Here’s Here are some reviews:
Blooming brilliant. Devastating” – Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“…shines a hard light on the rotten heart of the IPCC” – Richard Tol, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change and convening lead author of the IPCC
“…you need to read this book. Its implications are far-reaching and the need to begin acting on them is urgent.” – Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Donna writes on her blog:
Two editions of my IPCC exposé are now available.
The Kindle e-book is here – at Amazon.com for the reasonable price of $4.99 USD.
UK readers may purchase it for £4.88 from Amazon.co.uk here.
German readers can buy it from Amazon.de for EUR 4,88.
French readers may buy it at the same price here at Amazon.fr.
If you don’t own a Kindle you can read this book on your iPad or Mac via Amazon’s free Kindle Cloud Reader – or on your desktop or laptop via Kindle for PC software.
Digital option #2 is a PDF – also priced at $4.99. Formatted to save paper, it’s 123 standard, printer-sized pages (the last 20 of which are footnotes). Delivered instantly, it avoids shipping costs and is a comfortable, pleasant read.
A 250-page paperback edition priced at $20 should be available by the end of next week from Amazon.com – which ships internationally.
Amazon has posted a sample of the book that extends well into Chapter 7. Click here to take a peek.
h/t to Bishop Hill
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I just one-clicked the Kindle version and am looking forward with great anticipation digging into it tonight or tomorrow.
As for the Y2K sub-plot here, as a professional software developer and data wrangler for about 40 years now, I see both sides are more-or-less correct. Yes, the consequences were hyped and overblown. And Yes, there would have been quite unpleasant and extremely expensive consequences had not very large efforts been undertaken to check for and correct bad software before the 1 changed to that pesky 2. Unfortunately for me, the lion’s share of the software I’ve been personally involved in creating has been in SAS which, thanks to excellent foresight, handles dates intelligently and won’t run into difficulties until the year 9,007,199,254,740,939. Some of my colleagues – especially COBOL-literate programmers – made out quite nicely doing contract work during the late 90s, but I missed out on the Big Buck$ digging into all that old code.
Philip Bradley:
Do read this: http://qii2.info/y2k.pdf. Do you have any examples of no serious problems occurring where no Y2K was done where it mattered: i.e. on big “legacy” systems employed in large (e.g. financial) organisations? There may have been some (where two-digit dates had not be used) – but they were few.
PCs, small business systems etc. were not a concern.
I read the taster – very readable, so have just downloaded the Kindle version. I’ll probably devour it this weekend. Thanks, Donna! 🙂
Jeff Alberts says:Rude in what way? It seems to be ok when the mods do it. And if you think this kind of error is occasional, you haven’t been paying attention.
Jeff – please take it from me, correcting someone’s speech is just rude. Doing it in public is doubly rude. And doing it as if talking to an exasperating child (“*sigh*”) is triply rude. And it’s all made even ruder still if you are there as a guest of the person whose speech you are correcting.
It’s like accepting an invitation to dinner from someone and then, in front of the other guests, correcting their table manners.
My suggestion is to relax and live with these little things. But if a minor grammatical error really bothers you, you can always bring it to their attention offline – no need to rub their nose in it in public. It’s a great credit to Anthony and the mods how they react graciously to comments such as yours.
@ur momisugly Martin A (2011/10/15 at 1:46 am) & Jeff Alberts – re Rude in what way?
Martin – I agree.
Jeff – Anthony and the moderators are very grateful to people who point out specific errors – so that they can be corrected easily. Blog posts are often written during the day at WUWT while Anthony is juggling running his company – errors happen in haste to all of us and not just due to to ignorance of grammar (if that was your intended criticism). I find to my horror that I sometimes write the wrong article or spelling of a homonym when I am in a hurry.
Your manner in pointing out the error reflects more badly on you than the person you are criticising.
Thank you Donna – I’m up to page 50 and lovin it!!
@jaymam
“There is some Javascript problem, and yes I do have Java enabled.”
Javascript != Java
Interesting how Y2K seems to have hijacked this thread. I have read Donna’s book and thought it was about how Greenpeace, the WWF, and a few other zealots (and con artists) have dominated the AGW issue. AGW would appear to be a combination of massive scam and widespread naive eagerness to join together to save the world.
