No Tomorrow

✍ Scribed by Philip Machanick

• Publisher: RAMpage
• Year: 2007;2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 165 KB
• Edition: 2nd ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Martin Truscott had been a troubled child, with an obsession with computer games. Now, he found himself driven to seek the truth. A debate about climate change had been raging in the press - yet it seemed implausible that so many scientists could be lying or deluded. But what if they were? What if the "sceptics" really were modern-day Galileos? When a documentary appeared alleging just that, Martin was incensed because it was so poorly made; the mainstream scientists had little difficulty in picking it apart. Did this prove anything? No: only that the maker of the documentary did a poor job. What if the Nobel committee had blundered giving Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the 2007 Peace Prize? So he was determined to find out for himself - and make the real, definitive truth about climate change documentary. In this pursuit, he found out not only the truth about climate change, but the truth about himself ...

From the Author

I wrote this book after seeing the "documentary" The Great Global Warming Swindle, and wondered what it would be like to do a proper job, rather than a hatchet job on the science, which led to creating a fictional character trying to do just that. Why do I mainly present the mainstream science and not the anti-mainstream science? Because I battled to find any real science opposing the mainstream. By this I mean verifiable, evidence-based alternatives that explain reality at least as well - let alone better than - the mainstream. Almost all attacks on the mainstream rely on bluster, taking things out of context, implying improper motives on the part of scientists and bogus debating tactics like appeal to authority (a famous professor said this so it must be true). With no hint of irony, many of the people using these tactics accuse the mainstream of them.

Much of the attack on mainstream science is political since there really is no serious alternative. The nearest there is is Richard Lindzen at MIT, but his theories have comprehensively failed the test of measurement against reality. The only other serious group of scientists attempting to counter the mainstream are at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. For a while their satellite-based temperature trend was significantly below every other published data set (in terms of rate of increase) but with correction of errors, that is no longer the case.

My aim in writing this book was initially to see if there was any merit in the anti-mainstream position. I couldn't find any, so I shifted focus to explaining the mainstream. If the anti-mainstream comes across mainly as emotional, that reflects the reality that I found.

In a complex scientific field, there are many areas of doubt and uncertainty. Climate science is no different. We use technology on a daily basis that is based on the same scientific principles (e.g., a GPS system). Amplifying doubt and uncertainty to cause inaction is a political attack on the transfer of science to policy, and does not undermine the science. We've seen the same thing with attacks on the link between tobacco and cancer, the ozone hole and the science of HIV.

If you really want to understand the science in all its complexity, you need a science textbook, not a novel. I recommend Raymond T. Pierrehumbert's Principles of Planetary Climate. You need a fair amount of calculus to understand it. The key thing you learn from it is that the modern science of climate is well founded on basic sciences, and the uncertainties are no greater than any application of a range of sciences to a complex real-world problem.

About the Author

Philip Machanick is an associate professor of Computer Science at Rhodes University in South Africa. He holds a PhD in computer science, and has worked as an academic and researcher at University of Queensland in Australia, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and Stanford University.