The Climate Files: The Battle For The Truth About Global Warming

by Fred Pearce

(Guardian Books, R195)

With the torrential concern about global warming, can you imagine how devastating it would be if it was all a farce?

In 2009, thousands of e-mails and research documents were leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University, in a saga dubbed Climategate.

CRU has been a major player in climate change research – some of its journals are presented at the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change to devise environmentally friendly policies.

What can be seen as both the epoch and origin of the saga was Mike Mann’s 1 000-year “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.

Mann showed that global temperatures had barely changed over the past millennium, until a big rise in the 20th century – a result he attributed to man-made climate change – creating the hockey stick shape on his graph. This sparked rigorous debate among scientists exposed in the Climategate e-mails.

It has been widely believed by many scientists that our planet has undergone a notable warm age – the medieval warm age – and probably a couple of ice ages too.

Many critics and fellow climatologists found Mann’s graph of a relatively flat continuum before the 20th century difficult to accept. Research into global temperatures, over a similar timeline of 1 000 years, was then done by other institutions, some academic and others private corporations.

While Mann was defending his integrity, another disagreement broke out between parties whose research yielded similar results to Mann’s, and those who found otherwise.

The truth was that a lot of opposition to Mann’s research came from faculties financially supported, directly and indirectly, by the US government, which had its oil and fossil fuel interests at heart.

So who was telling the truth, and who was pushing the agenda? To find out, this book will throw you into possibly the greatest climate debate in history. – Tshepo Tshabalala