So far, so charming. The conversation then took a tougher turn when the black-robed figure began holding forth proudly on the vast sums of money which had been spent on the monastery at the behest of Vladimir Putin — turning the island into a place where the president and his elite guests could make comfortable and high-profile visits. Ash couldn’t help asking her companion whether he considered the president a holy man. “Only God knows that,” was the artful reply. But the results of this high-level patronage were visibly impressive. As Ash notes, it has been calculated that $700,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on the island for every member of a brotherhood supposedly devoted to asceticism and prayer; and Russia’s federal grid has supplied the 200-strong community with enough power capacity to meet the needs of a small country.

The post-communist transformation of Valaam island — from a harsh, romantic outpost into a slick and ruthlessly administered showpiece of state largesse — is one of many arresting stories told by Ash in The Baton and the Cross about the trajectory of Russian Orthodoxy since the fall of the atheist regime. Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the resurrection of Christianity felt to its participants like a valiant and counter-cultural enterprise. But with every passing year, a de facto partnership between the Patriarchate of Moscow and Russia’s earthly powers became more evident — especially after 2012 when Patriarch Kirill, having initially kept a little distance from the Kremlin, emphatically swung behind Putin and helped to ensure his re-election. In return, hundreds of millions of roubles were made available for the construction of churches and other projects that burnished the Patriarchate’s prestige and property empire.

As Ash argues, Patriarch Kirill’s strident support for the war in Ukraine — and the harsh disciplinary measures applied to priests who question this line — are only the logical culmination of an ever-tightening relationship between Church and State. Church-state interconnections in the land of the eastern Slavs have taken a bewilderingly wide variety of forms, but there is a common theme. In every era of Russia’s evolution, not excluding the Soviet one, ways have been found for earthly rulers to turn the soft power of religion to their own advantage.

Ash is not, of course, alone in making that observation. The great Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  remarked that his country’s history would have been “incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries… if the church had not surrendered its independence and [had] made its voice heard among the people as it does, for example, in Poland”.

And yet, as a careful reading of her account will also make clear, Russian Orthodoxy does not — even today — begin or end with its use as a tool of state power. There is more to the story than that.

To put matters at their very broadest, any religion, passionately embraced, gives people a motive to sacrifice personal interests and even their lives; that is one reason why earthly rulers find religion’s use so attractive. But faith also gives people the courage to oppose state power, at vast personal cost, in ways that send a dazzling moral signal. As it happens, Orthodox Christianity has inspired not only the most pliant servants of Vladimir Putin but also his most doughty opponents.

Take one well-known example: during his trial in 2021, Alexei Navalny made clear that a vital part of his own personal story was evolution from the militant atheism of his youth into a morally and politically engaged understanding of his country’s historic faith. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”, was one of the Biblical maxims which inspired the awesomely brave corruption fighter who died in an Arctic prison in February 2024.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an equally courageous challenger of the Putin order, had good reason to anticipate a similar fate when, in a letter from prison in November 2023, he lamented Patriarch Kirill’s moral support for the invasion of Ukraine. The dissident couched his argument in spiritual terms. “As an Orthodox Christian, this brings me only pain, grief, and deep sorrow,” he wrote. At the heart of Christianity, he added, was the rejection of murder and violence: this made it all the more deplorable that Church hierarchs “had placed the authority of Caesar over the foundations of the Christian faith”. Kara-Murza was one of 16 prisoners released to the West in a prisoner swap in August; until his liberation he was preparing himself for imminent death in jail.

Looking way back through history, it turns out there are some striking examples of tsars who thought they could turn the Church into an efficient instrument of their own power but found that the results were quite unexpected. Start with Ivan the Terrible, who held sway from 1547 to 1584 and was admired by Stalin for his savage purges and persecutions. If anyone stood up to Ivan’s murderous rampages, it was a turbulent cleric, Metropolitan Philip, who was duly imprisoned and strangled. But Philip lives on in Church history as a saint and martyr while only a lunatic fringe of religious ultra-nationalists (who do exist, unfortunately) unconditionally revere his sadistic tormentor.

