Cold Facts

            Cool It:

The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

by Bjorn Lomborg

Knopf 272 pp. $21.00, Reviewed by Jonathan Kay

            AMONG ITS fevered champions, the campaign against global warming has come to resemble a re­ligious crusade. Militant activists present the fate of a warming world as a sort of secular "end of days," and cast their own efforts in corre­spondingly messianic terms. Al Gore, declaring that he is fighting to ensure "the survival of our civi­lization and the habitability of the Earth", congratulates himself and his followers on the "compelling moral purpose" of their "genera­tional mission." As for the heretics who oppose this new religion, woe be unto them. The top scientist at the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has likened some critics of the Kyoto Protocol, the main international agreement for limiting greenhouse-gas emis­sions, to Adolf Hitler.

            The Danish social scientist Bjorn Lomborg believes that such shrill rhetoric and emotionalism have made it impossible to have any kind of sensible dialogue about the issue. In Cool it: The Skeptical Environ­mentalist's Guide to Global Warm­ing, he attempts to bring the debate back to the cost-benefit analysis typically used to tackle environ­mental problems. Applying the calm utilitarian approach that was the hallmark of his groundbreaking 2001 book, The Skeptical Environ­mentalist, Lomborg systematically catalogues the economic and hu­manitarian risks of global warming,

Jonathan Kay is managing editor for comment at Canada's National Post.

[Wzięte z nr. 1 Commentary, 2008. Pismo żydowskich neo-konserwatystów. Świetne]

[Książkę The Skeptical Environ­mentalist mam, nawet dwa egzemplarze. Korzystałem z niej przy  pisaniu swojej „O Energetyce”. Mogę – ostrożnie – pożyczyć na krótko potrzebującemu. MD]