Book review: Winter Games
At 59 degrees Fahrenheit ambient temperature, without warm clothing or movement, your body temperature will drop, keep dropping and you’ll die in less than a day. 59 degrees Fahrenheit is also what climate scientists claim to be the average temperature of our planet which, they also claim, is burning up. This is a key premise of Daniel Church's Winter Games, which starts out with a surfer suffering from hypothermia and leads onto a protest that will hopefully turn the tide of climate doom.
I found this an enjoyable read most of the way through and it is indeed an easy read. To a certain extent it has the whiff of a docudrama about it, with its asides concerning the state of climate science – the way that data is distorted by dropping past temperatures to make it look like there has been a steady climb to present temperature, being just one example. This is all pretty old news to me, ever since I started reading into the science more deeply several decades ago.
My interest had been prompted by a doom-mongering article, which shrieked about a huge sea level rise, but, unusually, quoted some figures. It only took a few minutes with a calculator to discover that the awful fate that the article implied was just around the corner was 14,000 years in the future. Thereafter I read and watched the long catalogue of lies and data manipulation that have led us where we are today: Climategate, the Mann Hockey Stick (where he tried to lose the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period), Al Gore’s film (where he pointed out a correlation between CO2 rise and temperature rise in ice core data but neglected to mention CO2 rose an average of 800 years AFTER the temperature rise), and the exposure of the Urban Heat Island Effect, which should have led to the dismissal of the whole warming farrago, but instead, after the scientists ‘homogenized’ the figures, resulted in it being ‘worse than we thought!’
I would recommend this book to those who would like some of the arguments against climate doom in an easily digestible fictional form. It’s a bit of an antidote to the "burning earth as accepted knowledge" idea you’ll find in most of what’s out there. It illustrates the craziness of killing our energy systems to stop a fire that simply is not occurring. It brings to light the fact, so often ignored, that cold kills orders of magnitude more people than warmth. It shows us the pressure scientists are under to conform – how they can lose their livelihoods and even their lives if they do not. And it shows us how the media, as we are discovering nowadays, are hardly the arbiters of truth. However, it does have flaws.
In the last quarter characters were dropped in who should have been introduced earlier, including, to my mind, an unnecessary villain. I understand the quandary faced here, because I’ve faced the same in one of my recent books. It’s difficult to tell a satisfying story when the villain of the piece is not a singular character to be defeated. In Winter Games, the true villain of the story is a system, a conjunction of media looking for drama and scientists looking for fame and consequent pay cheques, the growth of a zeitgeist about climate practically transforming into a religion that cuts down heretics – in this case rational scientists who see through the bullshit. I also note that the writer wanted to bring about a happy ending, when this would have been brought to a close better on the death of someone who had chosen to die, and from there opening out into the dystopia we might well be facing.