Then in the 18th century, modernising emperors like Peter and Catherine imagined they could curb Orthodoxy’s mystical and monastic tradition and turn the church into a Protestant-style enforcer of morals and state loyalty. But these efforts — like the vain attempt to cure Father Iosif — were unsuccessful. Instead, there was a strange countervailing reaction. In various remote outposts of the empire there was a kind of mystical resurgence, featuring saintly ascetics and monastics with prophetic gifts — a phenomenon which inspired writers like Dostoyevsky and hence gained an unlikely place in the history of world literature.

Those three tsars — Ivan, Peter and Catherine — are worth mentioning because they are the Russian rulers Putin most admires, according to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and hence took as his lodestars when invading Ukraine. Putin may imagine those monarchs as people who successfully and seamlessly harnessed Russia’s spiritual heritage — but if so, he is misinformed.

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Another unexpected twist in Russian spiritual history occurred during the death-throes of the tsarist era with the maelstrom of the Revolution and civil war. This febrile climate had an extraordinary effect on Russian religious thought, generating the so-called Silver Age whose intellectual protagonists creatively synthesised their faith with socialist atheism. That movement would, in turn, make a powerful contribution to intellectual life outside Russia.

Driven westwards by the Bolsheviks, that diaspora’s brainy, quarrelsome thinkers went on to electrify the tired worlds of French Catholicism and Anglican academia. Take the philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov stands out among the thinkers who on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution abandoned secular socialism and then looked for ways to link their spiritual heritage with a practical concern for human welfare. He co-founded the Anglican-Orthodox fellowship which led to a surge of overblown excitement about a possible rapprochement or even reunion between two major segments of Christendom and had a profound impact on former leader of global Anglicanism, Rowan Williams. Amidst huge controversy, Bulgakov also foreshadowed feminist theology by reflecting on “holy wisdom” as a distinctly female form of divine power, which features rather mysteriously in Orthodox iconography and liturgical poetry. And for French thinkers like Jacques Maritain, nurtured on the medieval worldview of Thomas Aquinas, the Russian sages arriving in Paris were an exciting mixture of tradition and creativity.

Of course, not all Russia’s religious philosophers managed to escape the Bolsheviks — some, like Pavel Florensky, were among the millions of souls, including tens of thousands of priests and bishops, who perished in successive waves of repression. But those victims had a posthumous moral influence on religious thought in freer places.

In the story of Bulgakov’s friend Mother Maria Skobtsova, Russian Orthodoxy can also offer an anti-Nazi morality tale. An unconventional nun, she ran a shelter and soup-kitchen for the homeless. Having experienced the civil war in southern Russia and then a series of personal tragedies, Mother Maria had an ocean of empathy for the vulnerable and suffering — and responded positively when Jews came to her Parisian shelter asking for false documents that would help them to escape Nazi round-ups. It was for these acts of compassion that she, her son and two other associates paid with their lives. She was deported to the Ravensbrück death camp where she was executed on Easter Saturday of 1945. Among her legacies was a devastatingly accurate observation of various forms of misguided piety that she observed in her compatriots — from militaristic forms of faith to excessively ascetic and other-worldly varieties.

In short, the Russian Orthodox tradition should, from its own treasure chest, be able to offer a rich and powerful critique of the compact Putin has fashioned with an apparently docile church. It is too early to tell what opposing trends might be triggered by the present cosy and calculating relationship between an ostentatiously pious war leader and his clerical cheerleaders. But history gives us plenty of reason to suggest that Patriarch Kirill’s proclamation of Vladimir Putin as “a miracle of God” will not be the last act of the current drama. If anything can heal the pathologies now afflicting Russian Orthodoxy, it might just be the spirit of Saint Philip or Mother Maria.

I was reminded of Havel’s greengrocer when reading The Right To Sex, a much-lauded new book on women and feminism by Amia Srinivasan — the holder of Oxford University’s prestigious Chichele professorship of social and political theory, a position previously held by luminaries such as Isaiah Berlin.

Despite — or perhaps because of — her standing, she opens the book with a statement typically found in the preface of any contemporary woke writing about women; I’ve come to think of it as a direct equivalent to the greengrocer’s poster:

“At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

Yes, commissar, the statement says, the definition of “woman” in my book about women is “anyone who identifies as a woman”. No, commissar, biology is not a thing.

