The Hockey Stick Illusion


Book Description

From Steve McIntyre's earliest attempts to reproduce Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph, to the explosive publication of his work and the launch of a congressional inquiry, The Hockey Stick Illusion is a remarkable tale of scientific misconduct and amateur sleuthing. It explains the complex science of this most controversial of temperature reconstructions in layperson's language and lays bare the remarkable extent to which climatologists have been willing to break their own rules in order to defend climate science's most famous finding.




Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick


Book Description

Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America




The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars


Book Description

A member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change examines the fossil-fuel industry's public relations campaign to discredit the science of climate change and deny the reality of global warming.




The Age of Global Warming


Book Description

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 industrialization. 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, refusing again twelve years later in Copenhagen. Despite proclaiming global warming a planetary emergency, Barack Obama ignored the Europeans to reach a toothless accord with the leaders of the developing world. Copenhagen 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.




The Knowledge Illusion


Book Description

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.




Climate


Book Description

"Dispassionately assesses whether politicians and campaigners are right to believe the dire warnings of the global warming lobby, and evaulates the consequences of governments' responses."--Cover.




The Innovation Illusion


Book Description

Companies, entrepreneurs, and complexity -- Capitalism and economic dynamism -- What is wrong - the map or the reality? -- Technology and income - are they decoupling? -- Jobs and technology -- Innovation famine rather than innovation feast -- 9 THE FUTURE AND HOW TO PREVENT IT -- From corporate globalism to global corporatism -- The continued rise of regulatory uncertainty -- The "silver tsunami" for cash -- Future imperfect -- Preventing the future -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX




Climategate


Book Description

Traces the origins of the climate scare, guiding the reader from the minds of Marx and Engles in the 1800s, to the global governance of the United Nations.




Don't Sell Your Coat


Book Description

Not very long ago, scientists, politicians, and journalists were seemingly unanimous: Global warming had already damaged nature, and things were only going to get worse. Snow was rapidly becoming a thing of the past; summers were becoming hotter; storms were becoming more violent; droughts and floods were becoming more intense. This was a nightmare. In the end, though, little of this was true. And the whole idea of climate change was based on a lie: that weather and climate used to be nice. They weren't. As for our own time, snow cover is increasing; summertime heating is negligible; hurricanes are diminishing; droughts and floods both used to be worse. The real nightmare is the politics suffusing modern climate science and the effects this is having on every resident of planet Earth. Don't Sell Your Coat, besides bearing a suggestion for its readers, brings to the public the scientific argument that global cooling is as likely a scenario for the next few decades as any of the nightmares of Al Gore. It also allows non-scientists to enter the debate about climate change armed with facts and to have a sense of humor while they do so.




Climategate


Book Description

The Climategate scandal covered from beginning to end--from 'Hide the Decline' to the current day. Written by two authors who were on the scene--Steven Mosher and Tom Fuller--Climategate takes you behind that scene and shows what happened and why.For those who have heard that the emails were taken out of context--we provide that context and show it is worse when context is provided.For those who have heard that this is a tempest in a teacup--we show why it will swamp the conventional wisdom on climate change.And for those who have heard that this scandal is just 'boys being boys'--well, boy. It's as seamy as what happened on Wall Street.