Taken By ...

Mobjective review:

Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming (2002) by Dr. Christopher Essex and Dr. Ross McKitrick lays out the case against bandwagon acceptance for unproven scientific claims, and in particular scientifically-based global warming predictions. In these populist tomes, to effectively portray a convincing counterclaim, your science has to objectively prove better than the opposition's.

Unfortunately, before they even consider the science, facts and figures seem to get in the way.

The most egregious example of limited fact checking is evidence that contaminant pollution has steadily decreased since 1970, even though they say "environmentalism achieved new prominence between 1986 and 1992". I consider this cherry-picking of facts to support an argument for a sort of wacky environmental self-recovery. Honestly, how can this ever of happened? After all, most of the pollution control initiatives started in the early 70's coinciding with Nixon's formation of the EPA and the advent of Earth Day observations.

The big give-away that their arguments would quickly turn south, was evident early on from the snide comment in the preface "We have no idea when Earth Day is".

answer: First Earth Day, April 26, 1970

Go to this paper that got me interested in this book.

(BTW, None of the figures have dimensions on the y-axes ... maddening)