James Delingpole – Watermelons – How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future (2011)

Another candidate for most idiotic book of climate skepticism, this is a book-length version of that type of blog post where you repeat some things you’ve read on the internet in a hyperbolic and folksy way. 300 pages of it.

Read: Half, at which point, after ranting for 136 pages without touching on any specifics of climate theory, Delingpole declares that that should be sufficient evidence to settle the matter, so now let’s just talk about how much we despise those environmentalists. Future readers who find my copy in a second-hand book store will find an angry exclamation written in the margin at this point. I was waiting for him to start the part of his book where he actually makes some arguments. But no, that was it.

Recommended: No. Delingpole’s climate skepticism is so content-free that I wonder if he’s paid by Greenpeace to discredit the rest of them, (and I’m not the first to suspect this). Delingpole believes the Hockey Stick is the central pillar of global warming, (which will be news to climate scientists). He believes the “warmists” lost the debate and should have admitted defeat back in 1998, because that’s when the earth stopped warming, (a statement so stupid, even skeptics who use the “warming has stopped” argument will blush in embarrassment). And that’s actually about as deep as his views go.  The rest is rhetoric. Enjoyably written, though. He should start a blog. Oh.