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Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade To Deny Global Warming (2009)

by James Hoggan(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1553654854 (ISBN13: 9781553654858)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Greystone Books

review 1: James Hoggan has put together an eye-opening expose of the deliberate activities of many powerful entities to refute, deny, or disclaim the cumulative scientific consensus regarding global climate change - that human activities are the primary driving force behind global climate change. These powerful entities include the oil and gas industry, the coal industry, and other money-rich manufacturing and industrial groups, as well as some local and federal governments (e.g., Canada, and the USA - under the last Bush administation). These are all entities that will suffer significantly once the general population comes to a realization that the climate is changing and that there is a worrisome risk associated with this change. Hoggan and his associates outline and document case... more after case where the scientific community's consensus on climate change, including strong statements from the UN's IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:], The American Meteorological Society, The American Geophysical Union, and the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science:] that the global climate is changing due mainly to human activities is ridiculed, undercut, and smeared by people paid either directly or indirectly by special interest money (oil, gas, coal, tobacco, manufacturing, etc.). The margins of many pages of my copy of this book filled with comments and personal observations of things that I had long suspected, but had never been able to take the time to discover on my own. As the pages flew by I found myself getting madder and madder, and sadder and sadder. Many things I had long suspected were confirmed repeatedly. In summary, this is not a book about climate change or even a call for action. This is a book about the practices and tactics used by the anti-climate change community to muddy the water and to keep the general population (including all of us) from coming to the realization that there is a strong scientific consensus on this issue, and that the longer we wait to act, the less effective our actions will be. This campaign of disinformation and misinformation has been so effective that even some people that should know better because of their knowledge and training have been deceived. So I certainly don't blame people for being confused when this topic is outside of their own realm of expertise and experience. FYI - I am not just parroting what Hoggan said in his book. I have been following and studying and teaching about the environment for almost 20 years. Everything I read in Hoggan's book rang true to what I know and many things I have long suspected. No matter where you fall on the climate change "debate" you will benefit from reading this book! Thanks for the insights and strong reminders about the need to be diligent regarding not only the messages we hear, but their ultimate sources as well. 5 solid stars!
review 2: I may have only given this four stars, but it is clear that "Climate Cover-up: the Crusade to Deny Global Warming" emphasizes and explores a five-star, unequivocally compelling topic, which is the ongoing and deepening sustainability and climate crisis.Hoggan wants to make you angry. You should be angry, and he generally succeeds, but he doesn't grab the reader's attention as strongly as possible. Hoggan targets the oil industry, the coal industry, and other monied interests that would be less successful under additional environmental regulation, digging into the ways in which they have worked extremely diligently to avoid that regulation. The book provides details of the various strategies that these interests have used, which largely reduce to lies and misdirection to confuse and slow down any decision-making with respect to the crisis.The book discusses all this in great detail, and provides historical context, but even Hoggan asserts that he doesn't want it to be a history. The book does a great job of pointing the spotlight on the motivations and strategies of those who would derail progress on the sustainability crisis, but it does not provide a continuous narrative, which might have helped to draw the reader more deeply into the reality of the situation. The approach that the book does take comes off as being a bit detached, and this is only aggravated by a poor analogy that Hoggan returns to several times throughout the book.That said, the insight that this book provides is extremely valuable, and it is a great jumping off point for further research. Hoggan has a rich list of real life villains and heroes, with the challenge reaching to all of us to learn as much as possible about both in order to arm ourselves with the information that we'll need to make good decisions going forward. less

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