The Real Global Warming Disaster
 The book consists of three parts and an epilogue. Drawing from Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's Unstoppable Global Warming, Booker presents a graph showing changes in temperature and carbon dioxide concentration over the last 11,000 years. In his analysis, rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the 1970s led scientists such as Paul Ehrlich to postulate that the earth, as a result of the greenhouse effect, may have been heating up or cooling down, either of which could have potentially disastrous consequences. Figures such as the environmental activist Maurice Strong and scientist Bert Bolin are then introduced, who would, according to Booker, "play a crucial role in what lay ahead" in influencing governmental policy and helping form the scientific basis for global warming. Booker contends that 1988 was a key year in which the IPCC was set up and James Hansen appeared at the Senate Committee of Natural Resources in Washington, where he stated that he was "99 percent certain" that man's contribution to the greenhouse effect was the cause of global warming. According to Booker, "on all sides 'global warming' became the cause of the moment" after Hansen's appearance. He then describes how: * in 1990, the IPCC published its first assessment report which made projections of future temperature rises; * at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit "politicians from 154 countries queued up to sign a 'UN Framework Convention on Climate Change'" that would "commit all the signatory governments to a voluntary reduction of greenhouse gas emissions"; * the second IPCC report (SAR) in 1995 found that the "body of statistical evidence now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate". Booker writes that the SAR was criticised by Frederick Seitz, who alleged that "more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report—the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate—were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text". Part one ends with an account of the signing of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the setting of new targets for reduced emissions. Booker begins part two by asserting that the medieval warm period "contradicted the idea that late twentieth century temperatures had suddenly shot up to a level never known before in history", and that this problem was dealt with by a 1999 graph depicting temperatures "suddenly shooting up in the twentieth century to a level that was quite unprecedented. Familiar features such as the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age simply vanished". Booker writes that the graph became the "supreme iconic image for all those engaged in the battle to save the world from global warming". He then states that the IPCC's methods, and in particular the draft summary of its next report, came in for serious criticism from scientists such as Richard Lindzen. Booker then examines Davis Guggenheim's Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth and the subsequent questioning of many of its assertions, including retreating glaciers, drowning polar bears, use of the "hockey stick" graph, the melting of the ice caps and snows of Kilimanjaro and rising sea levels. Booker begins part three by quoting the statement of the then British Environment Secretary that the IPCC's fourth assessment report was "another nail in the coffin of the climate change deniers". Booker contrasts this assertion with what he sees as evidence emerging to the contrary: that the earth had in fact begun to cool, possibly as a result of solar variation, and that may thus not be the only driver of climate change. However, the results of research into this theory by the scientists Knud Lassen, Eigil Friis-Christensen and Henrik Svensmark were dismissed by Bert Bolin as "scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible". Booker then alleges that a "consensus" and "counter-consensus" had begun to form, and gives details of a 2007 report by the US Senator James Inhofe that claimed to list 400 scientists "now prepared to express their dissent, sometimes in the strongest terms, from the IPCC's 'consensus' view of global warming". Booker then quotes the June 2007 International Energy Agency announcement that the cost of halving emissions by 2050 (the US and UK governments were intending 80% cuts) would be US$ 45 trillion—equivalent to "two thirds of the world's entire current annual economic output". Booker sums up the book's contents in a long epilogue, which quotes Theseus in A Midsummer's Night Dream: In the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear Booker contends that in this quote Shakespeare is identifying that &#34;when we are not presented with enough information for our minds to resolve something into certainty, they may be teased into exaggerating it into something quite different from what it really is&#34;.