In an issue in April last year, Time magazine published on its cover a photograph of a perplexed-looking polar bear on an ice floe. The polar bear is in danger of extinction, was the message. In his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore also included a scene of a polar bear drowning as his icy home melted. Lomborg dug up statistics and found that the polar bear population has actually grown from 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 in recent years. Polar bear numbers have fallen in only two out of 20 habitats. What is more, temperatures have fallen instead of risen in those two locations. Gore called the heat wave that swept across Europe in the summer of 2003 and left some 35,000 dead a "global warming disaster." In fact, the problem lies with cold waves, not heat waves. In Europe, about 200,000 people die every year from health problems caused by heat, but 1.5 million die as a result of cold weather.

Gore claims that as glaciers melt, sea level will rise 20 feet in 100 years, flooding Beijing and Shanghai. But Antarctic glaciers are growing bigger, rather than melting. As a result of global warming, the South Pole region has more snow. Some environmentalists argue that global warming will wreak havoc on farming. But as a result of global warming, some places are growing larger crops because carbon dioxide acts as "fertilizer."

Advanced nations signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, agreeing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2 percent from the level in 1990. It will cost US$180 billion annually, or 0.5 percent of the entire global GDP, to put this idea into practice. And yet it seems that such efforts won't be effective in halting global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body that received the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Gore, predicted that temperatures will rise 2.6 degrees by 2100. Even if the Kyoto Protocol is strictly followed, global warming will be postponed only by five years -- temperatures will rise 2.6 degrees by 2105, not by 2100, Lomborg says.

Lomborg stresses the need to divert the funds marked to battle global warming to more urgent projects. Every year, 4 million people die of malnutrition, 3 million of AIDS, 2.5 million from air pollution, 2 million from water pollution, and 1 million from malaria. By attempting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now in order to prevent a possible tsunami in Bangladesh 100 years later we will only spend enormous sums and achieve nothing. It would be much more effective to help Bangladesh develop economically and improve its ability to build dams 100 years from now. Global warming also spreads malaria. Diseases in Africa can be cured if only through better medical services. Lomborg also emphasizes that global warming can be prevented only if we invest 10 times as much money -- $25 billion per year -- as we do now in science and technology and on research for energy alternatives to fossil fuels.

Lomborg is a pain in the neck for scientists who try to snag research funds by exaggerating the dangers of global warming, and media companies that make it a point to sell news. The chairman of the IPCC even compared Lomborg to Hitler. "What is the difference between Lomborg's view on humans and Hitler's?" he said.

Not all that Lomborg is saying may stand to reason. It is not certain that once they exceed a certain level, carbon dioxide levels may snowball beyond control. Nobody can be sure that sea levels will never go up 20 feet. But in many cases, those who put forth plausible-sounding theories turn out to be contradicting themselves. Gore has called for using power-saving fluorescent lamps. He has three houses. One of them in Nashville has 20 rooms and eight restrooms and used 20 times as much electricity as an average American home last year. He needs to listen to Lomborg's advice to "Cool It."