That politically essential disclaimer out of the way, Srinivasan dives into the messy business of sex and feminism. Is it possible, she asks, to make the “sexual marketplace” more welcoming to people who are not conventionally attractive — without telling people who they should or shouldn’t shag? Can we make porn less harmful to young people without banning it? Can we chart a course between believing women who make sexual assault accusations and avoiding miscarriages of justice — which might disproportionately impact minorities?

The Right To Sex has been breathlessly received by all the usual bellwethers of correct opinion. A gushing profile in Vogue promised that The Right to Sex “will radically change the way you see feminism”. Corbynite clickbait queen Ash Sarkar tweeted a photo of it as “absolutely extraordinary” beach reading. And the Ground Zero of gender-woo fog-weaving, the queer theorist Judith Butler, lauded the book (somewhat ironically, given her own notoriously impenetrable prose style) in the New Statesman as a beacon of “clarity”.

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And indeed, taken one at a time, Srinivasan’s sentences are models of clarity. Taken together, though, her paragraphs and overarching arguments are not. One lengthy section — the coda to the book’s titular essay — dispenses with even the pretence of a sequential argument, instead offering some 40 pages of numbered paragraphs responding to critiques of The Right To Sex. And even where the text is arranged as a sequential argument, Srinivasan piles references together with examples and musings usually without bothering to spell out what they imply.

Instead, what we get is rhetorical questions. Sometimes several are arranged in a row, with none answered directly. “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas?” she asks. “Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?” We are left to speculate on how Srinivasan would actually answer the questions she poses.

Was this, I found myself wondering, the result of woolly thinking on the author’s part? This seemed unlikely, given Srinivasan’s successful career as a philosopher, an occupation that demands verbal precision. Rather, the cumulative impression is of intentional evasiveness. A tiptoeing across the minefield of contemporary debates about desire, personal autonomy, prostitution and exploitation. But is this mindless conformity? I came to think it less a matter of Havel’s greengrocer, than of another twentieth-century thinker who lived through an era of sharp constraints on what may be said: the German philosopher Leo Strauss.

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For it’s one thing to be a shopkeeper, obediently sticking a poster up to signal compliance and a desire to be left alone. What if you’re a public intellectual? Few intelligent people hold unambiguously to the dogmas of the day, but where blasphemy incurs meaningful costs, communicating a less than flawlessly orthodox opinion in public writing is a risky business.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argues that writers in repressive social contexts have historically often conveyed a message at two levels. Where orthodoxy is enforced by persecution, Strauss argued, truth-telling can still be achieved by an author “provided he is capable of writing between the lines”.

A lazy read of The Right To Sex garners all of the orthodoxies we’ve come to know and love in elite woke feminism. Trans women are women; prostitution should be decriminalised; the solution to porn is not legislation but more sex education; hook-up culture is fine except when it isn’t, in which case it’s all men’s fault; anyone who isn’t bisexual should re-evaluate who they fancy in the light of identity politics. Each of these orthodoxies is presented with moral certainty, as simple statements: “Third wave feminists are right […] that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial labour undertaken by most women”.

But having made a simple statement of the official position, our lucid Oxford professor proceeds to convey a sense that everything around that position is hopelessly muddled. Sex work is work, but:

“to understand what sort of work sex work is […] surely we have to say something about the political formation of male desire. And surely there will be related things to say about other forms of women’s work: teaching, nursing, caring, mothering. To say that sex work is ‘just work’ is to forget that all work – men’s work, women’s work – is never just work: it is also sexed.”

If you take at face value the poster Srinivasan put in the window of her greengrocer’s shop, asserting her belief that biology is not a thing, parsing what any of this means beyond the initial assertion of orthodoxy is like nailing jelly to a wall.

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And I came to think that this is, in fact, the hidden structure in this seemingly structureless book: the repeated, maddening contrast between confident pronouncements of theoretical orthodoxy and miserable, inconclusive rummaging in the less than positive real-world outworkings of this orthodoxy. Read in this way, The Right To Sex is an accurate critical summary of woke feminism: clarity in theory, amoral mess in practice.

