Thanks for your kind comments. The full book is out in the spring, and you can see it here on Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0857083104 – it’s also listed on other European Amazon sites and will be on North American Amazon sites soon too. The book will also be available in all good booksellers.

The writer uses climate change as a typical example for his argument, but quickly slips into an opinionated view that global warming is an un-arguable fact. In the 1970′s, the similarly accepted “fact”, by the media at least, was “global cooling” and the “new ice age”. Whatever happened to that theory? Actually there are theorists who expound that idea today, perhaps invigorated by the fact that since 2000 average global temperatures have reduced, not increased. It all depends on where the datum point for analysis begins and ends, and the widely used datum period from 1850 fits the global warming theory very well, but geological evidence of climate changes over millions of years show a regularly changing cycle of climate swings, the latest of which shows our current position as being in the lower quartile of a cycle.

It could be argued that the simplistic view that mankind’s use of fossil fuels is the root cause of rising global temperatures, as data extrapolated from selective periods and forecast by computer models can show, takes little or no account of wholly uncontrollable and largely unpredictable natural phenomenon such as solar cycles, volcanoes and ocean currents, among others. As mankind has yet to fully understand how these affect our planet, it’s hardly surprising that they can’t be properly integrated into forecast models. The long term climate cycle is not understood and those who inconveniently ask how these variables are fitted into the equations are usually dubbed “global warming denyers”, when in reality they are simply asking researchers to provide the basis for their forecasts and questioning their science.

Some questions arise as to the the basis of the writer’s statement “95% of scientists skilled in the study of climate agree that the world is heating up”, which the writer confidently pronounces as a “fact”. Who carried out this study, where is the supporting evidence and who qualifies a scientist as being skilled in climate change are just a few simple questions that spring to mind? The writer’s statement is a very tidy example of people thinking they have more knowledge on a subject than they actually possess. Perhaps Dunning-Kruger has a point after all.