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The Real Global Warming Disaster is a 2009 book by Christopher Booker that examines, from the point of view of a climate change skepticism the subject of man made global warming. In the book Booker charts chronologically the history of how scientists came to believe that global warming as a result of carbon dioxide (CO
₂) emissions had brought the Earth to what he calls the brink of catastrophe; he interweaves the science of the subject with that of its political consequences to show that, as governments become poised to make radical changes in energy policies, the scientific evidence for global warming is also, in his opinion, becoming increasingly challenged. Booker questions whether global warming is in fact supported by a consensus of the world's top climate scientists, and consistently criticises how the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presents evidence and data, citing in particular its reliance on potentially inaccurate global climate models to make future temperature projections.

The book was described in The Guardian as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual". Before publication, Booker gave a synopsis of the book, both in one of his columns in The Daily Telegraph and in The Daily Mail.

Synopsis

The book is divided into three parts.

Part One: Forging the 'Consensus': 1972—1997

Chapter 1: How it all began Cooling and warming: 1972—1987. In this chapter Booker asserts that in the early 1970s a group of American scientists feared that the earth was in the grip of global cooling and began warning of the imminent threat of a new ice age. He also presents a graph depicting average global temperatures over the past 11,000 years, and describes how temperatures over the last 1,000 years have consistently fluctuated and how, when they again began to rise in the 1970s some scientists, such as Paul Ehrlich, began to postulate that the earth, as a result of the greenhouse effect, was heating up—with potentially disastrous consequences. Figures such as the environmental activist Maurice Strong and scientist Bert Bolin are then introduced, who would "play a crucial role in what lay ahead" in influencing governmental policy and helping form the scientific basis for global warming.

Chapter 2: The Road to Rio Enter the IPCC and Dr Hansen 1988—1992. In this chapter Booker identifies the key year of 1988 which saw the setting up of the IPCC and how "on all sides 'global warming' became the cause of the moment". Booker asserts that this was largely in part to an appearance by James Hansen at the Senate Committee of Natural Resources in Washington. Hansen, using graphs and information from computer climate simulations, declared that he was "99 percent certain" that man's contribution to the greenhouse effect was the cause of global warming. In 1990, the IPCC published its first assessment report, which made projections of future temperature rises. The chapter closes with an account of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit "organised by Maurice Strong" (Maurice Strong was the Conference Secretary-General; the organisers were the UNCED secretariat ), where "politicians from 154 countries queued up to sign a 'UN Framework Convention on Climate Change'" that would "commit all the signatory governments to a voluntary reduction of greenhouse gas emissions".

Chapter 3: The Road to Kyoto Enter Vice-President Gore and IPCC 2. In this chapter the author examines the increasing involvement in the global warming debate of the politician Al Gore, and the publication of the second IPCC report in 1995, which claimed that the "body of statistical evidence now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate". IPCC 2 came in for particular criticism from the scientist Frederick Seitz, who alleged that "more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report – the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate – were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question has accepted the supposedly final text". The chapter ends with an account of the signing of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the setting of new targets of reduced CO
₂ emissions.

Part Two: The 'consensus' carries all before it: 1998—2007

Chapter 4: The 'Hottest Year Ever' Enter the 'Hockey Stick' and IPCC 3: 1998—2007.

This chapter begins by describing how the medieval warm period "contradicted the idea that late twentieth century temperatures had suddenly shot up to a level never known before in history". Booker alleges that this problem was dealt with by a 1998 graph by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, which depicted temperatures "suddenly shooting up in the twentieth century to a level that was quite unprecedented. Familiar features such as the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age simply vanished". The graph would come to be known as the controversial "hockey stick", and Booker writes that it became the "supreme iconic image for all those engaged in the battle to save the world from global warming". He then asserts that the IPCC's methods, and in particular the draft summary of its next report, came in for serious criticism from scientists such as Richard Lindzen and Stephen Schneider.

Chapter 5: The Political Temperature Rises 'A far greater threat than terrorism': 2004—5. This chapter begins with an account of how the majority of scientific establishments and periodicals had accepted by this time the fact of global warming. In Science magazine, Sir David King, chief scientific advisor to the British Government, published an article claiming that climate change represented "a far greater threat than international terrorism". King subsequently attended and was rebuffed at a a seminar on climate change in Moscow in July 2004 attended by Dr Nils-Axel Mörner and Paul Reiter and a group of Russian scientists who were skeptical of man made global warming and the IPCC's methods of presenting data. In this chapter, Booker also draws attention to what he sees as the inefficiency of wind power (a form of renewable energy that might provide a viable, CO
₂ free energy alternative), claiming that the 1,200 wind turbines built in the UK as of 2005 were providing less than half the energy of a 1,200MW coal-fired or nuclear power station. The chapter also outlines how in 2005 the IPCC came under the scrutiny of The House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.

Chapter 6: Hysteria Reaches its Height Gore and the EU unite to save the planet: 2006—2007. This chapter describes Al Gore's Oscar winning film An Inconvenient Truth and the subsequent questioning of many of the assertions in the film, including retreating glaciers, drowning polar bears, use of the Hockey Stick graph, the melting of the ice caps and snows of Kilimanjaro and rising sea levels. The controversy included in a court action in the UK. The chapter then goes on to examine the findings of the 712 page Tony Blair commissioned Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and the EU's setting a target in 2007 of 20% reduced CO
₂ emissions by 2020.