The text asserts that this mess can’t be solved, for to do so would be to embrace “authoritarian moralism”; but at the same time, the subtext demurs. Srinivasan approvingly mentions government interventions to force parents to accept state-sponsored sex education, or advertisers to create more “inclusive” marketing, policies with more than a striking resemblance to moral values imposed by authority.

The subtext, then, is that authoritarian moralism is good, but we can’t say so. The question is which morals? The things we can’t say in approaching this are hinted at in one of the book’s strangest and most Straussian glitches.

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Strauss suggests that one means a writer may employ to signal a double meaning is to present the orthodox position in flat, affect-less language that bores the reader, and the text’s real argument in vivid, thrilling, memorable terms. And just such a slippage occurs in Srinivasan’s abrupt gear-change from a language of bloodless abstraction to the mythic register of gods and monsters when discussing “patriarchy”.

“What,” Srinivasan asks, “does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?” The personification is startling against a backdrop of generally arid prose. What is this thing, “patriarchy”? How can an abstraction have a “mind” like some creature out of myth?

The careful reader, reflecting on this eruption of the mythic, might be drawn toward a question so profoundly un-askable under mainstream feminism that it could conceivably pose a threat even to shortlistings for appointment to (say) prestigious professorships. Is “patriarchy” not fact but mythology?

And if in fact there were no such thing as “patriarchy”, we might then speculate on what actually shapes the often difficult terrain of men, women and sex. And that in turn points to themes so glaringly absent from Srinivasan’s book it’s hard not to read it as pointed: biology, children, and love.

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You don’t get appointed to prestigious Oxford professorships without being both clever and canny. It’s now commonplace to acknowledge that the age of “free speech” is over, and The Right To Sex responds pragmatically to this state of affairs. It recites every conventional woke opinion the commissars could demand, while between the lines sketching the contours of an entirely different argument, conveyed in the only register such a thing could be conveyed in without trashing a prestigious career: esoterically.

And this shadow message implies many heresies: that the refusal to address love, biology, and children are driving us and our discourse mad. That loveless sex is hell. That pornography is hell, and is devastating young people, who long for loving sexual commitment. That trans women are not women. That “patriarchy” is a paper tiger. That there are irreducible trade-offs to be made between identity groups.

It’s of course impossible to know whether Srinivasan means this argument to emerge from her meandering if mercifully short volume. Given her prominent standing in an institution whose role is to shape elite youth into morally correct regime functionaries, she wouldn’t tell me if that were the case.

Either way, the esoteric reading is the more charitable one, so I’ll go with it. The alternative is that the youngest ever holder of Oxford’s prestigious Chichele Chair is peddling a poorly structured sheaf of arid witterings based on an incoherent worldview; is doing so under the name of “feminism”; and is being lionised for it in Vogue. I prefer to think someone of her evident wit and considerable prose skill understands exactly what she’s choosing not to say.

Most notably, scientists, like people, are social. If they exist in a social or professional circle that believes X, it is hard to say not-X; if they have professed to believe Y, they won’t want to look silly and admit not-Y. It might even be hard to get research funded or published if it isn’t in line with what the wider group believes.

All this makes it very hard, as an outsider, to assess some scientific claims. You can ask some expert, but they will be an expert within the social and professional milieu that you’re looking at, and who will likely share the crony beliefs of that social and professional milieu. All of which often makes it hard to disentangle why scientists do and say the things they do. Especially when it comes to scientific claims that are politically charged, claims on hot-button topics like race, sex, poverty — and of course climate.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I was reading Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled. Koonin is (as it says, prominently, on the front of the book) the “former Undersecretary for Science, US Department of Energy, under the Obama administration”. The publishers are obviously very keen to stress the Obama link: “…under the Trump administration” might not have carried the same heft.

Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be. The book itself is best thought of as the extended version of that op-ed, with added graphs.

We can break down his thesis into, roughly, three areas. One, is that despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence. In particular, floods, rainfall, droughts, storms, and record high temperatures have not become more common, and although the climate is unambiguously warming and sea levels have gone up, it’s hard to confidently separate human influence from natural variability.

