Climate-Sense

 Cool it

Bjørn Lomborg is the best-informed and most humane advocate for environmental change in the world today. In contrast to other figures that promote a single issue while ignoring others, Lomborg views the globe as a whole, studies all the problems we face, ranks them, and determines how best, and in what order, we should address them. His first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, established the importance of a fact-based approach. With later books, Global Crises, Global Solutions and How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, this mild-mannered Danish statistician has steadily gained new converts. Not surprisingly, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming will further enhance Lomborg’s reputation for global analysis and thoughtful response. For anyone who wants an overview of the global warming debate from an objective source, this brief text is a perfect place to start. Lomborg is only interested in real problems, and he has no patience with media fear-mongering; he begins by dispatching the myth of the endangered polar bears, showing that this Disneyesque cartoon has no relevance to the real world where polar bear populations are in fact increasing. Lomborg considers the issue in detail, citing sources from Al Gore to the World Wildlife Fund, then demonstrating that polar bear populations have actually increased five fold since the 1960s.

Lomborg then works his way through the concerns we hear so much about: higher temperatures, heat deaths, species extinctions, the cost of cutting carbon, the technology to do it. Lomborg believes firmly in climate change–despite his critics, he’s no denier–but his fact-based approach, grounded in economic analyses, leads him again and again to a different view. He reviews published estimates of the cost of climate change, and the cost of addressing it, and concludes that “we actually end up paying more for a partial solution than the cost of the entire problem. That is a bad deal.”

In some of the most disturbing chapters, Lomborg recounts what leading climate figures have said about anyone who questions the orthodoxy, thus demonstrating the illiberal, antidemocratic tone of the current debate. Lomborg himself takes the larger view, explaining in detail why the tone of hysteria is inappropriate to addressing the problems we face.

In the end, Lomborg’s concerns embrace the planet. He contrasts our concern for climate with other concerns such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, and providing clean water to the world. In the end, his ability to put climate in a global perspective is perhaps the book’s greatest value. Lomborg and Cool It are our best guides to our shared environmental future.

–Michael Crichton

Green Hell

From the Inside Flap,  Green Hell
Big Brother Has Turned Green

The environmental movement has cultivated a warm and fuzzy public image, but behind the smiley-face rhetoric of “sustainability” and “conservation” lies a dark agenda. The Greens aim to regulate your behavior, downsize your lifestyle, and invade the most intimate aspects of your personal life.

In this stunning exposé, Steve Milloy unveils the authoritarian impulse underlying the Green crusade. Whether they’re demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial, the Greens are envisioning a grim future for you marked by endless privation.

Steamrolling nearly all opposition with its apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom, the Green movement has gained influence throughout American society–from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country. And their plans are much more ambitious than you think, says Milloy. What the Greens really seek, with increasing success, is to dictate the very parameters of your daily life–where you can live, what transportation you can use, what you can eat, and even how many children you can have.

Citing the tactics and goals of Green groups as explained by their own activists and leaders, Green Hell demonstrates:

* How Green pressure campaigns threaten the safety of your home and your car, and public health overall
* Why the election of President Obama portends a giant leap forward for coercive Green policies
* Why Greens obstruct the use of all forms of energy–even the renewable sources they tout to the public
* How wealthy Green elites stand to profit fabulously from the restrictions and regulations they seek to impose on the rest of us
* How Green pressure campaigns are hamstringing the military and endangering our national security
* Why big business is not only knuckling under to the Greens, but is aggressively promoting the green agenda to the detriment of its own stockholders
* What you can do to help stop the great Green machine

A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive takedown of the entire environmental movement, Green Hell will open your eyes to a looming threat to our economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.

 An appeal to reason

From Publishers Weekly
Former British energy secretary and chancellor of the exchequer Lawson succinctly lambastes global warming hysteria in this slim book. To Lawson, save the planet is the most ludicrous slogan ever coined; Al Gore’s tendentious documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is a fanciful cherry-picking of phenomena illustrating a predetermined alarmist narrative; and the new religion of environmentalism contains a grain of truth—and a mountain of nonsense. Lawson’s tone is occasionally shrill, but his insights are keen and refreshingly iconoclastic. He argues that green protectionism, the movement to restrict importing produce because of the incurred food miles, damages the global economy more than global warming ever could, and the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world. Lawson reserves his deepest contempt for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-winner with Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which he dubs an unethical, politically correct pressure group whose most recent report misrepresents the reality of man-made greenhouse gas emissions and fails to embrace the potential of humans to adapt to climate change.

