Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming should be required reading for any serious student of the issue of climate change. Edited and introduced by iconoclastic climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, Shattered Consensus demonstrates the remarkable disparities between so-called consensus documents on global warming, such as the reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and climate reality. Shattered Consensus consists of nine expert essays on global warming, covering the earth's temperature history and disparities between what has been predicted about climate change and what has actually been observed. The reader will discover substantial disconnections and new information not generally discussed in mainstream reports about climate science. For example, the oft-quoted statement that recent years are the warmest of the last millennium is now in serious doubt. Temperature changes observed through the atmosphere (not just at the surface) are clearly different than what has been projected to occur. Disparities between observed precipitation and the simulations of computer models can be several hundred percent. Shattered Consensus will surely shatter commonly-held opinions about global warming and leave the reader with serious questions about whether or not policies to "fight" climate change are warranted at all.

Institutions and Incentives in Regulatory Science explores fundamental problems with regulatory science in the environmental and natural resource law field. Each chapter covers a variety of natural resource and regulatory areas, ranging from climate change to endangered species protection and traditional health-based environmental regulation. Regulatory laws and institutions themselves strongly influence the direction of scientific research by creating a system of rewards and penalties for science. As a consequence, regulatory laws or institutions that are designed naively end up incentivizing scientists to generate and then publish only those results that further the substantive regulatory goals preferred by the scientists. By relying so heavily on science to dictate policy, regulatory laws and institutions encourage scientists to use their assessment of the state of the science to further their own preferred scientific and regulatory policy agendas. Additionally, many environmental and natural resource regulatory agencies have been instructed by legislatures to rely heavily upon science in their rulemaking. In areas of rapidly evolving science, regulatory agencies are inevitably looking for scientific consensus prematurely, before the scientific process has worked through competing hypotheses and evidence. The contributors in this volume address how institutions for regulatory science should be designed in light of the inevitable misfit between the political or legal demand for regulatory action and the actual state of evolving scientific knowledge.