Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) – Review
Quite disturbing… he ignores many facts, and earns income by playing the skeptic game well. For example, with polar bears, yes, they were in a unstable state in the 1960s, and have quickly bounced back. However, their numbers are still quite limited, and a significant shift in climate that melts northern ice will clearly threaten extinction in the wild. It is nice to play the “cool head” image to the hilt, to get those who believe in left-wing conspiracy theories, and those who just don’t need to worry, to buy into the dangerous cool-aid newly promoted in this book. I do give the book the lowest rating because it is too dangerous – the author’s one legal point shows to be that thorough analysis should be done before acting. That usually applied to primitive windmill designs, and probably currently applies to the wild rush to create further biofuels. But I fear that the author is eventually selling his modest insight, and not an insight that is in any way unique to him, to the market place. No one is actively promoting panic – but gradually building a more sustainable economy, less based on declining external fuels, more based on plentiful sun and wind (and they CAN replace the large form of public energy requires in, for the example, the United Stated), does not sound like panic to me. It sounds like much-needed general sense.