Gentle visitor to this website, if perchance you have been led, by hysterical media reports, or by statements of uninformed and over-ambitious politicians, or by the mendacious absurdities of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or of those of posturing "activists" such as the Al Gores or David Suzukis (and friends) of this world, to believe that climate change is unprecedented or extreme, or even clearly identifiable, or that it threatens plant or animal species, or that it leads to more frequent or more severe storms or hurricanes, or that it is critically dependent on carbon dioxide emissions, whether by human agency or otherwise (high carbon dioxide levels are just as likely an effect, rather than a cause, of temperature increase, and whatever global warming may have occurred in the period 1950-2000 may well have been due to CFCs!) or that Kyoto and other similar agreements will do anything other than waste resources on a massive scale to absolutely no purpose -- that, in a word, we should panic -- then please, I urge you, read and reflect upon any one or all of the following:

Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them

Steven Milloy

Barnes & Noble (2009)

The Climate Caper

Garth W. Paltridge (a real atmospheric physicist who speaks well-mannered good sense)

Connor Court Publishing (2009)

Heaven & Earth: Global Warming -- The Missing Science

Ian Plimer (a real climatologist writing about real climatology)

Connor Court Publishing (2009)

The Deniers

Lawrence Solomon (a long-time environmentalist who only wants the truth to be told)

Richard Vigilante Books (2008)

Climate Confusion

Roy Spencer (another real climatologist writing about real climatology)

Encounter Books (2008)

Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years

S. Fred Singer & Dennis T. Avery (two real environmental scientists)

Rowman & Littlefield (2007)

State of Fear

Michael Crichton

Avon Books (2007)

Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians & the Media

Patrick J. Michaels

CATO Institute (2004)

Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy & Politics of Global Warming

Christopher Essex & Ross McKitrick (two real mathematical modellers)

Key Porter (2002)

The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001"

Vincent Gray

Multi-Science Publishing (2001)

The Crichton book is "only" a novel, in fact a mere thriller, but it includes interesting charts from stated sources, and then at the end an Author's Message, two Appendices, and an annotated bibliography. It begins with a pair of memorable quotes:

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

[Mark Twain]

"Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss."

[George Orwell]

If you don't have time for a book, go to the Climate Audit of Steve McIntyre, a self-taught Canadian climatologist who is probably by now the most knowledgeable and reliable person in the field. Or try this or this or this or this or this or this. Or this excellent tutorial. Or this and this and this! At the beginning of the latter article, you will find, in shiny red, a disclaimer, apparently posted by the Council of the American Physical Society, that is apparently, in three respects, a lie -- see the author's response. But in prevarication, the American Physical Society is in good company: see below, the discussion of Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the American Chemical Society's editor-in-chief has succeeded in disgracing himself, not least in the eyes of his fellow members.

Perhaps you only watch films. In that case there is a marvellous antidote to the propaganda "documentary" An Inconvenient Truth available, entitled Not Evil Just Wrong, available along with many other materials at their website. In fact, it turns out that, between the appearance of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and mid-2009, the decrease in average global temperature was 0.74 degrees Fahrenheit, almost exactly the increase claimed by the IPCC for the entire 20th century! Another marvellous (and funny) dose of common sense can be found in this short film.

Sometimes there is a little good news: in some truly advanced countries (America, Australia, the Czech Republic), a majority of the population have resisted being brain-washed about "global warming".

If you really believe it's got warmer the last few years (when it hasn't), then it should be easy to believe it's got cooler (when it has). And if you're worried about the melting arctic or antarctic icecaps, then you can relax, at least for now, and probably for a long time to come. Nor, you'll be glad to know, is the Sahara desert spreading; in fact, it's greening up. Meanwhile, the Himalayan glaciers, despite the gossip-mongering of the IPCC, are doing fine, just fine. Though some "scientists" will resort to any sophistries to distort or deny the meteorological evidence, to spread panic -- alas, sophistry after sophistry after sophistry ... And the sophistries are not the biggest worry: it is the deliberate egregious suppression of dissent by vested academic interests, the chattering classes of climatology.

(Of course all talk of global warming or cooling should be taken with a grain of salt, since the "average" temperature results from some sort of integral over a set of sites at which actual temperature is measured: these sites are not uniformly distributed (half of them are in the United States, for example, very few of them on the oceans of the world), many of them give results biased by their surroundings (in a city, on the ocean), they are not at a uniform elevation, and the measurement methodology varies from site to site, and has varied over time at individual sites. So it's hard to talk precisely about the "average" global temperature today, let alone the "average" global temperature over a year, let alone over a range of years in the past, let alone a "projected" "average" global temperature in the future. My own favorites among global warming articles are the ones that say well, yes, it may be getting colder, but that's really all part of global warming.)

If more generally you think that to discover the truth about climate change, all you need to do is to consult Wikipedia, think again ... and again. Sometimes you find the raw data are falsified, apparently by accident, but who knows? In fact, it seems from the recent ClimateGage revelations that "scientists" have systematically and deliberately tampered with or suppressed data that might conflict with their bias, including the "scientists" that contribute to Wikipedia. Here is the most thoughtful and careful article on ClimateGate that I have found so far; another excellent analysis can be found here. Of course, it has been clear for some time that the orthodox believers, those who adopt catastrophic anthropogenic global warming as an article of faith, avoid discussion or suppress it altogether. They don't want to understand that without debate, without critical thinking, there can be no science.

Organizations that one would hope would be trying to be objective don't seem to try at all: MIT , the Global Humanitarian Forum, the Obama administration.

If you wish, you can sign a declaration on climate change that advocates less panic and more science.

Perhaps you only seek amusement, here or there or somewhere or wherever. To understand better why so many people view the climate idealogues with disdain, read Rex Murphy's light-hearted (but eloquently disdainful) discussion of Armageddon Theory. In the same vein is Gerald Warner's column in the Daily Telegraph. Of course, truth is humour, humour truth ...