In the meantime what terrible harm has been done by diverting money to the scam? How many people have suffered, perhaps died, because we have had our focus diverted from more real and immediate problems?
So far I have just bought the Kindle version of her book. I look forward to buying a dozen or more when the paper version is available on Amazon and giving them to my more naive friends.
In the end (assuming there is an end) I believe that Steve McIntyre, Dr. McKitrick, Drs. Roger Pielke (Senior and Junior), Anthony Watts, and now Donna Laframboise will be shown to be the heros in the sordid episode. There are many others that have fought the good fight and I apologize that I have neglected them in this early morning post.
Interlude…..
More than half way through Donna L’s expose
[snip – video irrelevant ~jove, mod]
I just finished the book on my Kindle. It’s very well written and well-armored against counterthrusts. The author writes, (in Acknowledgments, 74% of the way through the book, at Kindle location 2586) the following:
I hope Donna (or someone) will produce a follow-up document containing “the rest of the story” for us buffs.
“Dave Springer says:
October 14, 2011 at 3:34 pm
I was a BIOS programmer at Dell computer from 1993-2000. I actually coded the fix for about 50 million computers circa 1998. Everyone knew how overblown it was.”
Well I worked for a large corporation as a cobol programmer back in the 70’s&80’s using IMS databases and an IT manager after and by the mid 90’s there was 3 decades worth of embedded Y2K problems in company’s backbone application code. Believe me the problem was very real and in the case of heritage mainframe systems very complex and labour intensive to fix. It wasn’t just things like using 9’s records in date fields and database keys to indicate the end of a file, but tests were hard coded in the cobol code which wouldn’t work after 1998 let alone 2000. All code had to be manually reviewed and what might be relatively simple changes in the object oriented, encapsulated world of modern programming were a labour intensive grind to fix in these older procedural systems.
The origins of the programming issues went back to when core memory was very expensive and using YY instead of YYYY on date fields was worth money and the industry wisdom was that the old code wouldn’t still be running in 2000.
“
Here’sHere are some reviews:”Sometimes it’s better to tell the self-annointed grammar police to sit on it and spin. Pedants annoy me.
99%? What about the 89%??
son of mulder says:
October 15, 2011 at 4:29 am
“Well I worked for a large corporation as a cobol programmer back in the 70′s&80′s using IMS databases and an IT manager after and by the mid 90′s there was 3 decades worth of embedded Y2K problems in company’s backbone application code. Believe me the problem was very real and in the case of heritage mainframe systems very complex and labour intensive to fix.”
I didn’t say the problem wasn’t real. The inability to deal with it well enough to avoid catastrophic consequences was demonstrably overblown given that no catastophe occurred. There were a great number of people who truly believed modern civilization was going to come to grinding halt because of it.
I’m sure it was quite tedious in some legacy code written in dated procedural languagues by programmers who have long since moved on, retired, or died. It remains however that it was the most anticipated and easily tested problems in computing history. Knowing you have a problem, knowing exactly what the problem is, and being able to duplicate & test comprises most of the battle in debugging.
The hysteria surrounding it and thus money directed at it turned it into a gold mine for a lot of people and those people had little inclination to still the hysteria since that would be like strangling the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs.
Just sayin’
Robin Guenier says:
October 14, 2011 at 9:59 pm
MarkG says that references to Y2K are off topic. Unfortunately, they’re not: Donna adopts a tone of objective rationality – looking at the evidence as it really is, not as “interpreted” by others. And it does seem that she has done that in this book – I certainly hope so. But, unfortunately, there’s a flaw: by characterising Y2K as no more than an exaggerated scare and thereby drawing a parallel with CAGW, she fails to meet her own high standard. I suggest that anyone who disagrees should read my paper: http://qii2.info/y2k.pdf.
I agree with both points: while over-hyped, the Y2K problem needed attention and Donna Laframboise should not have linked Y2K and CAGW the way she does.
Thanks for the link, too.
