The title screams “Red Hot Lies” and will indeed make some “see red”. While it initially made me a bit uncomfortable, it is fairly straightforward and compelling. Having been written about in this book with such an “inflammatory” title and style, I suppose now I’ll be branded as a “denier deluxe”.
Click image above for details on how to order a copy from Amazon at a discount price. If you order from this link above, I’ll get a small percentage from the sale.
I got my signed copy in the mail today from the author, Chris Horner. This is it on the black slate of my desk. You can find the details about my surfacestations project on page 267, along with photos. There’s a back story there as to why that is the only page with photographs. I refused to give permission for my chapter unless they used at least one of the photos I provided. At one point, there were no photos. My argument was “it’s what I do”.
Even after all that argument, I had to chuckle though, because the way Horner signed it was quite the surprise. I never really looked at myself that way, I started down this road because I was curious about paint, and then one thing led to another…and well here I am.
The book also has a good compendium of what has occurred not only on the blogosphere, but also in the government, news media, and with the individual players like Hansen and Gore in the last few years. It also has entries from sometimes moderator and regular contributor here, John Goetz as well as many other familiar names that have inspired questions.
After reading the first chapter I thought I should pass on this note to readers who practice the “dark art” of questioning the veracity of the AGW science and the IPCC: shred your trash, then douse it liberally with butyl seleno-mercaptan (C4H9SeH).
Here are the details on the book from Amazon:
Product Description
From the author of the New York Times bestselling Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) comes Red Hot Lies, an exposé of the hypocrisy, deceit, and outright lies of the global warming alarmists and the compliant media that support them. Did you know that most scientists are global warming skeptics? Or that environmental alarmists have knowingly promoted false and exaggerated data on global warming? Or that in the Left’s efforts to suppress free speech (and scientific research), they have compared global warming dissent with “treason”? Shocking, frank, and illuminating, Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies explodes as many myths as Al Gore promotes.
From the Inside Flap
Liars–Al Gore, the United Nations, the New York Times. The global warming lobby, relentless in its push for bigger government, more spending, and more regulation, will use any means necessary to scare you out of your wits–as well as your tax dollars and your liberties–with threats of rising oceans, deadly droughts, and unspeakable future consequences of “climate change.” In pursuing their anti-energy, anti-capitalist, and pro-government agenda, the global warming alarmists–and unscrupulous scientists who see this scare as their gravy train to federal grants and foundation money–resort to dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and outright lies, abandoning scientific standards, journalistic integrity, and the old-fashioned notions of free speech and open debate. In Red Hot Lies, bestselling author Christopher Horner–himself the target of Greenpeace dirty tricks and alarmist smears–exposes the dark underbelly of the environmental movement. Power-hungry politicians blacklist scientists who reject global warming alarmism. U.S. senators threaten companies that fund climate change dissenters. Mainstream media outlets openly reject the notion of “balance.” The occasional unguarded scientist candidly admits the need to twist the facts to paint an uglier picture in order to keep the faucet of government money flowing. In the name of “saving the planet,” anything goes. But why the nasty tactics? Why the cover ups, lies, and intimidation? Because Al Gore and his ilk want to use big government at the local, state, federal, and global level to run your life, and they can brook no opposition. But the actual facts, as Red Hot Lies makes clear, aren’t nearly as scary as their fiction.
Pamela Gray (19:57:12) :
“I doubt this book, with its title and flaps, will be used in serious circles to provide a balanced view of climate change when potential policies and programs are being discussed.”
That’s just it, getting the real science out is difficult.
Most folks, who just accept what they hear in the media, are interested in the alternate view but don’t care enough to chase it up, to understand the science behind the skepticism. So after a while the white wash of the AGW viewpoint washes over them again, perhaps with some debunking of ‘skeptic myths’. Doubts that crept in are probably smothered.
Those who care more are wary of the skeptical viewpoint. They usually know some of the counter-arguments, and even if polite enough to debate the issues, they are easily made to ‘see red’. It is hard to get the balance right. A drip feed (regular, moderate, good science) approach eventually works, but at the risk of becoming a ‘climate bore’. I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to reading an extreme version of my own viewpoint being rammed down my throat. I should read this book though before being accused of passing judgement..
Well I think I can beat your Butyl Seleno Mercaptan; if it takes parts per million to smell. You have to remember that Nitrogen Trifluoride, the latest Devil gas in the GHG lexicon, is present in the atmosphere at exactly 0.454 parts per trillion, and I can assure you you can’t smell it. In fact air that is polluted with Nitrogen Trifluoride, is 200,000 times more pure that the high purity (seven nines) Arsenic and Gallium that are common in the LED industry. Arsenic incidently smells like Garlic, so the farmer who contracted to farm the open ground around the HP plant where I started working in 1988, was allowed to grow any sort of row crops that he wanted to (that were legal) but never Garlic; it could be an Arsine leak in the plant.
