From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

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’.

De Waart is engaged in the essential task of disentangling empirical climate science from the ideological superstructure erected atop it. His method differs from Steven Koonin’s book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters. Where Koonin writes as a physicist correcting public misrepresentation of data, de Waart writes as a reflective chronicler of a long institutional drift — away from falsification, scepticism and open debate, towards consensus-by-acclamation and fear-driven policy. While both are scientists, Koonin’s role was as a professional science advisor as under- secretary for science under the Obama administration, whereas de Waart became a politician himself.

A book about climate — and about science itself

Crisis or Hoax? is expansive, almost encyclopaedic. It is divided into three broad parts: the first situates the modern warming period within geological and historical context; the second surveys the scientific foundations of climatology and related disciplines; and the third turns to climate policy in what de Waart calls the “Modern Warm Period”. This architecture mirrors the author’s core contention: that climate change cannot be understood in isolation from deep time, from the philosophy of science or from the political institutions that mediate knowledge into policy.

What distinguishes the book is not merely its scepticism toward the IPCC’s claims, but its sustained inquiry into why dissent has become taboo. De Waart is explicit that scepticism does not mean denial. He accepts recent warming. He disputes its attribution, magnitude and projected harms. Above all, he rejects the extraordinary policy certainties claimed on the back of probabilistic models and contested assumptions. In this sense, the book stands squarely in the tradition of Koonin’s Unsettled, which similarly documented how assessment reports, media headlines and political rhetoric progressively distort the underlying science.

But de Waart goes further back than Koonin, both intellectually and historically. He draws on the Royal Society’s founding motto Nullius in verba — take nobody’s word for it – to frame his argument: science advances not by authority or consensus, but by doubt, replication and falsification. The climate debate, he argues, has inverted this ethic. Consensus is treated not as a provisional sociological outcome, but as proof itself. Doubt is re-described as disinformation. Scepticism becomes heresy.

Alarmists, sceptics and the missing middle

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its refusal to caricature. De Waart describes both “alarmists” and “sceptics” as genuine scientists, often separated less by data than by priors, incentives and institutional pressures. His de-bunking of the so-called ‘97% consensus‘is measured but devastating. He dissects its methodological origins, its rhetorical uses and its near-total irrelevance to the actual scientific questions at stake — how much warming, driven by what causes, at what cost and with what human consequences.

Here the book resonates strongly with my earlier review of Koonin’s work, where the central indictment is not climate science per se but its politicised communication. Koonin showed how the IPCC’s own reports — when read carefully — undercut the apocalyptic headlines they inspire primarily through the IPCC’s politically-approved ‘Summary for Policy Makers‘(SPM) as amplified by the mainstream media’s alarmist soundbites. De Waart reinforces this point repeatedly, noting the IPCC’s Working Group reports that use careful language of likelihoods and confidence intervals. This is contrasted with the absolutist pronouncements of the SPR, politicians, UN officials and their stenographers in the mainstream media. The result is a widening credibility gap that erodes public trust not only in climate science but in science itself.

The tragedy, as de Waart sees it, is the disappearance of the middle ground: those uncomfortable with alarmism yet remaining to be convinced by radical scepticism. It is for this audience that the book is written. His tone is calm, occasionally weary, never shrill. He does not promise revelation or salvation. He promises context.

Models, media and the manufacture of fear

A recurring theme is the over-reliance on climate models — tools that are indispensable for hypothesis-testing, yet dangerously misused when converted into policy oracles. De Waart echoes a critique familiar from the sceptical literature: models ‘tuned’ arbitrarily to reproduce past temperature trends do not thereby acquire predictive authority over complex, multi-decadal systems. Their uncertainties compound, their outputs diverge wildly, and yet policy is increasingly framed as if these projections were engineering tolerances rather than speculative scenarios.

The media’s role in amplifying worst-case storylines receives sustained scrutiny. Extreme weather attribution as a basis for climate litigation, image-driven shock narratives and the uncritical repetition of activist claims all serve to short-circuit rational debate. The result, de Waart argues, is not informed consent but climate anxiety — particularly among the young — used to legitimise policies whose economic and social costs are rarely examined with rigour.

This analysis complements and in some ways deepens the criticism I levelled at Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Gates, for all his technocratic optimism, largely sidestepped empirical evidence from real-world energy transitions — Germany, California, the UK — where costs, instability and deindustrialisation have been anything but trivial. De Waart is candid: climate policy, as currently designed, risks becoming more disruptive than the climatic changes it seeks to avert.

Science, politics and the ‘double ethical bind’

Perhaps the most striking section of the book is de Waart’s discussion of Stephen Schneider’s infamous ‘double ethical bind‘ otherwise known as the ‘noble lie‘- the claim that scientists may need to exaggerate risks to mobilise public action. De Waart treats this not as a marginal curiosity but as a moral faultline. Once persuasion supplThis article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/02/05/this-book-by-a-dissenting-climate-scientist-is-the-perfect-red-pill-for-the-curious/ants truth-seeking, science forfeits its authority. Fear may win short-term compliance, but it corrodes the foundations upon which democratic legitimacy rests. The need for an objective weighing of costs and benefits for public policy formulation by politicians is thus dangerously obviated.

This argument aligns closely with Alex Epstein’s critique of what he calls the “anti-human” narrative of environmentalism. Epstein’s moral framework puts the focus on human flourishing, energy abundance and resilience. De Waart is less overtly philosophical, but the convergence is unmistakable: policies that impoverish societies in the name of speculative future harms violate both empirical prudence and moral proportionality.

Strengths — and limits

Crisis or Hoax? is not a book for the impatient. It repeats itself at times, it ranges widely and it assumes a reader willing to follow long chains of argument. Those seeking a polemical knockout blow will not find it here. What they will find is something rarer: an honest attempt to restore intellectual hygiene to a debate poisoned by moral grandstanding.

If there is a weakness, it lies perhaps in the book’s very moderation. De Waart documents censorship, career risks and institutional bias, but stops short of a full political economy of climate science — the funding incentives, regulatory capture and rent-seeking dynamics that increasingly shape research agendas. Others such as Tim Ball have ventured further down that path. Yet de Waart’s restraint is also his credibility.

The Good Red Piller

To ‘red pill’ someone is to set him or her free from the manufactured climate consensus, to be open to contrarian views and, in the process, to restore science to its proper place as a field of sceptical inquiry, not ideology. Jules de Waart has written a serious, humane and necessary ‘red- pilling’ book. It belongs alongside Koonin’s Unsettled and Epstein’s Fossil Future as part of a growing counter-literature that does not deny the climate changes but refuses to surrender science to ideology. In reminding us that uncertainty is not a bug but a feature of genuine inquiry, Crisis or Hoax? performs a service not only to the climate debate, but to the Enlightenment tradition itself.

At a time when dissent is pathologised and consensus fetishised, de Waart’s quiet insistence on thinking — slowly, critically, independently — may prove to be the most radical gesture of all.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/02/05/this-book-by-a-dissenting-climate-scientist-is-the-perfect-red-pill-for-the-curious/