Many of us who were involved in the early days of environmentalism, because of the disgusting and dangerous state of our post-war air and rivers, and had good reason to be satisfied with the progress that had been made, became distressed when the movement was suddenly hijacked by a new force. It seemed to be motivated by a hatred of industry and economic progress. Instead of relying on actual measurements of pollution, it began to extrapolate by means of theories and models. It developed the threat of the New Ice Age. Industrial pollution would block out the sun and plunge the world into an appalling frozen future. In Britain it was irrelevantly defeated by the searing summer of 1976, an isolate statistic that could have no bearing on climate and, though it caused ridicule, was nevertheless a portent of things to come. We innocently assumed that they would withdraw, but they simply did an about turn. Almost without pausing for breath, they converted the threat of an ice age to one of catastrophic global warming. Digging up old papers by the likes of Arrhenius and Callendar, and without a trace of embarrassment, they switched from accusing industry from freezing us to death to claiming that it would roast us. At the time most of us in science treated it all as a joke that no one could possibly take seriously. How wrong we were! We simply could not see that profound changes were taking place in society, that even science and its methods would come under a devastating threat.

If there is one area in which your reviewer takes a view that is divergent from that of these authors, it is in the role that Britain played in the Mother of all Scares. Sir Crispin Tickell and Margaret Thatcher just get a passing mention. Tickell, a history graduate and diplomat, closely involved with the European Commission and later permanent representative to the United Nations, author of Climatic Change and World Affairs, 1977, was a close advisor to Thatcher, who, with the unique authority of being a political leader and a science graduate, under the influence of Tickell launched Global Warming into the world political domain. If there is a “Typhoid Mary” that spread the contagion of global warming around the world it can only be Tickell; he was closely involved with the very international institutions that promoted it. Thatcher was at war with the Miners’ union and the oil sheiks and was determined to press the case for nuclear power. As so often happened, her tactical manoeuvres defeated her strategic aims. She fostered the creation of a movement that opposed everything she stood for. Revisionists deny that she was all that enthusiastic in the promotion of global warming. Take it from one who sat it the front row at a major speech she made, this is not so; or, failing that, take it from her then loyal lieutenant, Nigel Lawson. She established the Hadley Centre, designed to manufacture evidence for global warming, at the expense of funds diverted with great damage from real science, and subverted the Royal Society by putting money on the table for the same purpose. The Hadley Centre became a main engine for the UN IPCC, which imposed the global warming religion on the world.

Global warming is the scare that is the climax  of this book. It is both unique and typical. It is unique in that economic failure is not just a by-product of the scare, it is the whole raison d’être. It is promoted by interests who oppose everything that would enhance the economic well-being of mankind (for example, realistic sources of energy as opposed to those that are intermittent, impracticable and only sustainable by grotesque levels of subsidy). It is typical in employing all the manoeuvres that have sustained the previous, less durable scares; i.e. selecting favourable data while ignoring more credible adverse data, practising overt and covert censorship, mounting ad hominem attacks on opponents, recruiting “scientists” to serve its purposes with public funds, while without evidence gratuitously accusing critics of receiving handouts from hated industrial sources, putting the frighteners on ill-informed ordinary people and so on. Scientifically this scare is dead in the water, even the measurement evidence of any warming occurring at all fades away on examination, but the weaker their case becomes the more fervently the faithful cling to their belief and the more bitter the bile they direct at infidels.