The conservative (and Conservative) author’s contrarian synthesis of political thinking and economic analysis is notably well argued and well written—and sure to raise the hackles of those on the other side of the issue. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
‘Splendid … elegantly written, thorough, entertaining and, above all, convincing’ – Financial Times. ‘Clear, analytical and compelling’ Economist. ‘ This is a fascinating tome, the best exposition of the sceptical view on global warming that I have yet come across. It is comprehensive, packed with useful and clearly referenced facts and refreshingly free of the fanatical tone that plauges so many works on the subject’ – Literary Review. ‘It is intensely refreshing to find in Nigel Lawson someone who, without claiming to have all the answers, is at least brave enough to ask eminently sensible questions’ – Spectator. ‘Only one senior political figure in Britain has dared stand apart from [the] stifling orthodoxy: Nigel Lawson’ – The Telegraph. ‘A valuable antidote to the sloppiness surrounding climate change. This short book forces a rethink not only of some of the more alarmist predictions of global warming theory, but also of the fundamental underpinnings of the theory itself’ – The Mail on Sunday. ‘I’m dismayed to discover that I agree with considerable amounts of what Lawson is saying’ – Sunday Times.

The incorrect guide to global warming

The Left’s last best chance to gain a stranglehold on our political system and economy

For decades, environmentalism has been the Left’s best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small. It’s for Mother Earth! It’s for the children! It’s for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares they’ve trumped up haven’t been large enough to justify the lifestyle restrictions they want to impose. With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only “global governance” (Jacques Chirac’s words) can tackle such problems.

Now, in The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Christopher C. Horner tears the cover off the Left’s manipulation of environmental issues for political purposes–and lays out incontrovertible evidence for the fact that catastrophic man-made global warming is just more Chicken-Little hysteria, not actual science. He explains why, although Al Gore and his cronies among the media elites and UN globalists endlessly bleat that “global warming” is an unprecedented global crisis, they really think of it as a dream come true. It’s the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government. For, as Horner explains, if global warming really were as bad as the Leftist doomsayers insist it is, then no policy imaginable could “solve” it. According to the logic of the greens’ own numbers, no matter how much we sacrifice there would still be more to do. That makes global warming the bottomless well of excuses for the relentless growth of big government.

Horner (an attorney and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) reveals the full anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human agenda of today’s environmentalists, dubbing them “green on the outside, red to the core.” He details how they use strong-arm legal tactics–and worse–against those who dare to point out the weakness of their arguments for global warming. Along the way, he explodes ten top global warming myths, carefully examining the evidence to determine how much warming there really is and what is actually causing it. He exposes the lies that the environmental lobby routinely tells to make its case; the ways in which it is trying to impose initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol on an unwilling American public; and much more–including the green lobby’s favorite politicians (John Kerry, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and others).

It’s time to stand up to the environmentalist industry and insist: human beings are not the enemy. In breezy, light-hearted, and always entertaining fashion, The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming and Environmentalism gives you the facts you need to do so.

Chilling Stars

The authors explain their theory that sub-atomic particles from exploded stars have more effect on the climate than manmade CO2. Their conclusion stems from Svensmark’s research which has shown the previously unsuspected role that cosmic rays play in creating clouds. During the last 100 years cosmic rays became scarcer because unusually vigorous action by the Sun batted away many of them. Fewer cosmic rays meant fewer clouds–and a warmer world. The theory, simply put here but explained in fascinating detail, emerges at a time of intense public and political concern about climate change. Motivated only by their concern that science must be trustworthy, Svensmark and Calder invite their readers to put aside their preconceptions about manmade global warming and look afresh at the role of Nature in this hottest of world issues.

About the Author
Henrik Svensmark leads a group examining the Sun’s effects on the climate, at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. He has published 50 scientific papers on theoretical and experimental physics, including six landmark papers on climate physics. Nigel Calder has spent a lifetime spotting and explaining the big discoveries in all branches of science. He served his apprenticeship as a science writer on the original staff of the magazine New Scientist and was the magazine’s Editor from 1962-66. Since then he has worked as an independent author and TV scriptwriter. He won the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science for his work for the BBC in a long succession of ’science specials’, with accompanying books. His most recent book is Magic Universe (OUP, 2003), a comprehensive guide to modern science, which was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize for Science Books.