A personal account of one climate scientist’s struggle to promote facts in the face of contrarian prejudice
How on earth did we get here? How did we arrive in a world where temperatures in British Columbia can come within a whisker of 50C, where a ring of fire made Athens look apocalyptic, massive floods ripped apart towns in Belgium and Germany– yet still there is no international plan for how to keep the world habitable by the end of the century, and those protesting about that are labelled extremists?
Hot Air, by the leading climate scientist Peter Stott, offers an explanation. On the one hand it details the four-decade journey taken by him and his peers, especially in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to determine whether the world is genuinely heating at a dangerous rate, and if human activities are the primary cause. (It is, and they are.) On the other hand, it exposes the sustained efforts of a coalition of business lobbies, politicians, maverick scientists and contrarian attention-seekers to discredit and undermine that enterprise – efforts that continue even now, as the world literally burns.
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