In a wonderful essay called “On the Reading of Old Books,” C.S. Lewis argued that because every age has its own blind spots, we need the perspectives of other ages to help us see our own. So he recommended reading old books.

“To be sure,” he said, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately, we cannot get at them.” So, he advised, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

I thought of that when asked why, although Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming was first published 18 years ago, I was still urging people to read it.

When I first read it fifteen years ago, I had already read half a dozen or more other books presenting the realist (or skeptic) perspective on global warming. I didn’t expect anything extraordinary. Boy, was I wrong!

Taken by Storm differs from almost all other books on the subject (and since then I’ve read another fifty or so) because it focuses on fundamental principles rather than fleeting, constantly changing data. It teaches readers how to think about climate change more than what to think. And believe me, if more people knew how to think, fewer would think the truly outrageous things that masquerade as sound science when it comes to climate change.

Don’t get me wrong. Data matter. But fundamental principles are even more important. Why? Because apart from them we have no idea how to construct sensible theories, and no idea how to interpret data to test theories. Data don’t come with explanations attached. Underlying principles are indispensable for understanding them. Taken by Storm provides those principles.

But it does more. With biting wit it subjects the most prominent arguments for the climate-change crisis perspective to complete intellectual demolition. And though those arguments have changed facemasks in the intervening years, they remain essentially unchanged today. That makes Taken by Storm’s demolitions as relevant now as ever. Indeed, more relevant: because looking back on them makes it clear that advocates of climate alarmism have ignored, not refuted, such arguments.

That’s why Taken by Storm remains one of the best educational tools about human-induced (and natural!) climate change.

The authors, Dr. Christopher Essex and Dr. Ross McKitrick, both friends of mine, brought out a second edition five years after the first. Aside from a tongue-in-cheek foreword by the imaginary Sir Mortimer Long-Bore, Ph.D. (reproduced below for your entertainment), a new preface, and endnotes, it was only 7 percent longer than the first. The lessons and arguments remained the same.

We could not obtain copies of that edition to use as thank-you gifts to donors. But Chris had 300 copies of the first edition. He generously sold them to us, and his wife and their friend Donna Laframboise, author of The Delinquent Teenager who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Scientist (a devastating critique of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), actually drove down from Ontario, Canada, to my home in western Tennessee to deliver them in person. (And, boy, did we have stimulating conversations!)

And now, for your reading pleasure, here’s the foreword to the second edition that I promised you. But do remember it’s a parody! When you’ve read it, email us (Stewards@CornwallAlliance.org) with a list of the falsehoods and logic errors you identify in it. (Be forewarned: there are few sentences, even clauses, that don’t contain at least one!) We’d like to publish some of the more amusing comments in a future newsletter.

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Foreword to the Second Edition of Taken By Storm

By Sir Mortimer Long-Bore, Ph.D., FRS

Distinguished Professor of Science,

Chairman of the Department of Theoretical Modelling

Director of the Institute of Advanced Analysis

Stonetablet College, Topp University

and President, Royal National Academy of Scientific Societies

As a man of science, who is often described as one of the world’s leading experts on matters scientific, I am frequently prevailed upon to offer assessments of new books. In the case of this particular book, the request came from the authors, who specifically asked for a denunciation. In their letter they indicate a desire to “get it over with” and to have it done by the very highest authority. I am happy to oblige.

Science proceeds by the careful accumulation of authoritative expert wisdom, as recorded in the leading peer-reviewed journals, such as those of which my closest associates and I serve as editors. We are vigilant against allowing hard, established facts to be subject to frivolous question. The long history of science has taught us the paramount importance of preserving intellectual freedom. I speak of the freedom to accept and profess the truth, and the freedom to refuse to question that which is established on the word of the highest scientific authority. Readers of this book will learn none of these things. I denounce it utterly.

I had initially supposed this to be a book of independent thinking and skeptical attitude. My fears were well-founded. The authors recklessly question the widely accepted doctrines of global warming and the conclusions of the very eminent International Expert Panel on Climate Change [sic]. This is deeply disturbing to me. We cannot allow people to undermine the consensus position on global warming, after all the effort that went into imposing it.

The greenhouse effect is lifting the global temperature to dangerous levels. This is proven by elementary Newtonian physics as used in our most advanced computer climate models. The global temperature is warmer today than ever before in the planet’s history; modern computerized climate models can predict future warming with impressive numerical precision; the greenhouse “fingerprint” has been positively identified in global temperature data. We have complete certainty that our future is imperiled. We observe that sea levels are rising, storms are increasingly violent, droughts and floods ravage the land, animals are dying, and the Arctic ice cap is gone, I am told. One reels at the horror of it all.

The authors are wrong to question any of this. Morally wrong. Nor are the authors even qualified to make commentary on this sublime topic. One is an applied mathematician who apparently works on topics in radiation and fluid dynamics. The other is an economist who studies environmental policy. What claim has either to expertise on global warming or climate change? For tutelage on issues of such importance I counsel reliance on the authority of qualified experts. You may find, as I did, the book An Inconvenient Truth to be greatly informative in this respect.

In contrast, the book you are viewing is subversive climate literature. Do not read it. I have not read it, and you should not either; indeed, I threw my copy on the fire. I only regret that burning the book was my only remedy. In a better age I would have burned the authors with it.