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Taken By Storm | 
 enlarge | Authors: Christopher Essex, Ross Mckitrick
Publisher: Key Porter Books
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 351588
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 390
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Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1552639460
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.73874
EAN: 9781552639467
ASIN: 1552639460
Publication Date: May 28, 2008
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Product Description
Climate and weather patterns, and their changes over time, can be nearly impossible to predict. Yet thousands of political, social, and societal decisions have been made with the assumption that global climate change can be foretold. In this book, authors Essex and McKitrick dismantle the myth of global warming, and argue that the relationship between science and society needs immediate attention.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Deceptive Skepticism with a Twist January 12, 2007
4 out of 22 found this review helpful
Thank you to Chris Barrington Leigh for his incredibly detailed review, it inspired me to echo some his sentiments and share my own. My dad just gave me a copy of this book after we got in an argument about global warming. I swear he sees me as the product of popular media brainwashing about the existence of global warming. Which is ironic, since I choose only the websites of scientific organizations and journals to sway my opinions on the topics, and those forums contain far far less skepticism than the popular media, so to say I've been swayed by the skeptic-friendly media is a bit backwards!
After skimming through the first couple chapters of this book, I couldn't bear to go any further. The chart of decreasing pollutants ("despite people not being environmentally conscious") was also one of my favourites (strangely missing one pollutant, CO2). The next hint I saw was his mention of Fred Singer. Actually I have to admit, I was watching out for his name while reading this book, as I had a feeling I'd be seeing it. Just yesterday I came upon him as one of the worst offenders on http://www.exxonsecrets.org/em.php, showing that he is or has been a member of 12 organizations which directly received funding from ExxonMobil totaling US$2.89 million in *known* contributions since 1998. Interesting bedfellows he keeps.
As far as I am concerned, Dr. McKitrick has little clout in debunking scientific claims, as he lives in the world of economics and he plays the corporate-funded skeptics game. His personal interests and backgrounds come from the basic premise that making money is good, and all other issues fall by the wayside (particularly ones that may threaten, even slightly, that first premise), an attitude that is ridiculously apparent everywhere in the book.
While I give lots of credit to Dr. Essex for the thorough analysis and presenting of the evidence in a new light, and discrediting some bits of evidence that do deserve to be discredited, I really have doubts that someone doing his job from an unbiased point of view, and with an unbiased co-author, would end up with the same result. The fact that he doesn't care about the environment (doesn't care about Earth Day, he says) and is a mathematician is supposed to bring credibility, but in the end, it just means he misses the bigger issues by looking at isolated bits at a time and trying to discredit them individually, out of their real context. One funny thing I also noted was several times in the book was the point "it's too complicated to understand and approximate by any linear functions". The way it is done however is to convince the reader they have no idea what the complexities are (and indeed he often just glazes over what they indeed are) and to say 'its too complicated for you to understand, so just accept my advanced analysis'.
Overall I found what I read of this book to be condescending and deceptive to the level of being offensive. If you believe without question things in this book, then it is you who is being the sucker, not the people who believe in global warming. As far as I am concerned the bias of this book plants it firmly in the group of other books and oft-publicized reports published by 'Doctors' (who aren't scientists) who get paid for their work by corporations who support the skeptics' point of view.
Scientists need to educate the public about the science. Let's let economists talk about the economics. Governments and their people should decide the rest. But let's not have economists talking about the science, it's a disgrace.
Hot or cold in more ways than one November 28, 2006
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
Interestingly, of the 11 reviews above, only one has other than 1 star or 5 stars. There's very little in between. Apparently, anthropogenic global warming is like liver-either you love it or you hate it. After 20 years of working in water quality and hydrological deterministic computer modeling, I am somewhat skeptical of the results of multi-decadal global circulation models-I agree with the authors that conclusions reached are built on a house of cards. That being said, it cannot be denied that Carbon Dioxide transmits short wave radiation, and blocks longwave radiation. Where the models come up short is in the way they parameterize other forcings and feedbacks. Positive forcings can be dialed up, and buffering forcings and feedbacks dialed down, and voila, you have a global crisis. The chaotic nature of the climate and the massive amounts and varied measurement techniques of climate data allow such cherry picking.