But my candidate for the worst smelling muck in the periodic table or chemistry book, is Di-Ethyl Telluride, which is used in ppm dilutions in Hydrogen carrier gas to dope Gallium Arsenide and other LED semiconductor crystals.
It is actually a sweetish smell that will have you retching in seconds after detection; any amount you can smell a all will have you glowing green from ear to ear.
It gives rise to the expression; Tellurium Breath, which apparently plagued mine workers digging the stuff out of the Ground.
So if you do go to Telluride for some art or music or film festival stay the hell out of any of the old mines; it ain’t pleasant, and I believe I got zapped about three times in the 1970s.
But congrats on the book mention there Anthony; any time one can be mentioned in dispatches; on either side of the ledger is a good thing; there’s no such thing as bad publicity, when you need to expand your audience.
Good show there Mate!
“”Many of us are weary from having seen so many Red – Blue state-by-state maps during this election cycle. Here’s a rather intersting Red – Blue county-by-county map that displays the distribution of the popular vote results from Tueday:
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/11/06/popular_vote_pop/
The rural vs urban distribution of the popular vote is quite apparent, except in New England, and affords a different perspective than a state-by state map of the popular vote. Doesn’t look even remotely like the County by County Map I saw yesterday; but that wassn’t in the Boston Globe.
California is a whole lot more red, than shown in that map of yours. And just how do you judge rural from urban on that map; do you have all the cities memorized as to where they are in what county.
Really funny thing in California, was that the big Obama get out the vote in California worked a whole lot better than expected, since conservatives simply didn’t bother going to the polls; with essentially no Candidates in play anywhere in the State. But the big black and Latino turnout for Obama (how plain racist can you get) also happened to turn out millions of blacks and Latinos, who are traditional family folks, and who are simply getting tired of telling California Government the obvious; that it takes one man and one women to form a marriage; presumably no closer related than first cousins; and if you want to get married but also practice a gay or Lesbian lifestyle or hermaphrodite or whatever; so long as that’s ok with your spouse, you can.
But Pamela, you mystify me; how does one become left leaning while still believing in self reliance, and limited government; or is your idea of limited gvernment mean limited to control by left leaning liberals, since presumably conservatives; whoever they are, do not consider themsleves to be left leaning.
It is strange, that 85% of Silicon Valley contributions to Presidential Candidates, evidently went to Obama Supporters; but todays’ new Si-valley turks are the flower children of the 60s; who made a few bucks in the dot com boom-bust, and are now seeking taxpayer public trough running water to fund the next boom bust cycle which is solar Voltaic energy. Like every latest craze, they will have their hand out for subsidy money for their research, and then subsidised sales to would be customers (who would be would be not customers, sans subsidies); and then when they are all making taxpayer subsidized solar cells by the hectare, will discover that it is taking more fossil fuel energy to make them, than they recover from the sun (to the grid), during their mean time to failure. about then will come the bust when the subsidies get turned off as happens with all boondoggles.
Solar energy is renewable; just not sustainable; and bio solar is worse by far that PhotoVoltaic solar in energy conversion efficiency.
Well nobody ever said si valley wasn’t just as full of snake oil scoundrels as any other environment.
Dear George, thank you. Mystifying someone means they see me for what I am instead of through pre-conceived ideas based on what my voter registration card says and the government job I hold.
Nonetheless, I will try to clear it up a bit. I am a Democratic Libertarian who believes in the spirit of our Republic charter minus the gender bias (which is not rule based on majority but rule based on individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). I am closer to the liberal views of the current Democratic party planks than the conservative quasi-religious views of the current Republican party planks. That is why I remain a Democrat. The Republican party seeks too often to restrict personal liberty based on a rather arbitrary definition of who is inside and who is outside their definition of who gets rights (or equal opportunity to pursue the above) and who do not.
Living in rural NE Oregon, many of us have rather fuzzy lines of demarcation about what we believe is good government and bad government. I know of deeply conservative folks who couldn’t care less whether or not gays or lesbians decide to marry. Those are private matters and we don’t busy our nose into other people’s business. I also know of deeply conservative folks who believe that abortion should be available and legal. On the other side, I know of Democrats who are very religious in that they are religiously compelled to love, and seek peace and justice for all, but that are against all abortion, and marriage other than between a man and a woman. I guess being mystified by these rural political incongruencies are not uncommon.
Had I been around during Lincoln’s time, I would have been a Republican.
I knew that. #B^1
(But then, it takes one to know one.)
The only significant difference is that I think GOP represents those liberal views far, far better than the current Democratic party.
