Harold Ambler Wikipedia

A pet peeve: People google me all the time with wikipedia or wiki in the search field, and the result often carries them to a skeptic-bating PR machine known as realclimate.org. Specifically, they are brought to that cute little part of the AGW citadel known as RC Wiki. Although yours truly is significant enough to warrant the compilation of venomous ad-hominem diatribes visitors find about me at realclimate.org, I’m not significant enough to have my very own Wikipedia entry. Thus the peeve. No one’s allowed to create their own page at Wikipedia (although clearly the rule is broken routinely), but funneling search results with a clever ruse such as realclimate’s is perfectly OK.

Anyway, if I did rate a Wikipedia page of my own, it’d probably contain information like what you see below. (If you want to buy my book on climate change right now, the button is over to the right of your screen. I admit it makes me deliriously happy to out-sell Real Climate’s Michael Mann. Was it he who created the RC Wiki file on me? Who knows?)

WIKIPEDIA

Harold Ambler (born 1965) is an American writer known for his work on manmade climate change.

Early Years

Ambler was born in La Jolla, California, in 1965. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto in 1983. In 1987, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in English; in 1989, he graduated from Columbia University with a master’s in English. At Columbia, where he did three years of additional work toward a Ph.D., his principal area of study was the work of Samuel Beckett.

Writing career

Harold Ambler, Yosemite, California, 2009

Trained at The New Yorker, he has written about the Olympics, the environment, boxing, rowing, surfing, chess, and urban renewal. In 2009, he published a book, Ever True, about the sport of rowing at Brown University. A reviewer observed: “Ever True also does a fine job addressing the intellectual tradition at Brown, and locates the personalities of the oarsmen and oarswomen in this context.”

In 2009, Ambler wrote the first skeptical look at climate change published by The Huffington Post. Entitled “Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted,” the article was the cause of a low-level uproar in the national media, getting reprinted in part in The Wall Street Journal, The National Review online, and elsewhere, and getting read on the floor of the United States Senate by Sen. James Inhofe. Ambler questions Al Gore’s knowledge of climate science in the piece and proposes a list of things that are wrong with Gore’s statement that “The science is in.” Writes Ambler: “First, the expression ‘climate change’ itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will.”

In 2011, Ambler published Don’t Sell Your Coat: Surprising Truths About Climate Change. The book’s chapters look at climate lingo, the role of the media in developing global warming hysteria, misunderstandings about the polar ice caps, the odd power granted computer models in the climate debate, the disproportionate influence of English-speakers in the development of the global warming narrative, “unsung heroes” that Ambler claims to have found among the ranks of skeptical climate scientists, an in-depth look at solar variability, as well as predictions of global cooling during the coming decades.

He has written that climate science is fraught with irony, listing several specific ways in which he believes it to be so, including the following: “Those who purport to love nature the most may actually fear it the most, and are in the midst of a terror-laden campaign to ‘control’ it via carbon modulation.”

Personal life

He lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two children.