The cherry picking can occur on both sides-for example, on the slopes of Mt. Massive in Colorado, there sits a large snowfield, known locally as "Africa Bowl" because it is shaped like the African continent. Photographs taken in the summers of 1880, 1900 and 1930 all show an almost identical shape and extent of the snowfield. Conversely, 75 miles to the northeast, another snowfield, Arapahoe Glacier, has shrunk over 50 percent over the same time. I do not know why one would shrink, and the other would not-certainly average global temperature-warming, cooling or stable, would not allow this result. Perhaps it's more complicated than the Sierra Club or Essex and McKitric would have us believe.
To believe that the 5 billion people added to the planet's population over the last century have had no influence on the climate is ludicrous. But to believe climate forecasting, and specifically the influence of Carbon Dioxide on climate is understood, is equally ludicrous. I look forward to the time when popular science literature leaves the advocacy and polemics behind, and climate books are rated on the quality of the material, and not on the alignment of the political beliefs of the reviewer and author.
 Authors have tongue in cheek? Full fist in pocket? June 16, 2006
18 out of 38 found this review helpful
Review of Essex and McKitrick's Taken by Storm
Christopher Barrinton-Leigh
10 June 2006
1 Introduction
I have a background (PhD, postdoctoral research) in
upper atmospheric and space physics, and am currently a
PhD student in Economics. I am by no means a specialist
in climate research, but believe I have a pretty good
b.s. filter for both physical and economic arguments.
Recently I attended a workshop on Kyoto Protocol
politics and was highly struck by the fact that in
private conversations with both of the two other
economists in attendance, the issue of questioning the
science of climate change came up. Most of my friends
are scientists, and I hardly know any other "climate
change skeptics". One of these two fellow economists, a
professor I respect, suggested I look at Christopher
Essex and Ross McKitrick's Taken by Storm: The troubled
science, policy and politics of global warming [2002]
for a worthwhile perspective.
I did not get much beyond the 2nd chapter (other than
skimming) in this book because every page I read
compelled me to write to debunk the logic or
interpretation. I suspect that given developments since
this book was written, much of the thesis is
indefensible now. However, even when it was written,
this kind of selective picking of minutiae, exhaustive
construction of strawman after strawman, and simplistic
polarisation of facts and debates speaks simply of
ideology, not skepticism, even when it is ideology
against which it rails.
If it has a contribution to make in the ever-important
task of keeping the scientific process open to
self-criticism, then I congratulate the authors for that.
However, I believe the authors of IPCC reports and
concensus assessments are generally aware of the
sketchy nature of their enormous task, and that the
scientific process with all its warts is working in its
ideal aim. Maybe some of the extreme care and caution
with which scientists report to the press their results
on such major issues as climate change can be credited
to works such as this one.
Overall, the book comes across as a whiney rant from
someone whose ideas were published in top journals but
have not "won" the battle through the extensive
scientific debate. It opens with a superlatively and
openly glib demeanor which characterises some of
McKitrick's work elsewhere, as well as that of his
fellow "anti-science" profiteers such as S. Fred Singer
(on which more, later).
2 First two chapters
The book begins with a deconstruction of science on the
basis that things are very complex and that not all
descriptions of the world are based directly on some
unspecified level of theory which the authors call "fundamental"
. That they believe they have something to bring to
these topics is unfortunate. A good introduction to the
issues of symmetry breaking and multiple scales in
science could be found in the classic paper "More is
different" by (Nobel physicist) Phil Anderson in
Science (1972).
The authors absurdly conclude with the understatement "
There is no comprehensive scientific theory for climate!"
Essentially everything said about climate models here
could be said about daily weather forecasts. Yet it is
good policy to use competing weather models for
probabilistic predictions. Similarly, climate models
are calibrated and tested on recent history and
paleoclimate. By varying parameters or model choice,
modelers in both cases attempt to report confidence
bands as part of their predictions. The difficult
science evolves.
The authors suggest that "no engineer would sign off on
a model that was not tested". I find this an odd
analogy, and lacking in humility when coming from an
economist! Consider as a better analogy (and sharp
contrast with economists, who still have no Hippocratic
Oath) the behaviour of practitioners in medicine. What
matters is not that there be no doubt, but the measure
of a concept called risk. As an economist McKitrick is
intimitely familiar with the concept of risk but has
made it the overwhelming and remarkable omission in
this book (throughout, apparently!?).
After first admitting that scientists in modern culture
do in fact think independently, the authors go on to
liken them to a set of coupled mechanical oscillators
which all end up in phase. I have personal experience
in science with competing, strongly rivalrous
explanations of new phenomena. While it can be
frustrating being in the camp which knows it has the
data on its side and that its theory is likely to
prevail (while evolving) in the end and yet has to
spend time playing the battle fairly and patiently in
the mean time, it is the very knowledge that the system
works well enough to select the truth in the end that
makes the "frustration" an acceptable part of the game.
