That doesn’t follow.

For instance, you write that “in and of itself, though, videotape of glacial calving is meaningless. Yet because of such footage, any number of my environmentalist friends believe that they know in their bones that our era is one of perilous warming.”

This is of course true. A videotape doesn’t prove anything. But whatever theories climate scientists have about the growth or decline of glaciers, they’re a bit more detailed than “I saw something on a videotape once so it must be a big problem”. These theories may be wrong. But the fact that some people who are _not_ scientists have formed some belief about glaciers from watching a video, is not an argument for or against anything at all.

Nor is it an argument against the overall prediction of global warming. It’s only an argument about the ignorance of your environmentalist friends.

Your book is full of straw man arguments like this. You attack the believers, and the alarmists, but (with a few exceptions) rarely the scientists.

Personally, I don’t trust Al Gore. I don’t trust journalists. I don’t trust environmentalists. And I certainly don’t trust random people who have seen a video of glacial calving. But it _does_ seem to me that behind all this, there is solid science, performed by scientists who appreciate the difficulty of what they’re doing, and who know that there is a large amount of uncertainty involved. Like all science it needs to be criticized and corrected, which is why I applaud climate skeptics when they do a good job. For instance, checking temperature stations, as you write about, that’s fantastic. It adds data. It isn’t in itself a result – for that you need scientists – but it’s relevant.

Most of your book, however, is not relevant.

Btw, as for holding ths “dogma” dear, I don’t. I don’t like environmentalists, and I keep hoping that the skeptics will turn up some good argument against global warming. That’s partly why I am reading so many books by climate skeptics at the moment – I hope to find the best arguments the skeptics have to offer. Unfortunately, most of them are pretty bad. The best ones deal with the cost-benefit of preventing global warming, as Nigel Lawson does in his book. But the rest are not very good. Often, it seems the skeptics don’t even understand the theories they’re skeptical of, such as when they think that attacking the hockey stick will pull down the whole theory.

Your book, unfortunately, contributes to this confusion, by giving your readers easy targets to disagree with. They learn how to argue with your straw men – but very little about actual climate science.

One would think it would be a piece of cake to find factual errors in such a weak book, no? Here are some facts from my book:

1. Current interglacial, the Holocene, is the coolest of the last five (measured in Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvins)
2. Holocene Optimum warmer than now, on sustained basis, as shown by boreal forest growth (in Siberia) and wave patterns in northern Greenland
3. Warming of last 150 years unremarkable during current Ice Age (that began 3 million years ago)
4. Sea level has never been stable and cannot be stable in dynamic system such as Earth’s
5. Desertification, an AGW bogeyman, is far worse during glaciation than during periods of warming (which add water vapor to the atmosphere that in turn precipitates out)

No need to list the hundreds of other facts that lead plenty of people of good will to question the dogma you hold so dear! Thank you for your review.