Except that Weiss never said any such thing. He never even gave an interview to the Post, which long ago posted a retraction and an apology, under legal threat from Weiss who was infuriated such claims had been falsely attributed to him. "I don't believe solar radiation is the main cause of global warming and I never said so to the Post, as the authors of this book would have discovered if they had asked me," says Weiss.
This is not the time to go into the Post's motive for attributing such views to Weiss. Suffice to say, it has its own climate-change denial agenda. Not that this has bothered Booker and North. Self-appointed judges of their profession, according to the rest of Scared to Death, they have constructed, utterly without shame, a quite preposterous theory by throwing together a few clippings, making no discernible fact checks and reporting a non-existent interview. They accuse other journalists of "unthinking credulity" but commit egregious errors that would shame a junior reporter.
Then there is this year's Royal Society report by physicists Mike Lockwood and Claus Frohlich, who surveyed radiation records for the past 40 years and who concluded, unambiguously, "that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability." Incredibly, this is dismissed by the authors because of its careful selection of evidence.
This interplanetary scare story is only one Booker and North bete noir, of course. They also allege passive smoking is safe, speed cameras cost lives, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease was never a threat to health. Individuals who disagree are simply scaremongers. Again, most of the evidence is flaky. Going back to their major bogey, climate change, Booker and North claim a US National Academy report in 2000 concluded Earth's lower atmosphere, the troposphere, had cooled between 1980 and 2000. It didn't. It showed a warming. Similarly, they say the "hockey stick" graph commonly used to show Earth's rapidly rising temperatures has been discredited and dropped from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last assessment report. In fact, it appears on page 467.
In some ways, it is hard to credit such sloppiness and partiality, though I don't believe for a minute the authors seek to delude readers. The delusion lies within. No nanny state is going to control their lives, limit their car-traveling, stop them driving fast or make them recycle their trash. If research backs such restrictions, then it must be wrong and by carefully selecting sources, a demolition of mainstream science can be given precarious credibility. The result is misguided and sad.
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