I hope taht after Donna makes a reasonable amount of money from the book that she reduces the price or makes it open source aso that we can pass it on freely. I don’t mind buying a copy but I’d love to be able to give 10 copies to friends (and enemies)
Robin Guenier: The year 2000 was not the first year of the new millennium, it was the last year of the old. Centuries end in years that end in “00”, millennia end in years that end in “000”. The BBC propagated the error that 1999 was the last year of the 20th century.
“Dave Springer says:
October 15, 2011 at 5:25 am
The inability to deal with it well enough to avoid catastrophic consequences was demonstrably overblown given that no catastophe occurred.”
I absolutely agree with you on this but that is not how it gets presented when coupled with CAGW. The usual theme is that “nothing went badly wrong because of the Y2K as it was a scam, so why should CAGW be a problem?”
The analysis of Y2K was empirical and tangible and appropriate action taken despite the profiteering scam that happened. Looking at computer models that predict CAGW is entirely different because the underlying rules are not adequately understood let alone programmed into the models.
So with Y2K, some folk panicked because they weren’t aware of what was actually being done to rectify the known problems, whereas CAGW is presented as panic despite no one adequately understanding the way climate works but the nurturing of such panic still benefits the profiteers.
Darren Parker says:
“I hope that after Donna makes a reasonable amount of money from the book that she reduces the price….’
I downloaded the PDF for $4.99. How can she reduce the price – it’s virtually free.
Just finished the book – the time flew by. Donna has really joined up all the dots to reveal the full mendacity of the IPCC, which is simply unbelievable. It’s eminently readable even for someone who isn’t the least familiar with the topic. It deserves to go viral. I hope Delingpole picks up on this and does a piece on it.
As I am now suffering from late early onset advanced middle age, I can say that I am less passionate, less energetic, more cynical and more methodical than I was in my 20’s. I’m also now know I don’t know the answer to everything, that the gloom-and-doom hysteria over the current world crisis is more likely to be just the flavor of the month than a real problem. My brain is less agile than if was, but while I am becoming slightly curmudgeon, I’m definitely not getting stupider.
I stopped getting stupider after the kids stop being teenagers.
I am in the middle of Dona Laframboise’s new book. It is making my weekend.
In her book Donna has a comprehensive perspective regarding the non-transparent handling by IPCC’s Susan Solomon (AR4’s Chair of WG1) of a request by expert reviewer Steven McIntrye for SI on two as-of-then-unpublished papers being considered for inclusion in AR4.
———————–
My hat off to Donna L; her view looks like appropriately skeptical professional journalism to me. Donna titled that chapter “Clear as Mud” and I can see why she chose Susan Solomon’s muddiness as an IPCC leader as a key element of the chapter.
John
“They” are surely convinced they are improving humanity, they are surely convinced that they are the saviors of the human kind, and as a proof of this is the apparently progress attained in several of the former developing countries and the widening of commerce and welfare….however has it been really so?
We renounce our personal freedom, even to my personal and free poverty, in order to get what? A marvelous existence, as the workmen in the chinese Ipad factory, a twelve hours workshift in order to enjoy a fabulous salary of 300 a month, in a small room without windows?
Does this not seem, instead, the “joy” of the “gamma class” in a “Brave New World”?
What is it more “ecological”?
It seems more that their real purpose is just “optimizing” sales, markets and profit of the self-chosen “Alpha” elite?
The former kingdoms and local aristocracies were not so voracious. They identified themselves with their people, and the people identified themselves with their lords. It was an almost personal relation. We have read remembrances of those times in old tales from every country around the world.
Of course there were good times, when everything flourished, during “solar maxima” and bad times, during “solar minima”. At every “turn of the screw” things, order changed.
We are about a new change, a new turn of an evolving spiral; it will be up to us to keep our human condition or to surrender it in exchange for a bulk of printed paper of doubtful value.
Would someone who knows, please supply a phonetic spelling of “Laframboise“, and while you’re at it, a phonetic spelling of “Tiljander“. If her name comes up in a conversation, I want to use the correct pronunciation.
Reed Coray:
I think it’s La-from-bwaz; not sure about Tiljander, though I pronounce it as spelt with a hard “j”, though it might be soft, more like a “y”.
Currently ranked #319 overall on Amazon Kindle store…..
WOW!