Climatology in The Books Store

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

(photo credit: Jonathan Exley)

If you think that global warming means slightly hotter weather and a modest rise in sea levels that will persist only so long as fossil fuels hold out (or until we decide to stop burning them), think again. In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world's leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters. By comparing the global warming projection for the next century to natural climate changes of the distant past, and then looking into the future far beyond the usual scientific and political horizon of the year 2100, Archer reveals the hard truths of the long-term climate forecast.

Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change--if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.

Revealing why carbon dioxide may be an even worse gamble in the long run than in the short, this compelling and critically important book brings the best long-term climate science to a general audience for the first time.

In the 1960s we were warned that the population explosion would lead to mass global starvation. In the 1970s we were warned that the planet was running out of natural resources and that world economic growth would grind to a halt within our lifetimes. When the planet's temperature, which had been gently rising for some 400 years, appeared to be falling again, scientists warned us that we were facing the disaster of a new ice age. In the past year, sensational warnings about climate change have dominated the headlines as we are told that global warming will have disastrous consequences in the very near future unless we take drastic measures now.

In this cautious and reasoned treatise on an issue that effects each and every one of us, former Energy Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Margaret Thatcher government years, Nigel Lawson, argues that it is time to take a cooler look at global warming. Lawson, father of famed cookbook author, looks at the facts behind the headlines and explains that science is only part of the story. For governments to make informed decisions about the path ahead they must listen to economists as well as scientists, utilizing economic forecasting to assess the likely evolution of the world economy, and even more urgently, economic analysis: what is the most cost-effective way of tackling this issue? We also need an understanding of exactly what measures are politically realistic on a global scale.

At a time when politicians and the media are stirring up public and political hysteria on the subject of climate change, Lawson has written a timely disquisition urging us to take into account all the facts in order to deal with the threat of global warming.