Move along folks, nothing to see here!
What just happened here. I go to sleep in England and I wake up to find everyone spilling out their deepest political thoughts. There are too many skeletons rattling here and I suggest they are thrust back into their cupboards forthwith, the doors locked shut and the keys swallowed.
Good grief, you are all chattering like teenagers who think it’s cool to expose their unwashed, fake Calvin Klein skeggies whilst walking about, looking as if “dire rear” is the latest fragrance. Have you chaps no shame?
As for that naughty Pamela! Oh la la!
We need Smilies, so that my humour is not misjudged as a caustic diatribe.
Perry
Had I been around in Lincoln’s time, I would have invented the Libertarian party. 😉
With the collapse of the Whig party, they all became Republicans. Lincoln destroyed the Compact between the States, created ‘Executive Orders’ and in an attempt to save the Union, let what it stood for die on the battlefield. Federalism, as we know it, can be said to have been born under Lincoln.
Granted, the compact was deeply flawed from Day One and the Founder’s knew it at the time, but as the Articles of the Confederation weren’t working, accepting the Compromise on Slavery was at the time the only way to save these States united.
Every 70 or so years, the POTUS dramatically alters the nature of the compact. Lincoln in 1860s was the first. FDR in 1930s was the second and in 2000s, will history blame the great change on Bush or Obama? A few years ago, I first thought it might be Bush with the PATRIOT act, but I am not so sure anymore.
We live in interesting times, yes indeed.
G Alston
While it might be easy to see from your point of view that right-wingers are more skeptical, from a left-wing perspective they’d rather you were more skeptical about such things as faked evidence of WMD’s. If you bother to look for things that spoil your utopian, free-market, bottom-up version of the world then you can find them quite easily.
The World bank and the IMF tried to enforce the Washington consensus in country after country and they finally had to admit that it failed miserably in every one, especially their flagship country of Argentina. They even admitted in official reports that the latin economies had been growing a lot faster before the World bank’s free-market meddling. Their method of imposing free-markets was ironically a statist set of rules that governments had to comply with to the letter otherwise they’d lose cash. Of course by it’s very inflexibility it failed in exactly the same way as Stalin’s five year plans failed; by ignoring human nature and ignoring critical feedback. When things go wrong all the idealogues just keep chanting “it’s because the medicine isn’t strong enough” or “they’re not doing what we tell them”. This trust-the-theory and damn-the-data approach is of course exactly what Milton Friedman had preached.
The sad truth is that when you have a system of no controls then criminals both from the bottom-up, ie mafias, and top-down, ie monopolistic Enron-types, tend to take control. So capitalism, like it or not, needs to be regulated. And the USA and Europe merely imposes an ideological non-statist system on other nations via the World bank and the IMF despite not having ever tried it themselves.
Indeed America didn’t become dominant through a lack of regulation. That’s a huge myth. America has always been highly regulated. California and New York are indeed the most highly regulated and yet are usually the most successful. It’s greatest prosperity even actually came about under very rigid state control by FDR. And this was shortly after a relaxation of the regulation of credit had caused the depression. It’s not that simple of course but then nothing is ever as simple as people would like to believe. Mostly we only know what works by seeing what worked and it’s very often not what the theory predicted. While things are going well the incumbent party says “it’s due to our policies” while the opposition says “it’s due to the legacy we left you”. And then when things turn sour the incumbent says “it wasn’t us, it was the previous administration’s stupid policies” while the opposition says “you ruined our legacy”.
On your other idea that all good things have come from innovative right-wing ideology – well I’m afraid not. Most innovation springs from state-funded, left-wing dominated academia. It is fair to state that right-wing dominated businessmen then see those ideas and fund them but the academics have to bring the ideas to the attention of the businessmen in the first place. Hence, whether you like it or not, we all need each other.
There is a reason that the adversarial system dominates democracy and that is because while both sides are sometimes right – they are also often very wrong and when that happens we hope that the other side acts as a check and balance to such flawed ideology. The idea of preventing domination by ideologues was in fact the intention of the founding fathers of USA when they set up the separation-of-power system. It might be annoying to some but they were right.
The primary reason why I am not a member of the Libertarian party is that when someone else’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is impinged upon by another group, the Libertarian (or at least I think that is the way it goes) says “live and let live”, or this: “The persons affected should be the ones to protest, not me.” I am very ready and willing to fight for my neighbor’s right to, for example, marry whomever he/she wishes, simply because that is a governmental right given to some but apparently not to others. I think that is wrong and decidedly against the fundamental spirit of the Constitution that knits our Union together. Our form of federal government is Republic, not Democratic. And if states want to belong to that Union under that constitution, I don’t think they should be allowed to add discriminatory pieces to their own constitution. That is why I would have been a Republican in Lincoln’s time. If you take rights away from one group, or even one individual, who will be next?
“they’d rather you were more skeptical about such things as faked evidence of WMD’s”
On Jan. 24 2003 the Israelis reported that Russian engineers were transporting chemical weapons to Syria. Within a year Jordan arrested in or near Amman idigenous terrorists with 20 tons of chemical weaponry.
Early on following Iraqi surrender, 500 55gal. drums of cyclosarin were found buried near an military airbase. This was labeled insecticide by the ‘media’.
To date the left still disparages the plastic turkey Bush was photographed with at Thanksgiving in Iraq.
Our problem is on the left, with its truculent media and government apparatchiks. Lie long enough and loud enough and eventually the fools either believe you or back down.
I hate “is” and “are”. Such a nitpicky grammar rule when I am typing fast.
jamesg
i hate to tell you this but the prosperity that came after FDR was due mostly to world war 2 not government imposed regulations
Mike M. (14:40:05) :
Yes, I’ve found this spot to occasionally roost. It’s nice to hear from another of the “old crowd.” Keep fighting the good fight. 🙂
On a related topic
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=940841
Maybe an argument for the use of strategic nuclear devices?
JamesG (03:09:32) :
There is a reason that the adversarial system dominates democracy and that is because while both sides are sometimes right – they are also often very wrong and when that happens we hope that the other side acts as a check and balance to such flawed ideology.
With the current legislative domination, I sit in gloomy despondency earnestly hoping “we the people” will, without delay, be capable of “checking and balancing” the “flawed ideology” of income redistribution and cap and trade.
Pamela, even agricultural producers will be subject to fees.
To wit: http://www.nacdnet.org
NACD’s policy on climate change, adopted at the July 2008 Board Meeting, is fully consistent with the statement adopted at the consultation. Conservation districts could potentially be involved in a “carbon credit” system in a variety of ways. One aspect could be to act as an “aggregator,” where credits from individual farmers are collected and brokered. Aggregators typically receive a fee or commission for their work. Another opportunity is for districts would be [sic] to act as “verifiers,” to verify that the proper conservation practices were applied.
“Verify” should be a very scary word to a government employee. Will I be required to join the civilian army and carry a weapon to improve verification.
i hate to tell you this but the prosperity that came after FDR was due mostly to world war 2 not government imposed regulations
I hate to break it to ya, but it’s worse even than that. Life during WWII was as sparse as during the depression. Unemployment was taken care of, but since the GNP was being poured into the military, actual standard of living was terrible. In the ’30s you couldn’t afford it. During WWII, you couldn’t find it. And if you could it was either rationed or illegal.
Morale, however was great! It’s one thing to be deprived. It’s quite another to sacrifice heroically for the genuine good of all (but consume as few calories as when “deprived”). A depression is so, well, depressing. But a World War it to die for.
And, of course, when the war ended, there was a terrific recession and we were dropped back to 1940 standard of living anyway. It wasn’t until after 1947 that we started genuinely to recover from the great depression. The GI Bill was a big leg up, which goes to show that not ALL big gummint is necessarily a Bad thing. If Ike had gotten the taxes down below a 90% marginal rate, he might have been as successful as Kennedy or Reagan. Alas . . .
Pamela,
It appears that the only kind of liberty and rights you care about involve gay marriage.
Some people care about the rights of a child to life. Some care about the rights of an individual in his property or its use. Some people care about the choices parents have in educating their children. Some people care about the millions of Third World poor who die because they have no right to spray for malaria control. Some people object to the persecution of the Boy Scouts. Some people worry about those on the bottom of the economic ladder who are cut off when the minimum wage is raised and they can’t find a first job. Some people are concerned that colleges all across the country have stifling “speech codes” which enforce rigid ideological adherence. All of these people find a home in the Republican Party. Because the enemy of all the rights involved in those concerns reside in the Democratic Party.
And whoever it was above who said that America’s greatest prosperity came under FDR’s very rigid state control desperately needs a history lesson. FDR extended the depression for many years with his policies.
Confirming Clark and Jones:
http://tinyurl.com/44ysum
Lend-Lease got the engine started but things remained bleak during the war. Paper says depression lasted more than 15 years and anti-competitive regulation prolonged it 7 years.
Someone try to find the repealed/rolled back regulation of Financial Markets leading to the bailout. More lies.
stan (11:47:16) :
You omitted the most devastating act of the FDR regime, that of planting the seed for a welfare state.
The industry created by the war effort elevated the US economy from the Great Depression.
Hey, Red Hot Lies is on Hannity! Grab yer channel switcher and tune in to Hate Cable, quick-like!