Don't Sell Your Coat

Book excerpt: Not very long ago, scientists, politicians, and journalists were seemingly unanimous: Global warming had already damaged nature, and things were only going to get worse. Snow was rapidly becoming a thing of the past; summers were becoming hotter; storms were becoming more violent; droughts and floods were becoming more intense. This was a nightmare. In the end, though, little of this was true. And the whole idea of climate change was based on a lie: that weather and climate used to be nice. They weren't. As for our own time, snow cover is increasing; summertime heating is negligible; hurricanes are diminishing; droughts and floods both used to be worse. The real nightmare is the politics suffusing modern climate science and the effects this is having on every resident of planet Earth. Don't Sell Your Coat, besides bearing a suggestion for its readers, brings to the public the scientific argument that global cooling is as likely a scenario for the next few decades as any of the nightmares of Al Gore. It also allows non-scientists to enter the debate about climate change armed with facts and to have a sense of humor while they do so.