Trust Us, We're Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber
This book was great until they contradicted their own advice and had an entire chapter dedicated to one side of climate change alarmism and attempted to discredit all opposing views. Even worse they used James Hansen to establish authority. A climate scientist whose future prediction models have been apocalyptical and dead wrong (thank God) over and over again since the ‘80s[1]. Even worse he still creates these things without learning from his failed theories and he still advises politicians and media today as the expert. “A model is not valid until it makes real, forward predictions”[2] a thing Hansen has yet to do. Yet the authors believe he is more right than all the other climate scientists who state alarmism is exaggerating the situation. And somehow, they believe Hansen holds a crystal ball which tells the future despite how wrong he has been. If Hansen is the modern day superior to Nostradamus as he can predict to the degree the increase in temperature a hundred years from now, why has he not taken all of the money the world has? His future prediction models are esteemed to be flawless. He should be able to predict the move of markets; stocks, bonds, commodities, he should be the richest man on the planet. He should take all the money with his prediction models and then he himself could afford to implement his green initiatives to save the planet. Yet he hasn’t done so. Why?
Even members of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) state repeatedly that their studies are often misquoted and exaggerated by people such as Greta Thornberg, AOC, and Bill McKibbon, and would disagree entirely with their conclusions which are based on the studies they themselves publish. It would be great if the authors took their own medicine and listened from non-believers as much as believers within the religion of climatology with the same skeptical criticism they encourage. They even skim over a scientist who pointed out the diminishing affects of CO2 in the atmosphere (as it is a fertilizer for plants and therefore more CO2 causes a greening of the earth which filters even more CO2) which Hansen believes to be the driver of global warming. The excuse they gave for disregarding this scientist totally blowing up Hansen's theory was how dare this biologist pretend to know more about the atmosphere than a climate scientist. Which is a flag they even say to look for...
But...
Despite this and a few other contradictions within the book, I still would recommend it. It is still a great read. Just a shame that it contains such a massive oversight of their own bias in a book about how to subvert bias.
John Stossel shares part of his interview of climatologist Judith Curry, who once received great recognition for attributing climate change as the cause of an increase in hurricane intensity.
Thirty two instances when quoted climate scientists made apocalyptical predictions which never came to fruition. Fortunately for climate castrophizers such as Greta Thornberg, they can just delete their social media posts once the date of the failed prediction passes, and still have a following of religious zealot true believers supporting their next crystal ball prediction.
[1] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_ha02700w.pdf
[2] Epstein, A. (2014). The moral case for fossil fuels.
