Cool It is an interesting book.  It is clearly written, absorbing and informative about global warming. Lomborg finds things are not so bad.  Yes, there is global warming and sea levels are rising, but the enormous powers fossil fuels have given us make these problems manageable.  The alarming stories told by Al Gore about polar bears being driven to extinction and coastal cities drowning are highly unlikely. The weakness of the book is that Lomborg is too absorbed by statistics.  Doesn’t he know they are merely the manure of machinery only fit to nurture still more machinery?  This dependence has left him deficient in human qualities such as malice.  After exposing Al Gore’s wild exaggerations about global warming, Lomborg could at least have followed through, for malicious readers like me, by repeating the size of “Mr. Save the World’s” house and his enormous use of electricity.  Enough house and power for ten families, or maybe twenty. Long on reason and always careful to make the judicious choice, Lomborg doesn’t understand what I have noticed during forty years of alternative energy work.  Under the spell of big business and government we are forgetting whatever is simple and works.  We are forgetting day lighting, clothes lines, foot traffic, passive heating and cooling.  Lomborg puts in special type his advice: all nations to commit themselves to spending 0.5% of GDP in R&D on non-carbon emitting energy technology.       Who pays for this?  Taxpayers?  Who runs the R&D? Government Departments of Energy?  His recommendation is absurd.  He has his head up his statistics.  Lomborg wants every country to focus on its own vision.  What can he mean?  People have visions, but not governments. Like the environmentalists who attack him, Lomborg will not be involved directly in any solutions.  They will advise. He and his critics both have faith that we need centrally planned societies guided by computer models.  They have little concern for liberty, traditions and private enterprise. Steve Baer October 2007