the exhaustive data search they performed to confirm conclusively the existence of a 1,500-year warming cycle. They grappled with the 100,000-year elliptical cycle of the Earth's orbit, the 41,000-year axial tilt cycle of the Earth, and the 23,000-year precessing or wobble cycle.

In addition to those cycles, they thoroughly document the most influential cycle of all: the 1,500-year solar cycle that drives most of the Earth's climate cycle.

The authors shatter the greenhouse gas theory, making it clear humanity's modest addition to the atmosphere's small amount of carbon dioxide does not add up to a significant alteration in temperature.

In obliterating the Kyoto Protocol as a construct to change anything, the authors uncover a suppressed report from the federal government of Canada, which concluded that country's expenditure of $500 million to reduce greenhouse gases was "largely wasted, producing neither a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions nor the development of new, cleaner technologies."

Scaremongering Exposed

With merciless precision and incontrovertible scientific proof, Singer and Avery show mankind need not fear there will be sea level surges, devastating floods, the mass extinction of species, famine, drought, barren soil, more frequent and fierce storms, death by warming, and then an eventual sharp turn to killer cold.

One of my favorite chapters focuses on common sense regarding the extinction of species. The authors explain that most of the world's animal species evolved 600 million years ago, so we know most of today's species have successfully dealt with ice ages and global warming periods that have sent temperatures much higher and much lower than today's temperatures.

Ulterior Motives Unmasked

Singer and Avery unveil the best imaginable view of global warming alarmists' true objectives when they explain that what the Greens want is "to end or severely restrict the use of fossil fuels."

Famous fear-monger Paul Ehrlich saw civilization self-destructing as a result of having too many rich people using too many resources. Following his lead, global warming alarmists want solar and wind energy because they are erratic and expensive, and they want organic farming because reducing yields by half will achieve a radical reduction in our capacity to populate the Earth.

Warming Benefits the Biosphere

In addition to disassembling the absurd scenarios of the anti-human zealots, the authors calmly present the logical lessons from history that provide so much cause for optimism. A case in point:

"Human food production historically has prospered during global warmings. ... Warming climates provide more of the things plants love: sunlight, rainfall, and longer growing seasons. During warmings there are less of the things plants hate: late spring frosts and early fall frosts that shorten the growing seasons, and hail storms that destroy fields of crops," Singer and Avery observe.

"Human food production today depends far more on farming technology than on modest climate changes," the authors note. "We are no more doomed to famine by the Modern Warming than we are doomed to malaria in the era of pesticides and window screens. In fact, the food abundance the world has increasingly enjoyed since the eighteenth century is primarily due to scientific and technological advances."

Dramatic Weather Events

Along the same lines, Singer and Avery look at history and confirm that the frequency and severity of hurricanes, droughts, thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes have not increased in recent years.

They point out, for example, that John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in testimony before Congress, "noted that the most significant droughts in the Southwestern United States occurred more than four hundred years ago, before 1600. He stated that before 1850, America's Great Plains were called 'the Great American Desert,' and experts at the time said the region couldn't be farmed. Weather just seems unusual and dangerous these days, said Christy, because of the increased media coverage of major storms."

Computer Model Flaws

The authors explain a subject few of us really understand--the global warming computer models that are used to scare the public on a daily basis. They are properly called Global Circulation Models, or GCMs, and they are the megastars of today's climate and environmental research.

Unstoppable Global Warming is worth owning if just for chapter 11, which explains the limitations of GCMs quite clearly for folks without a deep scientific background.

Here is a sample:

"The GCMs are three-dimensional computer models that attempt to pull together and project into the future all major causes of climate change--jet streams in the upper atmosphere; deep ocean currents; solar radiation reflected back to space by ice sheets and glaciers; changes in vegetation; naturally changing greenhouse gas levels; eddies in the ocean that transfer heat laterally; number, type, and altitude of clouds in the skies; variations in radiant energy coming from the sun; plus hundreds of other factors."

Singer and Avery explain in meticulous detail why these efforts are instructive on a pure research level but foolish as a guide for any precise decision-making, especially given how the models have failed to reproduce today's climate accurately when inputting real-world data.

From cover to cover, Unstoppable Global Warming is truly elegant reading--so much so that I cannot wait to read it again.

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Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is science director for The Heartland Institute.

After reading Dr. Singer's book I read the reviews and rebuttals to the reviewers posted on Amazon. I think it is easy to summarize all by saying that the debate is not over.

Like religion, there are true believers who attack non-believers on faith alone. It's also possible one should follow the money because there are more than a few converts who've figured out how to milk the system.

In the end, the taxpayer is the dead end kid who gets to fund all the new laws, restrictions and requirements passed into law by politicians and bureaucrats who might not be operating on good information. Dr. Singer's efforts show that there is another theory that fits the data, so right or wrong, it at least throws doubt on the CO2 theory as the only one.

Prior edition was excellent. It goes without saying that in any era global temp will either be increasing, decreasing, or at an inflection between the two. This book does not limit the discussion to the typical truncated data from very recent history biased by availability of measurement technology but points out what we all know or have surmised but politically is improper to even mention that climate has always periodically cycled, over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, between cooling and heating and that the majority of these, sometimes very extreme occilations, occured long before man. In my opinion we have far more to fear from potential sudden reversal in global temperature than increase. Clearly global cooling and associated extremes of ice ages would be calamitous including mass stavation due to very significant contraction of acricultural latitudes. One also should not be entirely dismissive of the idea that some degree of global warming may provide a buffer to the potentially highly disruptive cooling of a large volcanic eruption such as have happened in the past. Additionally this frenzy of global warming propaganda is diverting attention from the much more obvious and more easily and less expensively addressable problem of the ever increasing crush of human population and the inevitable anihilation of the natural world required to house, feed and otherwise provide for the relentlessly increasing 7+ billion. Anyone reasonably concerned about preserving so much as a vestige of the natural world and the prevention of mass extinction of the world's remarkable animal diversity must also see that habitat preservation is key which realistically will be a hopeless task if human population continues to increase without bound.