The Inquisition of Climate Science

Science is under the greatest and most successful attack in modern history. An industry of denial, abetted by media more interested in selling controversy than presenting facts, has duped half the American public into rejecting the facts of climate science—facts showing that human-caused emissions are warming the Earth. The industry of climate science denial is succeeding: public acceptance has declined even as the scientific evidence for global warming has increased. It is vital that the public understand how anti-science ideologues, pseudoscientists, and non-scientists have bamboozled them. We cannot afford to get global warming wrong, yet thanks to deniers and their methods, we are.

Jim Powell's The Inquisition of Climate Science is the first book to take on comprehensively the climate science denial movement and the deniers themselves, exposing their lack of credentials, industry funding, and absence of any alternative theory to explain the observed evidence of warming. In this book, readers meet the most prominent deniers and participate in a dissection of their credentials, arguments, and lack of objectivity. James Lawrence Powell shows that the deniers use a wide variety of deceptive rhetorical techniques, many of them going back to the Greeks. While written for the general reader and non-scientist, this book is carefully researched and fully referenced. Readers with an open mind will learn that the evidence of global warming is real and see that an industry of denial has deceived the American public, putting them and their grandchildren at risk.

James Lawrence Powell was born and raised in Kentucky and graduated from Berea College. He received his Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has had a distinguished career as a college teacher, college president, museum director, and author of books on earth science for general audiences. He serves as executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool that includes women and minorities. He has taught at Oberlin College and has served as its acting president. He has also been president of Franklin and Marshall College, Reed College, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed Powell to the National Science Board.