Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed by Christopher C. Horner

An answer to those who find it "completely immoral, even to question" the scientific "consensus"

It was UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland who declared that it was "completely immoral, even to question" the UN's authority and scientific consensus about global warming. (pp 307-8)

Quotes like that make a free speech-loving teacher angry. Isn't science about questioning? Isn't peer-reviewing about questioning?

I guess that's why I teach history, government and economics and not science.

In the old days I used to be an alarmist. I showed proto-versions of An Inconvenient Truth to middle schoolers that told them the oceans would be dead by the year 2000 if we did not stop throwing plastic pop can holders into the sea (my students lived in Indiana so I guess they weren't much of a threat to the sea anyway).

However, my training as a junior historian finally kicked in and I started looking around for other sources and I found it that, in a lot of cases, the emperor has no clothes (a scary thought considering Mr. Gore's ubiquitous presence at the forefront of the movement).

Christopher C. Horner

While far from perfect, Horner's book does demand an important point: lay your cards on the table and let's discuss everything before we start spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on something that we cannot seem to quite be able to prove. Even the most strident global warming supporter cannot fail to see the logic in that.

Or, can they?

"Global climate change is a fact because the policymakers say it is, regardless of what you may think."(p. 244) - Tom Boggus, Texas Forest Service

Sad to say, but that is the reality of it. Don't argue. Don't complain. Just open your wallets and prepare to pay.

Negatives of the book:

The first half of the book was a real chore to read. It was full of acronyms, names and quotes without names (the quotes are endnoted, but you have to flip to the back of the book to see who said it) and it times was a bore.

Positives:

The last half of the book is very good. Horner at his best is Horner going after silly policies and the laughable standards of the vaunted Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. He uses their own quotes and practices to show how the ICPCC documents have been warped and misinterpreted beyond recognition.

His photographs of the climate measuring stations on page 269 should throw into doubt our entire system of measurement (and this throw all of the conclusions into doubt).

The discussion of the Urban Heat Island effect (pp. 284-292) is perhaps the most powerful section of the book.

The discussions of data manipulation throughout only reinforce my call (up above) to lay all of the cards on the table before we start spending billions of global warming.

While I liked this book, I prefer Horner's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism). It's a good place to start and covers most of the same ground. Red Hot Lies is really the sequel to that book.

I also recommend The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them. It is much more topic specific.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Red Hot Lies.

Reviewed on March 14, 2009.