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 Two, he says, climate models are highly uncertain and struggle to successfully predict the past, let alone the future, so we shouldn’t trust confident claims about the climate future. And if we do accept the IPCC’s predictions, they aren’t of imminent catastrophe. Instead, they point to slow change which humanity can easily adapt to, and, broadly speaking, to humanity continuing to prosper.

And three, he continues, there is basically nothing we can do about it anyway, partly because carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for so long, but mainly because the developing world is developing fast, and using ever more carbon to do so, and actually that’s a good thing.

These are — according to Koonin — all, by and large, only what the IPCC assessment reports and other major climate analyses say. The public conversation, which he says is full of doom and apocalypse and unwarranted certainty, has become unconnected from the state of the actual science. And he blames scientists — and policymakers, the media and the public — for that disconnection.

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So is he right? Certainly he has a case when it comes to Point One: I think he is correct that the media narrative about climate change is not especially well correlated with the IPCC’s own central assessments. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that the recent floods in London, China and Germany have been held up as examples of a changing climate. But the IPCC’s most recent assessment report, 2014’s AR5, found studies showing evidence for “upward, downward or no trend in the magnitude of floods” (see p214 of the AR5 Physical Science Basis document; be warned it’s a big PDF), and concluded that they were unable to be sure whether, globally, river floods had become more or less likely. 

Similarly, I think there is a perception among many commentators and policymakers that storms, hurricanes, and droughts are all more common as a result of climate change, but the IPCC’s own report (see p.53 of AR5) has “low confidence” that those things are more common than they were 100 years ago. I know some scientists think the IPCC is overoptimistic, but it is the closest we have to consensus climate science.

That said, there is some fairness in accusing Koonin of cherrypicking. He spends a lot of time arguing about extreme daily temperatures, convincingly (to my mind) debunking a claim in the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR), the flagship US government climate science assessment, that US extreme daily temperature records have gone up. In fact, CSSR is comparing the ratio of extreme high temperatures to extreme low temperatures, and what in fact has happened is that extreme low temperatures have become less common. Which is interesting.

But the IPCC does think extreme daily temperatures have gone up globally (see p53 again). In his chapter on “Hyping the Heat”, Koonin doesn’t mention the IPCC, and the IPCC outranks the CSSR. His detective work is interesting, but he is fighting a henchman, not the end-of-level boss. Maybe the IPCC is wrong as well, but we don’t learn that here.

On Point Two, I don’t feel competent to assess the models; certainly it seems highly plausible to me that there are enormous uncertainties in predicting something as inherently chaotic as the climate, especially when to do so you first have to predict something as inherently chaotic as people. But my non-expert understanding is that broadly speaking the models have been getting it about right. 

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That said, I think he is right that, if you were to ask the average person in my social circle, you would hear that climate change will lead to catastrophe in the near future. And I think that is overstating what the IPCC reports actually say. For instance, it is true that the IPCC predicts more people will go hungry than otherwise would have: it says that almost 140 million children will be undernourished, in a world where climate change goes unmitigated, compared to 113 million in a world where there is no climate change (see p730 of this IPCC report). But that is still fewer than went hungry in 2000 – almost 150 million, out of a much smaller population. The IPCC predicts that a world with climate change will be worse than one without; but not so much worse that other things, such as economic growth and technological progress, won’t broadly keep the big things, like life expectancy and human health, improving. That does seem worth saying.

And Koonin’s Point Three is worth making too. If India were to increase its per capita emissions to those of Japan, “one of the lowest emitting of the developed countries”, he says, then that change alone would raise global emissions by 25%[1.  He’s right. Japanese people emit about nine tons per capita, and Indians about two, so if 1.3 billion Indians started emitting seven extra tons a year, that’d be about nine billion tons on top of 2019’s 38 billion or so]. Realistically, we’re not going to be able to stop India — or China, or Brazil, or Mexico, or any of the other middle-income countries — from developing, and development at the moment means carbon. 

