Unmasking the Global Warming Belief System

Climatism: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic
By Steve Goreham
New Lenox Books, 2010, 480 pages
ISBN-13: 9780982499634

If you care about twenty-first century society, you must read Steve Goreham’s new book, Climatism. In my 55-year career as a scientist I have written more than 1,000 book reviews for various journals. No book has pleased me more than this one.

Unmasking a Dangerous System

After The Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in March 2009, Goreham decided to summarize, between the covers of a single book, everything everyone should know on this topic. In 390 pages of narrative, including 133 outstanding charts and illustrations plus 1,134 references from countless articles, he has succeeded.

Goreham has performed a service for the uncommitted citizen, which could one day lead to the unraveling of the new social order, religion, and political system Goreham calls climatism. While an ever-larger percentage of the public is beginning to recognize that man cannot and does not control the global climate, the public has no idea how thoroughly climatism has infiltrated the seats of world power.

Scientific Flaws

The first five chapters of the book are filled with persuasive science presented in such a readable manner that the average layman will easily grasp it. For instance, we often hear about the concepts of positive and negative climate feedback, but few people understand their importance. The author explains these concepts clearly and shows how the asserted positive feedbacks that cause most of the forecasted warming in alarmist computer models are not happening in the real world.

In a section titled “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” Goreham explains:

“Model simulation results are not experimental data. No matter how many different models get similar results, no matter how many times models are run, if the underlying physical basis of the assumptions [is] wrong, the models will give the wrong result. And the modelers have been finely tuning the wrong result for 30 years.”

Chapter six, “Global Warming Disasters Debunked,” is by itself worth the price of the book. Here the author provides the reader with objective evidence to counter the plethora of unsubstantiated global warming scares presented by climatists and their media allies.

IPCC Farce Exposed

Few people really understand the origin, purpose, and composition of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Goreham pulls off the difficult task of explaining it more vividly than a sports commentator explains a key play in the Super Bowl.

In short, IPCC is a political organization masquerading as a scientific body. As a political organization, it works to achieve political consensus, not scientific truth.

IPCC, Goreham explains, created a process to achieve a “science consensus” confirming manmade global warming by effectively using six techniques.

The first was to assemble a large group of scientists to agree on a consensus. The second was to select authors of critical chapters who are predisposed to support the manmade global warming dogma. The third was to provide these authors with authoritarian editorial power.

The fourth technique was to encourage lobbying groups to pressure for consensus. The fifth: writing the conclusions before the science was agreed. The sixth and final technique was selective choice of science to support the dogma and minimize natural explanations for climate change.

The process has been truly Machiavellian, but IPCC has largely gotten away with it and most of the world believes the garbage they publish.

Underlying Motives

In chapter eight Goreham defines climatism in all its ignominious awfulness: “Climatism opposes the free development of human society and seeks to substitute autocratic control from centralized government bureaucracy. It calls for the radical transformation of our way of life, regardless of cost. Climatism demands adherence from all nations.”

In chapter nine, Goreham presents a vest-pocket guide to dissuading your friends of the prevalent false beliefs about climate. This chapter is a must-read.

In part three of the book, encompassing chapters 12 through 17, Goreham offers the finest tutorial on the hopelessness of renewable energy “solutions.” He draws heavily from Howard Hayden’s wonderful book Solar Fraud, as well as many other sources, and his investigative reporting style presents all this information in a very understandable manner.

Goreham really gets to the nut of climatism insanity in chapter 17, where he asks, “When has mankind ever been able to stop the rise of the sea? When have we ever been able to control the weather at a single location on Earth? Yet, climatism now demands that we switch to renewable energy, forego economic growth and consumption, and accept thousands of regulations on energy use for our home, transportation, business and recreation. If we do so, then we’ll be able to command the tides and control the weather. Climatism is a belief system--not a science.”

House of Cards

Climatism is big business. It financially supports modeling scientists and their multimillion-dollar supercomputers, environmental editors at newspapers, entire university departments, environmental vice presidents at thousands of companies, and huge government bureaucracies of climate regulators, enforcers, and consultants.

We now have a great many people standing on a house of cards, but the more people who read this book and spread the truth it contains, the sooner this house of cards will come tumbling down.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.