"Cool It!" 

Author :Bjørn Lomborg

Originally published: Jan. 1 2007

Publisher : Cyan and Marshall Cavendish

Paperback : 304 pages

This is one of the few books that all of our members and fans alike should read. Global warming has become unfortunately and for the masses such an incredibly irrational issue. Its an burning issue in bringing more awareness to our project in general, and this book brings a rational, objective voice to the debate. This book is meant to cool everyone's temper on the issue (hence the name 'Cool It'), and provide logical solutions to the problem.

Lomborg a sitting member on UN planning committees argues that we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches (such as massively increasing our commitment to green energy R&D) that will allow us to deal not only with climate change but also with other pressing global concerns,further discusses the following: global warming is caused at least partially by humans, but dealing with it by means of extreme CO2 cuts it not a viable solution. Instead, he argues that using our world's resources to solve other world problems, such as disease and poverty, will have an incredibly larger benefit to the world in the long-term, and will in turn put us in a better position to deal with a world that is slightly warmer than it is now. He argues that we should continue making our technology more environmentally-friendly, but that suddenly making all technology have no environmental impact (as some environmentalists want) is completely unreasonable. 

Lomborg supports his position with a tremendous amount of evidence, cost-benefit analyses, and references. To give an idea of how much his argument is supported, this book has 164 pages of actual content, and there are approximately 450 citations and 400 references. Of course, we can't browse through all of them to see how valid they are, but of the few dozen that we checked they seemed quite reliable. However, there are some claims that I found somewhat hard to believe, such as what is predicted by the various models of climate and human condition that Lomborg references. For example, Lomborg claims that humans will be richer in general over the coming century, which we find somewhat believable, but we find it hard to believe the precise numbers that he gives from the models of the worldwide economy that he references.

As I mentioned, we recommend this book to you and those on either side of the debate on how we tackle these issues present and future. You might not believe all the claims made in the book, but it definitely provides an excellent and fresh alternative viewpoint on the subject. The book is short enough to be accessible to almost anyone, yet it doesn't miss any important aspect of the issue.