Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything Paperback – Illustrated, October 7, 2016

I highly recommend this book. I’m not sure why another reviewer described the writing as awful. The book is well done. It is comprised of multiple short, concise, clearly written chapters covering all the facets of climate change science in just the right amount of depth. The accompanying graphics are excellent--- better in color on my Kindle Fire versus my black and white. I didn’t notice any distracting ebook issues at all. It is a science book, as advertised, which is what I was looking for.In my view, the discovery of empirical methods has been the key driver of modern human material prosperity. That’s kind of a truism, but it is intriguing to observe how even very smart people can sometimes lose the focus on basic principles of valid statistical inference. A strength of this book is the focus on those very basic principles as applied to climate science.The scientific proposition driving climate change alarmism is that we can predict the future---that climate is predictable to a level of accuracy and precision on the relevant timeframe such that public policy can reasonably be based on those predictions.In light of current understanding of complex non-linear systems one may reasonably ask: What is the prior probability that human-made computer algorithms starting around the end of the 20th century will accurately predict global temperature 20, 50 or 100 years into the future? It’s an extraordinary claim. It’s a hypothesis requiring robust empirical validation by out of sample prospective data. Stated more technically: the prospective data must reject the null hypothesis that climate is unpredictable. In any other discipline that last sentence would be uncontroversial. But somehow, along the way, in climate science the null hypothesis has now shifted to imminent dangerous anthropogenic global warming. It’s as if the burden of proof is now on those that doubt predictions of climate catastrophe.As very well reviewed in this book, the climate models used for the IPCC consensus reports are predicting substantially more warming than is actually occurring. There is a systematic error in the climate models. To my view, this is the nut of the problem with climate alarmism, casting real doubt on the myriad predictions of all sorts of severe climate related problems. But now that the null hypothesis has somehow shifted to dangerous global warming there is no failure of the models that can ever disprove the null hypothesis. All of the multiple retrospective explanations for failure of the models are presented as refinements of our understanding of global warming instead of post hoc reasoning. It is argued that the models are good enough. We can’t wait 50 years for them to be validated. Because global warming. Objecting to the lack of empirical validation of predictions of catastrophe now becomes anti-science and immoral.1.3 billion people live without access to electricity, mostly living in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. The attempts to block the construction of coal-fired power plants in Africa and India because of predictions of dangerous global warming decrease the chance that young people in these regions will have access to electricity in their lifetimes. Poverty kills people. Lack of access to affordable electricity shortens lifespans. The WHO estimates that 3.2m million deaths per year are caused by indoor biomass burning. This is real harm to real people in the here and now.Humans have a strong proclivity to predict the future, especially apocalypse. It’s been a feature of humankind since the beginning. Environmentalists don’t have any better track record than others in making accurate predictions, although they may be the champs on the apocalypse scale. We need to be very sure that climate alarmism in not just another chapter in the story of human evolutionary psychology, with the digital computer as the latest Oracle of Delphi.The other driver of modern human material prosperity is exploitation of energy concentrated in fossil fuels. Decision makers in the rich nations owe it to people living without energy security to be scrupulously scientific when examining predictions of climate catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels. This book presents a thorough discussion of the quality of the science from an appropriately skeptical stance.

The book is a thorough (I would even say rigorous) refuting of talking points made in many published government (primarily) works. It literally pulls apart each fact-missing tidbit from the published works and explains with text (and in many cases graphs) why these tidbits are wrong. If you want to understand the truth about why all of the impending gloom and doom over the last 30 years hasn't yet come to pass, this book puts it into perspective and adds a few ideas that are never discussed in the mainstream. The biggest problem I had with this Kindle book is the graphics - they don't reproduce well and the graphs were somewhat hard to read at times.

Told in very short essays, this book is tremendous. He gets quickly to the heart of each issue and explains it well. Using his definition I am a "lukewarmer" but I don't like the term much. I'm a scientist by trade and prefer the term skeptic. I still think skeptic is the accurate term for someone who questions the "settled" in "settled" science. But, the world is warming and man probably plays some unknown role in the warming. So, some like to say lukewarmer so they don't get confused with those that dogmatically deny the world is warming or that man has any role, no matter how small, in the warming. A lukewarmer would say that we don't know the causes of warming, we can't measure accurately the natural forces affecting warming, so we can't say how big man's contribution is. Which is also what a proper skeptic would say. In any case I found the book to be an enjoyable read and quite accurate. The nice thing about the book is it is written in short and easy to digest chapters. I disagree with the other reviewer who said the writing is poor. I thought the writing was quite good.

This book will probably disappoint you if you are one of the many that have been convinced that the "science is settled" and that we have only 12 years to react to the threat of global warming or catastrophe will be inevitable.On the other hand, if you are interested in a balanced, well-presented discussion of the real science behind climate science then this is a great book for you to read to get the facts without all of the alarmist claims of by people who have a socialist political agenda or those who reject that the climate is changing at all.Do you want proof that this is a great book? I got kicked off a Facebook group that discusses the Green New Deal for even mentioning this book. That is how good it is - it presents the facts clear and simple.