Book Recommendation: The Great Global Warming Blunder

The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists by Roy W. Spencer (2010)

Roy Spencer is a climatologist and researcher at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and is one of the scientists leading the charge against what he calls the "bad science" of man-made global warming. In this book he lays out his case for an alternative cause of the warming trend seen on the planet between the late 1970s and today.

His argument mainly revolves around the natural cycles that occur on this planet that no climatologists really understand yet--and may not be able to, when all is said and done. He shows through simple climate models that can run on a personal computer spreadsheet program how the Pacific Decadal Oscillation could be the cause--the "forcing" mechanism--behind worldwide warming as a certain phase of the Oscillation directly corresponds to warming periods. He argues that cloud production, or lack thereof, is a cause of warming or cooling and not an effect. And he delves in the issue of chaos theory and how it touches on the issue.

Spencer also challenges the notions that the CO2 level is higher than it should be and that the earth warming would be catastrophic.  He admits that higher CO2 levels should cause a bit of warming but points out that during the time when CO2 production by mankind increased by one of the fastest rates (mid 1940s through the mid 1970s) the worldwide climate was actually cooling, something not easily explainable by Al Gore and the other high priests of global warming. An interesting point he makes is that to increase plant growth in a greenhouse, the air mixture is changed to a CO2 level three times that of the normal atmosphere. This causes an explosion in plant growth. Therefore, an increase in atmospheric CO2 should cause that same effect. He points out that more species thrived on the plant during time periods that were historically warmer than the planet is now.

I think this is an important book; Spencer takes his arguments and message directly to the public rather than have them watered down in so-called "peer reviewed" publications and then ignored by the press (these issues are more fully explained in the book, as well). I am not a scientist and will not pretend to have understood everything in this book, but I feel he does a good job cutting through the hype and emotion of the issue and laying out his side in a common sense, mostly understandable way. I wish it could be made even easier to understand, but maybe it just is not possible with an issue this complex...it is certainly more complicated than "The earth has a fever."