Part Three: The 'consensus' begins to crumble: 2007—2009

Chapter 7: The Temperature Drops IPCC 4, The modellers lose the plot: 2007. This chapter opens with the launch of the IPCC's fourth assessment report in Paris in 2007, described by the then British Environment Secretary as "the final nail in the coffin of the climate change deniers". This is followed by an assertion that the earth had in fact begun to cool, and how this may be have been as a result of solar variation; however, the results of research into this theory by the scientists Knud Lassen, Eigil Friis-Christensen and Henrik Svensmark was dismissed by the IPCC's Bert Bolin as "scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible". The theory was further expounded in the 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle who adduced other evidence to cast doubt on CO
₂ induced warming, and, most crucially, that CO
₂ levels rise in the atmosphere only after the earth heats up. The chapter ends with details of a report published at the end of 2007 by the US Senator James Inhofe, which claimed to list 400 scientists from all over the world "now prepared to express their dissent, sometimes in the strongest terms, from the IPCC's 'consensus' view of global warming".

Chapter 8: A Tale of Two Planets Fiction versus truth: 2008. In this chapter Booker claims further decreases in world temperatures, unusually cold winters, and how the "story thus enfolding in 2008 was of how the two sides to global warming debate seemed more than ever before to be speaking from two different planets". Booker refers to these two sides as the 'consensus' and the 'counter-consensus'. He also describes how in June 2007 the International Energy Agency announced that the cost of halving CO
₂ emissions by 2050 (the US and UK governments were intending 80% cuts) would be US$ 45 trillion – equivalent to "two thirds of the world's entire current annual economic output".

Chapter 9: Countdown to Copenhagen Colliding with reality: 2009. In the final chapter, Booker describes the situation in the run up to the climate conference at Copenhagen: President Obama's taking the issue of climate change very seriously; the emergence of bloggers skeptical of climate change such Stephen McIntyre placing IPCC data under close scrutiny; the BBC reporting that "the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed"; the failure of the Caitlin Atlantic Survey to establish that ice at the North Pole was diminishing; a conference organised by the Heartland Institute entitled "Global warming: is it really a crisis"; the reluctance of BRIC countries to reduce their CO
₂ emissions frustrating efforts before the Copenhagen conference; and the increasingly astronomic forecast cost to Western economies of decarbonising their economies.

Booker summarises and recaps the book's contents in an epilogue, entitled Saving the planet from whom?, in which he concludes: "it begins to look very possible that the nightmare vision of our planet being doomed" may be imaginary, and that, if so, "it will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive, and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made".

Reception

The book received a mixed reception in the press. The Spectator identified it as one of the best books to take a skeptical stance on the subject of global warming, and that Booker "narrates this story with the journalist's pace and eye for telling detail and the historian's forensic thoroughness which have made him a formidable opponent of humbug". The Mail on Sunday wrote that "anyone seriously interested in this subject owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book" and praised Booker for producing what it saw as a "courageous" piece of work.

Writing in The Scotsman, Sir John Lister-Kaye chose The Real Global Warming Disaster as one of his books of 2009, writing that, "though barely credible in places" it was an "important, brave book making and explaining many valid points".

The Guardian's review of the book was very critical, and, though expressing admiration at the "skill and energy with which Booker has assembled his polemic", dismissed the central claims made by the author in the book as false.

The Times criticised the book for ignoring entirely the issue of the acidification of the oceans, a subsidiary effect of CO
₂ emissions.

See also

James Delingpole's review of the book in The Spectator

References

1. The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker
2. The real climate change catastrophe
3. The devastating book which debunks climate change
4. Booker, Christopher. The Real Global Warming Disaster. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009, page 21
5. ibid, page 32
6. ibid, page 38
7. ibid, page 41
8. ibid, page 53
9. ibid
10. ibid, page 63
11. ibid, page 65
12. ibid, page 80
13. ibid, page 83
14. ibid, page 84
15. ibid, page 88
16. ibid, page 111
17. ibid, page 115
18. ibid, page 121
19. ibid, pages 144-150
20. ibid, page 159
21. ibid, page 175
22. ibid, page 180
23. ibid, page 183
24. ibid, page 208
25. ibid, page 226
26. ibid, page 255
27. ibid, page 233
28. ibid, page 270
29. ibid, page 279
30. ibid, page 342
31. A wild goose chase
32. The inconvenient truths Mr Gore and his fanatical friends DIDN'T tell you about climate change
33. Books of the year: Writers' choice The Scotsman 2009
34. The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker
35. If climate change doesn’t grab you, meet its evil twin

Further reading

• Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth 2007 book by Christopher Booker and Richard North. ISBN 0826486142

• The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud - and Those Who are Too Fearful to Do So 2008 book by Lawrence Solomon

• 2009 books
• Environmental non-fiction books
• Environmental skepticism
• Climate change books