Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Modern World 

by Paul McGoldrick

Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Modern World
by Rael Jean Isaac, Published by Heartland Institute
ISBN 13: 978-1-934791-37-0, paperback, 113 pp, $8.95, February 2012

Rael Jean Isaac has three degrees: a BA from Barnard College (Columbia University), an MA in English literature from John Hopkins University (Baltimore), and a PhD in sociology from City University (New York). She writes primarily on public policy issues and her publishers here, the Heartland Institute, are probably a logical output for her work. Heartland is a non-profit whose mission is “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.” One of their primary goals seems to be to foul any environmental laws and they pride themselves on their voluminous contacts with elected officials as well as their shaping of public opinion by “writing and placing dozens of letters to the editor and opinion editorials every week.”

The title of this book is derived from the work of Richard Landes (Boston University) who described apocalyptic movements in terms of the pro-Roosters and the anti-owls.

Dr. Isaac introduces her text – which is the length of a religious tract or an offering from the Scholastic Book Club – with the story of a Xhosa (anglicized in pronunciation as ‘Koosa’) fifteen year-old girl who issued a prophecy that if her people slaughtered all their cattle the white men would leave the country and everything would be restored as things were before. Her story is not exact. The Xhosa (of Bantu ancestry) were the principal African peoples who moved South from the Sahara. Their language, close to that of the Zulu, is renowned for the many consonants that are ‘clicked’ instead of spoken and among the famous in their tribes today is Nelson Mandela. When the white man came to South Africa it was first to The Cape, where the Dutch set up a replenishing port for their trade from the Far East. When the British arrived they pushed the frontiers of growth away from the coast, and before the prophetess Nongqawuse was born there were eight wars between the Xhosa and the British over territory for growing crops and raising animals.

In 1856 Nongqawuse was sixteen and believed she had received a message from her ancestors that abundance would come with all manner of food and clothing if they destroyed their cattle. Dr. Isaac believes this prophecy was successfully promulgated by her uncle but the Xhosa ignored her and it was, in fact, a tribal chief-of-chiefs, Sarhili, who killed his own cattle and then they came to believe that Nongqawuse really was an igqirha, a diviner or spiritual healer.

Isaac believes that our planet is likewise self-destructing by believing the promulgators of climate change (global warming to her, of course) and that as the “apocalypse bandwagon gets rolling…more and more people develop a stake in it" from government grants to scientists and subsidies to alternate energy projects. She repeats the frequently maligned University of East Anglia IPCC involvement as "climategate" even though facts have shown the accusations to be unfounded. She goes on, verbosely, to explain how Kyoto was a fake and why carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, blaming the rooster-Obama administration for its control. Obama is also blamed for mixed messages on nuclear power (at least he can pronounce nuclear, unlike owl-Bush) and for attacking coal, oil, and natural gas production. Fracking is justified while restricting areas of exploration is attacked.

Overall, Isaac is convinced in this sermon that global climate change is not based on scientific facts but on irrational and ideological non-science. The environmental movement only exists, she believes, to drive up the costs of energy for all of us, and as one chapter title states, “Do we want to live or die?”

It is really difficult to be polite about this book. How a sociologist is qualified to analyze scientific data is beyond me. The whole meandering narrative comes across as a conspiracy of its own from a group that is representing itself with this text as unwilling to understand science.