Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial

"This is a hugely chilling, but massively well-informed book. Obviously, a lot has been written already about climate change , but this should not put people off. The thing about Peter Stott is that it was he and his colleagues who were trying to persuade the world and particularly the powers that be that not only was global warming happening, but it was human activity that was making it happen. At the beginning, the consensus was that, well, the sea temperatures are going up, the snow is melting, but this is just something happening to the universe, this is not anything to do with us. And there was an enormously frightening and powerful lobby that wanted to discredit everything that Stott and his colleagues had shown. There was such malevolence, such nastiness from the oil lobby, that the threat to Stott and his colleagues was serious. Stott and his colleagues were bullied in meetings and in court and their emails were stolen. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And all that time, the media was obsessed with this idea of false balance, giving equal airtime to self-styled experts. But what did they know? What had they studied? What had they done? What had they written? Stott explains this very well—he’d be asked on to the BBC to present his case, followed by a person who was given exactly the same amount of time to argue against him, who was actually a self-appointed crackpot with no evidence. It is so important that if there is scientific debate, the level of expertise of the debaters is honestly stated and the argument is equally informed on both sides. It is satisfying that, now, every sensible person in the world knows that Stott and his colleagues were right. So this is a story of persistence, resilience and bravery. I like to think of it as the power of science: that, in the end, the scientific evidence will win out. It might take a long time, but it does. And that, of course, is what the Royal Society is all about. Part of our best books of 2022 series."