The Satanic Gases

Clearing the Air About Global Warming

Patrick J. Michaels, Robert C. Balling

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781937184452
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Global warming is vastly overrated as an environmental threat, argue leading climatologists Patrick J. Michaels and Robert Balling, Jr. Former Vice President Gore staked much of his career on a largely mythical problem, they write. Unlike every other book on global warming, The Satanic Gases places the issue in its proper social and scientific context. Citing the pioneering work of historian of science Thomas Kuhn and economist James Buchanan, Michaels and Balling demonstrate that it was inevitable that global warming would be distorted by the political sphere and that most scientists would either stand mute or actually assist in that process. But, the authors argue, such distortions in science are always temporary, and inevitably the scientific community will concede that earlier forecasts dramatically exaggerated the threat of global warming.

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE
• OVERVIEW
• 1. The Shared Vision of Hell
• 2. Global Warming Goes Global
• 3. The Earth's Climate
• 4. Modeling the Earth's Climate
• 5. Has the Earth Warmed?
• 6. The Sulfate-Greenhouse Paradigm vs. the Reality of Climate Change
• 7. Greenhouse Projections of Circulation-Scale Changes vs. Reality
• 8. An Ocean of Data: Sea-Level Rise and El Niño
• 9. Global Warming and Mortality
• 10. Greening the Planet
• 11. How Did We Get Here?
• 12. Treaties, Programs, and Protocols
• 13. The Future
• REFERENCES
• About the Authors