Booker focuses his attention on the mother of all environmental scares: global warming.

This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history.

Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.

The book exposes the myth that the global warming theory is supported by a ''consensus of the world's top climate scientists''. It shows how the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is run by a small group of ''global warming'' zealots, who have repeatedly rigged evidence to support their theory.

But the politicians, pushed by the media, have so fallen for its propaganda that, short of dramatic change, our Western world now faces an unprecedented disaster.