This Book by a Dissenting Climate Scientist is the Perfect Red Pill for the Curious

Review of Crisis or Hoax? Climate Change in Science, Media and Politics by Jules de Waart

Crisis or Hoax? Climate Change in Science, Media and Politics by Jules de Waart (Bookbaby, 372 pages)

In a recent article entitled ‘The Devil’s Algorithm: Unplugging from the Climate Matrix’, I wrote:

The world is trapped in a digital Matrix, not unlike the one depicted in the iconic 1999 film (The Matrix) where Morpheus offers Neo a choice: take the blue pill and remain in a comforting illusion or the red pill and confront the unsettling truth. The blue pill, in our case, is the dominant narrative on climate change, peddled relentlessly by mainstream media, tech giants like Google, social media sites like YouTube and artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT. This narrative — man-made global warming, caused by fossil fuel use, is an imminent existential threat — has achieved near-total dominance, suffocating dissent and sidelining credible scientists who dare question it.

One such credible scientist is Dr Jules de Waart. Born in Amsterdam, he studied physical geography with climatology as a minor at university. In 1971, he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the landscape development of southern France over the last 60 million years. In the 70s, he worked as an exploration geologist in Uganda and Congo for several years, then returned to the Netherlands and became a civil servant at the Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Hygiene. He was politically active, a member of the Labour Party and served as spokesman for the environment and for development cooperation.

He published Crisis or Hoax? Climate Change in Science, Media and Politics and, except for a short entry by Marcel Crok in the contrarian website Watts Up With That?, one looks for reviews of his book in the mainstream papers in vain. Quite unlike the book How To Avoid Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, who never earned a degree in the social or physical sciences and made his fortune developing software. Adulatory reviews of the Gates book abound in the media (here, here and here), despite the obvious shortcomings of the amateurish attempt by one of the world’s richest men.

Crisis or Hoax? arrives not as another pamphlet in the overcrowded literature of climate polemics, but as a long, reflective and unusually self-aware intervention by a scientist-politician. It is a book written less to persuade than to understand — and therein lies its ‘red pill’ strength. In an era where climate discourse has hardened into moral catechism, de Waart insists on returning to first principles: what science can say, what it cannot, how uncertainty is managed — or abused — and how politics and media have come to dominate ‘settled science’.