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At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it’s actually a feature. Their implicit logic — never stated outright for obvious reasons — is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That’s worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)
The book’s explicit claim is that because there’s a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn’t follow, and the initial premise is dubious.
Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 — allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade. Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers — including Chicago’s own don’t-think tank, the Heartland Institute — aren’t serious participants in the discussion of these issues.
