Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming

The popular vision of an approaching apocalypse caused by global warming has no scientific foundation, says Patrick J. Michaels. Those who warn of a catastrophic greenhouse effect — such as former Vice President Al Gore — can justify neither their fears not their blueprints for dramatically interfering with the U.S. and world economies. Sound and Fury criticizes “science by sound and bite” and congressional show trials complete with testimony that has not been peer-reviewed according to scientific standards. Michaels shows that the slight warming over the last century has been far less than the prophets of the apocalypse would expect — throwing the reliability of their computer climate models into doubt — that most of it happened before industry’s massive carbon dioxide emissions began, and that most of the warming is at night, when it produces benign effects such as longer growing seasons. In other words, the warming that has resulted from natural climatic processes is beneficial.

Patrick J. Michaels is Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. He is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, winner of the American Library Association’s worldwide competition for public service writing, and an author of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year,” awarded by the Association of American Geographers. He is the author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.