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Book review by guest poster Matthew Simmons
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Having scraped my way through the first couple of chapters of Cool It, my first thought by way of review was simply “Chatty”.
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Then I thought, no, this is an opportunity to sound off, stick with it. And I did try. But frankly it’s a bit boring, unless you’re interested in arguing about economics, particularly the economics of Kyoto (briefly: Kyoto will cost an enormous amount of money, and delay global warming by a few years - "for the first 170 years, the costs are greater than the benefits"). One point that sticks out is that Branson gave $3 billion to climate change recently. As the economics go, this is the equivalent of delaying climate change by about a day, in 2100. As I said to a friend who works in economic regeneration of SE London, think how much you could do with that money.
There is some good stuff in there, for example on urban heat islands, and how humans have adapted to the effects. Tucson has increased in temperature by 6oC in 40 years. Central Tokyo is some 12oC warmer than the surrounding area. Lomborg notes that the reasonable IPCC models suggest a 2.6oC rise over about 100 years. He also points out that much of this average global temperature increase will occur at night, in cold regions, or in deserts – i.e. in places where it won’t do us much damage.
A point of particular interest to me, after I stopped reading and started just flicking through, is on water shortages. “Al Gore tells us how the devastating drought and hunger just below the Sahara is not caused by nature, corruption or mismanagement. Rather, the more we understand about global warming, ‘the more it looks as if we may be the real culprits’”.
I wrote my dissertation on water supply in Africa, from a consulting engineer’s perspective. Everything I learnt suggested that the problem was with nature, corruption and mismanagement, and that there are sensible and logical ways of dealing with many of those problems (although corruption in Africa is rife, and how theory translates into practice is another matter). So I guess Lomborg is onto something, but as one observer noted, he is “an extrovert self-publicist, who most serious people prefer to ignore”.
I think the sad thing is, that while it is possible to ignore Lomborg, it is increasingly difficult for governments to ignore Al Gore and the carbon lobby growing around him. Lomborg cites myriad examples from Gore, most of which stretch and bend, if not outright distort many of the world’s problems. He cites other journalists who add to the hysteria, Monbiot for example.
It is an interesting book to flick through, and Lomborg does at times show why Time nominated him one of the most important living thinkers. Sadly, he is not one of the world’s greatest living writers. The most important message from the book is, hold on, let’s not panic about this; instead of assuming that everything we do and everything we have achieved is somehow wrong, let’s look at what we have learned and move forward one step at a time, instead of making rash decisions and choices that could make the situation worse. Which seems infinitely sensible, for when climate change is considered from the perspective of some other global problems - water sanitation, malaria, Clash of Civilisations, neo-conservatism, the Middle East crisis - it arguably pales into insignificance.
Unless of course you believe in Lovelock and Gaia’s revenge, and that the ice caps are going to melt. In which case the future is not bright at all, and perhaps we are all better off going to the pub and waiting it out (or at least waiting until the beer runs out). Which is exactly where I am going now I can put this book back on my shelf.
Matthew Simmons is a consulting engineer based in London.
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