The sceptical literature on global warming is tiny and, to put it generously, of variable quality. Dissent from the received wisdom that climate change is a global emergency that calls for drastic remedies has been overwhelmed. The climate-science establishment is on board; so is the larger scientific community; and so, lately, are most governments, with Britain's leading the way. Now that the matter has been settled to almost everyone's satisfaction, sceptics are derided as "climate-change deniers" - akin to Holocaust deniers in their moral turpitude and refusal to face the truth. Increasingly, they talk to each other. Nobody else is listening. This is a shame, because on many points the sceptics happen to be correct. Nigel Lawson's short, splendid book on the subject can leave no fair-minded reader in doubt on that score. He points out that this was the first book he had trouble placing with a publisher. No British firm would touch it. You will have to read the book to understand how scandalous this is. An Appeal to Reason is elegantly written, thorough, entertaining and, above all, convincing. The foreword quotes a rejection letter: "My fear, with this cogently argued book, is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide market." Please, no more cogent arguments: what we want is prevailing orthodoxy. Lord Lawson is a former energy secretary and chancellor of the exchequer (a former journalist too), not a scientist - but then, as he points out, "neither are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter with far greater certainty than I shall do here". Typically, the genuine experts on climate science are cautious in their statements and honest about how little they know. Most of those who claim to speak on their behalf supply the certainty from their own resources. Lord Lawson appears to know the literature and draws on his experience as a policymaker and member of a House of Lords committee that reported on climate change. The science is clear, he says, that carbon dioxide warms the planet and that the amount of the gas in the atmosphere is rising. Exactly how much it warms the planet, though, is harder to judge. The climate system is complicated and the models far from perfect. The recent warming trend seems to have paused since 2000 - the models did not predict that. Projecting trends forward a century or more requires not just climate models but long-range economic forecasts as well (because emissions depend on economic activity). The uncertainties multiply. Still, suppose that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is right and temperatures will rise by between 1.8