Indeed, the scientific community --- not just the press
--- loves irreverance, revolution, skepticism etc, even
while individual scientific communities naturally
develop inertia and myopia. Look at the history of
metal-catalyzed "cold fusion", for example. It was met
with excitement, support, and skepticism initially, and
on the long term suffered the rigours of the scientific process.
Indeed, some of the very journals which the authors
falsely (and disingenuously, since they have published
there) accuse of being closed to climate-skeptics are
precisely the ones to go to with counter-culture
theories. I once had a young colleague with fantastic
(crazy, misguided) ideas about some fundamental physics
concepts. The remarkable advice he received from my
mentors was "I think you should submit your ideas to Nature".
Taken by Storm goes on to discuss the "players" in its
strawman "Doctrine of Certainty". Here, a resentful, if
playful, language and set of irreverant acronyms that
characterize the authors' style comes across as petty
and again reminds me of the snide manner of S. Fred
Singer. Environmentalists are described as "private politicians"
while industry is not a lobby and is described as
entirely removed from the debate except that it
ostensibly tends to fund the environmentalists' side!
This is coming from a Senior Fellow of one of corporate
America's major mouthpieces in Canada, the Fraser Institute.
On page 28, the text shows some declining measures of
air pollutants (typically, such pollution is
economists' only concept of "environment") in the late
20th Century and it is posed as a mystery that
environmental awareness was growing in this time; this
mystery is supposedly solved by the existence of mass
hysteria. The authors claim that during this period the "
environment was getting better on its own". The authors
ought to know more about the possible directions of
causality than this. Environmental improvements through
legislation, and every piece of land conservation
throughout the last century, have occurred as a result
of hard work by people typically working without, and
against, the kind of corporate funding and support
which is available to the authors of this book.
Meanwhile, Earth increasingly appears to be in the
midst of the largest mass extinction event in the last
two hundred million years. Can it really be a sincere
belief that the rise of environmentalism, or the
reduction of certain gases and aerosol concentrations
in the USA are the result of independent
self-propagating phenomena? These authors boast in
their Preface that "We have no idea when Earth Day is,
nor do we care, as long as the malls stay open", which
suggests to me that scientific and economic claims made
in the book may be just so much more tongue in cheek.
The authors quote a cogent editorial from Nature which
rails against people just like Essex and McKitrick, "
many of whom are not even atmospheric scientists" who
have used "specious scientific findings" to muddy the
issues. Essex and McKitrick fear that Nature's even
carrying this kind of editorial deters real results
which don't "fit" with the main thrust of research.
Ironically, the comment in Nature is about efforts like
Essex and McKitrick's, not that of scientists with
contributions to make. Indeed, both sides of
conflicting data such as that of the ground and
satellite measurements debate of the late 1990's were
carried in top journals. When writing in a scientific
capacity, the authors themselves have published their
own "dissenting" interpretations in G.R.L., Nature, and
so on. Their ideas simply haven't held up.
Next, the book rails against the idea that 0.1 degree C
could be a significant or measurable deviation in ocean
temperature, based on the limited precision of a home
consumer thermometer. This appears to be an appeal to
the reader to now have better scientific knowledge than
the peer-reviewed primary literature.
The authors claim that all official bias has been
pro-warming, i.e. fueling and responding to a global
warming hysteria. This seems fantastic. The USA
government has led the world in dismissing and muddying
the science of climate change, and has harassed its own
scientists, replaced key advisors with non-scientists
with a counter-science and pro-status-quo view,
actively censored NASA scientists, changed the
conclusions of reports, etc, all in favour of a
Doctrine of Optimism.
The remaining text of the section continues with
hyperbole and polarisation in nearly every sentence.
There is no monolithic view anywhere in the scientific
community on climate. There is debate at all the levels
listed -- science, media, and public/political
discourse. The system is naturally imperfect in many of
the qualitative ways they describe, yet their claims
that it is completely broken, or collectively deluded
on climate change are not in the least bit convincing.