More importantly: we don’t want them to stop developing. Richer countries have healthier, longer-lived citizens and are better able to cope with a changing climate. Even huge, swingeing cuts to Western emissions — politically unrealistic — would only go some way to offsetting the inevitable growth in the developing world. Those cuts may be worth doing, but there are limits to how much good they can do.

But even if Koonin is right about almost everything — if the best guess of the science is that we’re heading towards things merely getting better more slowly, rather than getting worse — then I think he’s missing a major point. That is, climate change models are uncertain. In fact Koonin claims they’re even more uncertain than we think. So they could easily be erring on the side of optimism.

And the one thing we should have learnt from the Covid pandemic is that it’s not enough to say “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, so let’s act as if it’ll be fine.” The correct thing to say is “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, but if there’s a 10% chance that it’ll be completely awful, then we need to prepare for that 10% chance.” Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world reduces the chance of some unforeseen but plausible disaster: as a happy bonus, it makes our cities more pleasant places in which to live. It will come at some cost, but hopefully not too high, because green technology is getting so cheap and effective these days.

Reviews by climate scientists have been unimpressed. “I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist,” starts one review, which goes on to not ignore it. Another accuses him of cherry-picking his fights (not entirely unfairly, as I said). A third says the book is “distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified”. 

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But none that I’ve read really addresses the nitty-gritty of his arguments — which is hard to do in a 900-word review, of course, but still. They usually pick some line out of the first chapter or two, disagree with it, and then say the whole book is therefore rubbish. But I wanted a bit more meat to the objections. 

The third review, for instance, quotes Koonin as saying “The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” and then asks “According to what measure?” Well, Koonin tells you the measure, at length: absolute record extreme daily temperatures. Maybe he’s wrong, but he does answer that in the book. (And your next sentence is “Highest annual global averages?” He’s talking about the US! You just quoted that bit!)

Similarly, it complains that Koonin says that the sea is only rising about a foot per century, saying “The trouble is that while seas have risen eight to nine inches since 1880, more than 30 percent of that increase has occurred during the last two decades.” But again: Koonin addresses this, for pretty much an entire chapter. His point is that most of the rest of the rise came during an (unexplained by climate models, according to him) period of rapid warming from 1910 to 1940, before human influence should have been relevant. That, he says, is good evidence that natural variation is driving the current acceleration. Is he right? I don’t know. But the reviewer is not attacking Koonin’s argument at its strongest point. 

In fact, none of them seem to: they just want to dismiss the book. They attack Koonin’s credibility and credentials, his temperament. They say he was only hired by the Obama Energy Department because of his contrarian views; they call him a “climate denier”, which seems de trop since he accepts most of the central claims of the climate consensus. The response felt more like a circling of the wagons than a serious effort to counter a serious argument. After all, it is unpleasant to hear reasons why you might be wrong about something: cognitive dissonance is painful.

I started this book confident that climate change is a serious concern, and I finished it only slightly less confident; Koonin has not persuaded me. But I’m glad Unsettled, flawed though it is, has been written. As I said at the beginning, science in a politically charged environment is very hard to assess. Scientists are as prone to groupthink and motivated reasoning as anyone else, and I know very well that there are some who feel they need to keep heterodox views quiet. The reviews, which make so little effort to engage with the substance of the arguments, do not reassure me that climate science is a uniquely groupthink-free discipline.

One thing Koonin suggests is a so-called “Red Teaming” of climate scientists: getting scientists to act as adversarial critics of the existing consensus, a method used by superforecasters, among others, to improve their accuracy by actively hunting out flaws in their reasoning. Science can only progress if assumptions are tested. Red teams in climate institutions — any institutions — seem like a good idea, and I’d support them.

Whether it’s possible or not, of course, is tricky to say. The climate debate is so highly charged, so borderline toxic, that it might be difficult for any climate scientist to take on the red-team role without making their own life more difficult. According to Koonin, one senior climate scientist told him “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.” The old “in my emails, everyone agrees with me” line is hardly a new one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a bit of truth in it.

But if the Catholic Church was able to stomach someone advocating for the Devil, then climate science should be able to stomach one doing it for the sceptics. And in the meantime, this book does an acceptable job.