September 13, 2007

I have Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist on my wishlist at Amazon. The author, a Danish statistician and former Greenpeace activist, set out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, who claimed that environmental fears were baseless and that the world was actually improving. To Mr. Lomborg's surprise, he found that Simon was mostly right. In today's WSJ, there is a review of Lomborg's new book, Chill Out.

From the review:

Mr. Lomborg--"liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace," as he describes himself--is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.

Need to pick up a copy of that one as well.