There is an alternate possibility. Science may be
working reasonably well, overall. The lack of
peer-reviewed articles in good --- no, any ---
specialist journals in recent years which could be said
to disagree with the cautiously-worded, inclusive, and
concensus-oriented conclusions of IPCC might, in fact,
be a success story for science. This remarkable
convergence of conclusions from countless different
scientists, methods, and instruments contrasts, of
course, with the even split of the "two sides" in the
media, and the distortions towards those two extremes
(not just one of them) in political discourse.
Let me make a quick comment on the authors' associate,
S. Fred Singer, a once highly respected magnetospheric
physicist who in his retirement has taken up the cause
of fighting tobacco regulations by refuting the health
effects of smoking, the cause of fighting the Montreal
Protocol by refuting the role of CFCs in destroying
stratospheric ozone, and the cause of promoting the
benefits of climate change, disputing the existence of
climate change, and denying the role of humanity in
contributing to possible climate change. Two or three
of these causes now appear ridiculous in retrospect,
and thankfully sense prevailed amongst the majority.
I have discussed Fred Singer's views on climate with
him on two occasions during his visits to Stanford.
This is a man who shares the odd, gleeful, almost
reckless, contemptuous language and attitude for
mainstream concensus on these scientific issues. While
claiming conspiracies of delusion and "doctrines of certainty"
, he quite openly believes that it is healthy to have
preconceived notions like he himself does that one way
or another we should not be taking costly measures
against climate change. On page 55 of Taken by Storm,
the authors describe Singer's message as focused on the
discrepancy between ground, air, and space temperature
measurements (there is no longer any discrepancy; the
scientific process and open debate has led to a strong
concensus). This is not correct. His message has
consistently (in my experience) been on all three
fronts mentioned above --- climate change is good for
us, it isn't happening, and if it did it would be
natural. This is an odd collection unless you are the
oil companies which have funded Singer's organisation.
That David Anderson declined to attend Singer's talk,
as described in this book, saved one busy person from
listening to what in my estimation is a decidedly
unscientific (unrepresentative) rant.
The book goes on to harp on things like the fact that
the popular notion of the "greenhouse effect" describes
the climate issue but not that of real greenhouses.
This is true, but the politics is not about
greenhouses. I only skimmed beyond Chapter 2, but saw
mostly just more hyped, playful language.
3 Conclusion
With Singer I always got the impression that he did not
care too much what people think of his views, maybe
because he knew that his reward for the work was coming
in another, more concrete form than scientific respect.
I detect a similar smugness and willingness to ignore
the big picture, or 90% of the details, in the authors
of Taken by Storm.
Real science can be troubling to some... November 7, 2005
10 out of 38 found this review helpful
Just a few of points on this book that should give one pause:
1. The case for a significant human influence on climate goes far beyond the "hockey stick". Still, McKitrick's claims have been thoroughly addressed by ACTUAL CLIMATOLOGISTS and those who closely follow their work. You can easily find rebuttals and analysis on the web, from Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Tim Lambert, and others. The hockey stick temperature reconstruction has also been independently verified.
2. Regarding the surface temperature record: Other data, including the satellite record (corrected for stratospheric bias), and recent oceanic research, confirm the warming trend, as do numerous observational studies.
3. Misleading arguments about water vapor are often made in "skeptic" circles, despite the fact that water vapor is included in climate studies - but as a feedback. Evaporation and precipitation cycle water vapor through the atmosphere about every 10 days on average, maintaining an overall balance at levels determined by temperature. In other words, water vapor can amplify a warming trend, but it's irrelevant as a forcing factor (excepting small anthropogenic amounts in the stratosphere). If humans were to pump a million tons of extra water vapor into the air tomorrow, most of it would precipitate out within a week and a half. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, can remain in the atmosphere for decades to centuries (determined by various processes), and have feedback effects far beyond that. Human CO2 output (the full influence of which is delayed by oceanic inertia) is exceeding natural absorption, and accumulating rapidly.
So one piece of advice when reading material like this: Look into the REST of the story before coming to the comfortable or convenient conclusion that we're having little impact on the future.
 objective, respectful, and humorous November 20, 2004
18 out of 23 found this review helpful
In my attemps to grasp the core issues around the science and politics of global warming I have stumbled upon a very enlightening book. The book covers a variety topics from the current connection between facts, science, politics, and policy, to the the concept of uncertainty in existing climate technology. It is not overly ambitious in the scientific concepts it presents to readers who are at least aware of the current global warming discussion, and it remains respectful to the field of climate science. Overall, a fun read and a reminder to the world of science that life is unpredictable, non-linear, and has infinite outcomes.
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