My brother’s response was immediate. “Ned, don’t be silly. There are thousands of scientists who all work for the United Nations. They all agree that, in fact, human emissions are a real problem for the climate.”

At the time I was brand new at this whole climate controversy, so I had no answer because back then I barely understood anything whatsoever.

So when my brother said “What do you know?” that was kind of the end of it. 

But if somebody said that to me today, I would have had a response, because now I understand in depth the science and the politics of this issue.

In the subsequent days and weeks, my skepticism didn’t go away for me.

At first I had the thought: well clearly I just don’t understand this sufficiently to respond in any reasonable way to what my brother had said.

Then I thought about more about it. The year before, The Wall Street Journal had spoken out against the Kyoto Protocol regarding climate policy. The newspaper had been skeptical about the scientific claims of climate change. I had enough connection to the political views of The Journal to decide to pursue this further.

So I did a lot more reading.

I saw my brother again about a year later, in 2002. I said I’ve done a lot more reading on this climate issue. I’m still really interested in it and if you’re open, I’d like to tell you what I’ve learned.

We had another conversation about the climate issue, but with much more depth.

One of the things he said was that he really didn’t know anything about climate; that as an environmental scientist it was just normal to say the standard view within the environmental community, that human activity is causing climate change, and that climate change is a problem. He just goes along with the standard view.
My brother studies birds and biodiversity, so it wasn’t surprising that he held this standard view.

After more conversation, he eventually said that there’s some plausibility to what I was suggesting, based on the scientific perspective that I was sharing.

He even shared with me how in his own experience as an environmental scientist he had had to deal with political considerations.

The fact that my brother, a PhD, one of the leaders in his particular field of science, acknowledged that what I had learned and what I was saying sounded valid to him, gave me a real boost.  

That inspired me to keep going and keep trying to understand the science issues.

To be honest, before I found Taken by Storm, I was seriously thinking about going back to graduate school, studying environmental policies, then writing a book just like that one.

I felt that for a lay person it wasn’t easy to find a complete view of the whole climate controversy. You could look for articles about it, but you couldn’t find it all in one place.

But when I found this very well written book, I decided I could just read this one. And the climate issue was just going to be a hobby. I would read about the science and policy, and happily debate climate issues with others.

I decided to become an “Amateur Environmental Policy Analyst.”

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