Nigel Lawson, author of AN APPEAL TO REASON, in The Wall Street Journal

Lord Nigel Lawson, author of An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, offers his perspective on the Copenhagen climate change conference in The Wall Street Journal: "The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate change traveling circus—Mexico City next year^and the job will be done. Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communique with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room "and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The neatest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions. The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the. same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy. Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today."

An Appeal to Reason is now available in a new paperback edition.

Nigel Lawson's AN APPEAL TO REASON Now in Paperback

New in paperback this week - and just in time for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen - is Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, by Nigel Lawson.

In this well-informed and hard-hitting response to the scaremongering of the climate alarmists, Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of State for Energy under Margaret Thatcher, argues that it is time for us to take a cool look at global warming. Lawson carefully and succinctly examines all aspects of the global warming issue: the science, the economics, the politics, and the ethics. He concludes that the conventional wisdom on the subject is suspect on a number of grounds, that global warming is not the devastating threat to the planet it is widely alleged to be, and that the remedy that is currently being proposed, which is in any event politically unattainable, would be worse that the threat it is supposed to avert. Argued with logic, common sense, and even wit, and thoroughly sourced and referenced, Appeal to Reason makes a cool contribution to the heated debate.

The Climate Heretic's Handbook: Nigel Lawson's AN APPEAL TO REASON in FT:

Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming was recently reviewed by Clive Crook in the Financial Times: "The sceptical literature on global warming is tiny and, to put it generously, of variable quality. Dissent from the received wisdom that climate change is a global emergency that calls for drastic remedies has been overwhelmed. The climate-science establishment is on board; so is the larger scientific community; and so, lately, are most governments, with Britain's leading the way. Now that the matter has been settled to almost everyone's satisfaction, sceptics are derided as "climate-change deniers" - akin to Holocaust deniers in their moral turpitude and refusal to face the truth. Increasingly, they talk to each other. Nobody else is listening. This is a shame, because on many points the sceptics happen to be correct. Nigel Lawson's short, splendid book on the subject can leave no fair-minded reader in doubt on that score. He points out that this was the first book he had trouble placing with a publisher. No British firm would touch it. You will have to read the book to understand how scandalous this is. An Appeal to Reason is elegantly written, thorough, entertaining and, above all, convincing.

Overlook Preview: AN APPEAL TO REASON by Nigel Lawson

Just published in the U.K. and making its way to the U.S. for publication in May 2008 is Nigel Lawson's look at global warming: An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. In the April issue of Literary Review, Allister Heath offers this assessment: "This is a fascinating tome, the best expositiion of the skeptical view on global warming that I have yet come across. It is comprehensive, packed with useful and clearly referenced facts and refreshingly free of the fanatical tone that plagues so many works on the subject. If Lawson is eventually proved right, this book will be remembered as a milestone; if, instead, he turns out to have been completely wrong, at least Lawson had the courage of his convictions, an increasingly rare virtue in today's excessively consensual age."