The Age of Global Warming: A History - Tapa dura

'A definitive and clear-eyed history of global warming alarmism' --Michael Barone 'Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past thirty years or so in the name of saving the planet ... Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the "subjectivity" of the future, and too often have a "cultural aversion to learning from the past". If they read this tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful clarity' --Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph 'A superb and compelling book' --Mail on Sunday 'This is a brilliant piece of work that every climate change negotiator should have in his front pocket' --Jon Snow 'A great achievement ... Rupert Darwall has written a compelling and balanced account of a story that needs to be told' --Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and author of An Appeal to Reason 'A total masterpiece' --James Delingpole 'Gripping ... Darwall's book has been widely praised as a welcome addition to our understanding of this extraordinary story, which as he says reflects a historic shift in the global balance of power between the West and those fast-rising nations to the east led by China and India' --Spectator 'Rupert Darwall has told a story of frauds and fools thoroughly and well. His truth may be inconvenient for some. For the rest of us, it is a breath of fresh air' --The American Spectator

Rachel Carson's epoch-creating Silent Spring marked the beginnings of the environmental movement in the 1960s, its 'First Wave' peaking at the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The invention of sustainable development by Barbara Ward, along with Rachel Carson the founder of the environmental movement, created an alliance of convenience between First World environmentalism and a Third World set on rapid industrialisation. The First Wave crashed in 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and decade-long energy crisis. Revived by a warming economy of the 1980s, environmentalism found a new, political champion in 1988: Margaret Thatcher. Four years later at the Rio Earth Summit, politics settled the science. One hundred and ninety-two nations agreed that mankind was causing global warming and carbon dioxide emissions should be cut. Rio launched rounds of climate change meetings and summits, with developing nations refusing to countenance any agreement restraining their greenhouse gas emissions - their blanket exemption from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leading to its rejection by the United States that year, and again twelve years later in Copenhagen. This therefore marked not just the collapse of the climate change negotiations, but something larger - an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the hands of the rising powers of the East.