ABSTRACT
Browsing through the “Environment” section of my local bookstore can be a confusing if not depressing experience. Lined up across the bookshelves are titles that convey their focus on the current environmental “hot” topic, global climate change. Most, like the well-known An Inconvenient Truth, offer a disturbing future that includes warmer temperatures, rising sea levels, more violent storms, receding glaciers and polar ice, and stranded polar bears. Some titles, such as Boiling Point, Climate Crash, and The Suicidal Planet, convey this view more provocatively. These books explain how our modern dependence on fossil fuels has raised carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, thereby fueling the conditions causing global climate change. However, other book titles like Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years and Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media suggest a very different point of view. These books insist that the dire predictions of climate change are based on an incomplete reading of historical records, poor understanding of the natural forces that influence climate shifts, unreliable computer models, and the political agendas of their authors.
