Although this book promises to be a break from orthodoxy on global warming, it needlessly cedes crucial high ground at the outset, which makes this essay less of a tilt at convention than one might have hoped. The greenhousers claim recent warming is caused by human activity and that the culprit is humanly produced carbon dioxide (CO₂). Everything, from Kyoto to carbon credits, stems from this proposition before which, alas, Nigel Lawson obediently bows: “Given the greenhouse effect, it can...be said to be settled science that the marked, and largely man-made, increase in carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere has contributed to the modest 20th-century warming of the planet.”

Having made his curtsies to dogma, Lawson settles into the sort of policy discussions one might expect of a former chancellor of lively intellect. He demolishes the hectoring agitations of the “one-minute-to-midnight” lobby, and is acidly on target about capitalism's ingenuity in milking the carbon markets. He puts ethanol properly in its place, and has a wonkish amble through such follies as “forced decarbonisation”. He's funny about the Indians and Chinese deliberately building factories so western countries can pay to clean them up.

Lawson's whole polemic, however, is raised on an unsound premise. After years of computer modelling, there's still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO₂ is making any measurable contribution to the warming trend. It's too bad Lawson didn't alert readers to the strong scientific case that the world is in a thaw after the last Ice Age, itself the consequence of changes in solar heat following changes in the earth's elliptic orbit and in its tilt. It is the release of CO₂ from the carbon reservoir in our oceans that controls atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Increase in atmospheric CO₂ is the consequence of temperature change, not the cause.

An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming by Nigel Lawson
Duckworth Overlook £9.99 pp149

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