CONTENTS
Title Page
Author Profiles
Preface: The Doomsday View of the World
Foreword
Introduction • Stanley Feldman & Vincent Marks
SECTION 1: CO2 & GLOBAL WARMING
1 Global Warming • Stanley Feldman
Greenhouse Gases • Stanley Feldman
3 The History of the Atmosphere • Stanley Feldman
4 Is Global Warming Manmade? • Stanley Feldman
5 The Global Ice Caps • Stanley Feldman
6 The Economics of a Warmer Earth • Stanley Feldman
SECTION 2: THE EPIDEMIC OF OBESITY & MATTERS OF HEALTH
7 Good Foods, Bad Foods Stanley Feldman & Vincent Marks
8 An Epidemic of Obesity? • Vincent Marks
9 Health Foods and Superfoods • Vincent Marks
10 The Food We Eat • Vincent Marks
11 Labelling and Legislation • Vincent Marks
12 What Really Causes Heart Attacks? • Michael Smith
13 Metals and Myths • Andrew Taylor
14 The Next Great Plague • Rodney Cartwright
15 Electricity and Leukaemia • David Jeffers
SECTION 3: GRIDLOCKED BRITAIN: A TRANSPORT POLICY?
Introduction • Stanley Feldman
16 A Policy for Transport? • Paul Withrington
17 Road versus Rail • Paul Withrington
18 Light Rail, Trams & High-Speed Trains • Paul Withrington
SECTION 4: QUESTIONABLE DOGMA
19 Recycling Rubbish • Eamonn Butler
20 Unsustainable Arguments • Austin Williams
21 The Ethics Industry • Stanley Feldman
22 Globalisation • Stanley Feldman
Efficiency or Effectiveness? • Vincent Marks
24 Population • Vincent Marks
Epilogue: Why Do We Believe It? Stanley Feldman & Vincent Marks
Appendix
Further Reading
Copyright
EAMONN BUTLER is director of the Adam Smith Institute, an influential public-policy think-tank based in London. Non-party and non-profit, the Institute promotes free-market ideas and explores ways of introducing choice and competition into public services. Butler himself is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, and began his career working on policy issues for the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC. He is the author of books on famous economists including Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and a book on how markets work, entitled The Best Book on the Market.
RODNEY CARTWRIGHT qualified in medicine from Birmingham University in 1963. After various clinical jobs, he specialised in medical microbiology that led to his appointment as director of Guildford Public Health Laboratory and a consultant microbiologist at the Royal Surrey County Hospital. He worked closely with the University of Surrey, where he became an honorary visiting professor. Cartwright developed special interests in the epidemiology and prevention of travel-associated infections and water-borne diseases and became a medical adviser to the tourist industry and many British water companies. He is still an independent medical adviser to the UK government’s Regulator for Drinking Water Standards. His wider interest in public health resulted in his serving as a trustee and council member of the Royal Institute of Public Health and as Master of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers.
STANLEY FELDMAN gave up working for his biochemistry thesis on the metabolism of the wood louse to study medicine in 1950. Qualified (hons) Westminster Medical School 1955. Trained as anaesthetist at Westminster Hospital. Learned research techniques as a Fellow University Washington USA 1957–58. Senior Lecturer Postgraduate Medical School, 1962. Advisor in Post-Graduate Studies Faculty Anaesthetist 1965–70. Visiting Professor Stanford University USA 1967–68. Higginbotham Lecturer Dallas, Frederickson Orator Emory University. Member Senate University London, Chair of Anaesthesia University London at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical Schools (later Imperial College School Medicine). Research adviser Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital 1994–97. Author/Editor: 12 text books in anaesthesia, including Scientific Foundations of Anaesthesia, Mechanism of Action of Drugs, Drugs in Anaesthesia, etc. Editor Journal, Anaesthetic Pharmacology. Contributor Encyclopaedia Britannica. Published over 100 peer-reviewed papers on molecular mechanisms of drug action, the evolution of animal life and science education. Recent publication From Poison Arrows to Prozac, 2008, John Blake. Panic Nation (with Vincent Marks), John Blake, 2005. Life Begins, 2007, Metro Books.
DAVID JEFFERS began his engineering career as a college apprentice with Metropolitan Vickers and he was working on nuclear power station construction in the heady days of the early 1960s, when nuclear electricity was going to be too cheap to meter. After Berkeley Power Station was commissioned, he joined Manchester University as reactor engineer on the joint Manchester and Liverpool Universities’ research reactor. Jeffers completed a PhD in nuclear engineering while working there but, after this period in academe, industry beckoned again and he transferred to the Central Electricity Generating Board’s (CEGB’s) Scientific Services Department, which provided technical backup to the power stations in the Northwest. He became controller of scientific services in the Northwest and then director of design in the CEGB’s Transmission Division. Between the privatisation of the industry and his retirement in 1999, he was the National Grid Company’s consultant on electric and magnetic fields.
VINCENT MARKS graduated in medicine from Oxford in 1954. He took up a consultant post in Epsom at one of the largest clinical laboratories in the Southeast of England, where he established the first drug-screening laboratory in the country in addition to continuing his clinical work into the study of metabolic disorders. He moved in 1970 to the University of Surrey in Guildford as its first professor of clinical biochemistry and subsequently became its first dean of medicine. Marks is known internationally for his research on insulin and hypoglycaemia. He has published numerous books and monographs including Insulin Murders and Panic Nation for non-specialists.
MICHAEL SMITH, emeritus consultant physician to Royal Surrey County Hospital, Guildford, qualified in medicine in Newcastle in 1957 and held junior posts in professorial departments of paediatrics and medicine and a year with Dr Henry Miller in neurology. After two years of national service with the RAMC, he returned to Newcastle as registrar and then was appointed as research registrar at the Royal Postgraduate School of Medicine. Smith spent a year as research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, developing an interest in diabetes, endocrinology and metabolic medicine. He was appointed consultant physician in Guildford. Undergraduate and later postgraduate tutor and regional adviser in postgraduate education. Honorary senior lecturer in biochemistry, University of Surrey.
ANDREW TAYLOR is a consultant clinical scientist in the Clinical Biochemistry Department at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford