Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg (Knopf)

"Cool It" is not the first book Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg has written about global warming. Lomborg's heretical 2001 best-seller, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," drew a firestorm of nasty criticism and unveiled hatred from environmentalists and the global warming crowd because it said most of the bad effects of climate change have been grossly exaggerated. Named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2004, Lomborg -- a statistician by training -- believes global warming is occurring. But he also believes we should approach the problem rationally -- which means not wasting all our energy and resources today on global warming's long-run effects when there are more-pressing human-killing problems like malaria and malnutrition we should be addressing.

Q: What does “Cool It” refer to?

A: Well, of course it refers to the idea that we need to find a way in the long term to reverse global warming. But it also -- and perhaps more importantly in the current debate -- refers to the fact that we need to cool and temper our conversation on climate change. Right now there is a lot of hysteria going on, a lot of alarmism going on, and quite frankly, if we only hear one side of the story -- and often an exaggerated side of the story -- it’s unlikely we’ll make good judgments.

Q: Will you give us a brief synopsis of your book?

A: It tries to tell us three things. It first of all says global warming is real. The second point is to say that the effects of global warming are very often vastly exaggerated and one-sided and that doesn’t lead to good judgments. So that’s the third part, where I try to point out that we need a much smarter, much cooler way of talking about climate change and thinking about how we can do something about it in the long run. What I try to say is that we need to focus on things that are both cost-efficient and will solve climate change. Right now we talk about cutting CO2 emissions, which is expensive and which quite frankly will do very little good. What I talk about is cutting the cost of cutting emissions – that is, investing in research and development of non-carbon-emitting energy technologies like solar, like wind, like carbon-capture, energy efficiency – all these things. If we do that, we will leave a world where our kids and especially our grand kids will have a much easier time cutting their carbon emissions, simply because we’ve made it much cheaper. And therefore, both our kids and grandkids -- but also the Chinese and the Indians, who will be much richer in 2050 – will want to cut much more. So at the end of the day, it’s really, “Do we want to cut a little now at high cost or do we want to make sure the whole world will want to cut a lot at low cost because we’ve invested in research and development?”

Q: What is your position on global climate change?

A: I think it’s incontrovertible that it’s happening and that it’s at least partially caused by man. But it’s often vastly over-sold. The idea that we are going to see a 20-feet sea level rise is just simply not in the cards. The UN climate panel tells us it’s going to be about a foot. There’s a huge difference in telling us the sea level rise is going to be a foot over the next 100 years or it’s going to be 20 feet. One is a problem; the other one is a catastrophe. But it’s the problem that will actually happen. To put it in context, remember over the last 150 years sea levels also rose a foot. Yet was it something we noticed very much? Ask a very old person who lived through most of the 20th century what were the important things that happened and she’ll likely talk about the two world wars, the emancipation of women, and maybe the IT Revolution, but it’s very unlikely she’ll say, “Oh, and sea levels rose.”

Q: You aren’t a climate scientist and don’t even pretend to be one like Al Gore. What makes you qualified to write books about global warming?

A: Because I’m a social scientist and I’m a statistician and what I look at is “What are the social impacts of many of these things?” I simply take as a starting point what the U.N. climate panel tells us. But then I say, “We need to remember all the facts.” As I say, “The UN climate panel tell us one foot of sea level rise, so let’s not say 20 feet.” When the U.N. climate panel says we’ll see increasing temperatures that will mean that more people will die in heat waves. That’s absolutely true and everybody points that out. But of course increasing temperatures also means that fewer people will die in cold waves. And since in most parts of the world there are many more people dying from cold than from heat, we’ll actually see more people not dying from cold waves than extra people dying from heat waves. In the UK, it’s estimated that 2,000 more people will die from heat waves each year – a very much publicized fact. But we forget to hear that 20,000 fewer people will die from cold. That’s the point: I’m simply saying we need to hear both sides of that argument. It’s not a very complicated argument, but it’s one that’s absolutely necessary to hear.

Q: The reason we haven’t heard both sides of the argument, some of us would argue, is because the media has let us down by not playing fair and balanced.

A: The media, as you probably very well know, is not necessarily fair, because they love a good story which is often a bad story. I don’t think it’s because anyone is being inherently dishonest or trying to torture the facts. It’s much more that we as a human species have a tendency to only say, “Oh, my God what’s going to happen? Oh, bad things.” But perhaps we are forgetting to say, “If we are going to make good choices, we need to hear the whole story.” So I simply see this as a way of saying, “Oooh, let’s just remember that 2,000 are going to die from heat but 20,000 are not going to die from cold and we need both sides of that information.” Continued...