Return to Coronet Books main page

Global Warming
Apocalypse or Hot Air?

By Roger Bate & Julian Morris
May 1994
Institute of Economic Affairs
ISBN: 0-255-36331-1
54 p.
$14.50 Paper Original


The public is constantly warned that the pollution generated by economic activity constitutes a real threat to the survival of the human race. In particular, we are told, unless dramatic action is taken to curtail carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, climate change will take place that will have calamitous effects on standards of living in the course of the next century. At the slightest sign that governments fo not mean to press ahead with vigorous policies to reduce carbon emissions, cohorts of eco-doomsters rush to warn us that we are living on the edge of the abyss, that urgent action is needed to save the planet, that even if serious global warming is not certain it is quite likely and would be irreversible, so that - in the name of some so called 'precautionary principle' - immediate action must be taken to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change.

Environmental Science
Series: IEA Studies on the Environment