Cooling the climate debate: in his new book, Bjorn Lomborg, the "skeptical environmentalist," demolishes the global-warming lobby's mythology and shows that efforts to curb carbon emissions are dangerously off-base.(Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming)(Book review)

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, by Bjorn Loreborg, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 253 pages, hardcover, $21.00.

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg made few friends among his fellow environmentalists when he burst on the scene in 2001 with the publication of his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. In that book, Lomborg undertook a wide-ranging review of environmental science and declared that the world's ecosystems were in much better condition than environmentalists and their allies in the scientific establishment and the press were willing to admit. The inevitable counterattack on Lomborg's credibility came from multiple directions at once, but was led by Scientific American, whose editor, John Rennie, spuriously dismissed Lomborg's assertion of scientific credibility. "Many people claim to have scientific arguments when they do not: creationists, ancient astronaut theorists and the like," Rennie wrote of Lomborg.

Not one to let a little criticism keep him down, Lomborg has continued to play the role of thorn in the side of the radical environmentalist movement. This is not, however, because Lomborg himself is not, in his own way, a radical environmentalist. He wants an international effort to solve global problems just as much as any other environmentalist. He is the leader, for example, of the Copenhagen Consensus, an effort to have 55 economists identify global problems and develop global solutions.

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What sets him apart, however, is his apparent dedication to separating science from propaganda. Policies, he seems to think, should be based on clearly established facts and not on irrational fears. The biggest of these irrational fears, at the moment, is the fear of a global-climate catastrophe. In fact, as Lomborg points out in his new book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, anyone who doubts the imminence of this predicted catastrophe and "does not support the most radical solutions ... is deemed an outcast and is called irresponsible and is seen as possibly an evil puppet of the oil lobby." But, as Lomborg points out in his book, such an approach is neither constructive nor based on fact. The truth, he says, is that there is little that can be done about global warming and that practically anything that is tried will be a colossal waste of resources.

The Real Impact of Warming

If there is a criticism to be made of Lomborg's approach to global warming, it is that he firmly believes that it is real. "That humanity has caused a substantial rise in atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels over the past centuries, thereby contributing to global warming, is beyond debate," he writes. That's not true, of course. There are any number of scientists whose work is related to climate who have found major shortcomings in the standard theory of human-caused warming.