by Gregory McNamee The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate, by Ross Gelbspan (Addison-Wesley). Cloth, $23. FOREST AND GRASS fires rage through Mongolia and Texas. Killer heat waves fell hundreds in Calcutta and Chicago. Floods consume Nepal and Oman and North Dakota. Deserts form in Greece and Spain. Yellow fever-bearing mosquitoes move into the highlands of central Africa and Costa Rica--and the Sonoran Desert. These and countless other alarming recent incidents form the backdrop for veteran Washington Post reporter Ross Gelbspan's book on the politics of global warming, a subject that excites considerable controversy. Gelbspan opens with a dire scenario about the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, ranges over a discussion of the so-called greenhouse effect, and looks at the apparent alteration of the globe's normal weather cycles in recent years. These matters have been reported only glancingly, Gelbspan maintains, adding, "The truth underlying the increasingly apparent changes in global climate has largely been kept out of public view." The reason for this, he continues, is that the multi-trillion-dollar oil and gas industries have conspired to keep the public from knowing about that truth. That hypothesis, on the face of it, may just as well come from Oliver Stone's paranoiac notebooks, but Gelbspan does a good job of backing it up. He goes on to examine the energy industries' financing of reports that deny the disappearance of the ozone layer and other manifestations of human-caused climatic change, charging that the science in those reports is suspect and tainted by big money. Gelbspan's own command of the relevant science seems a little fuzzy at times, if far better than industry apologist Rush Limbaugh's, and the reader is left to judge just how evil the energy companies' acting out of clear self-interest really is. Still, it all adds up to an interesting polemic. And Gelbspan gives a good account of alternative-energy programs, which he urges be given greater funding priority. With the proper tax incentives, he holds, "climate-friendly energy technologies could instantly become competitive with fossil fuels"--a useful bit of news for those of us who live in the Sonoran Desert, where solar energy ought to reign. Is the sky falling? After reading this book, you might be inclined to think so. Whether you buy Gelbspan's thesis or not, it makes good fodder for argument.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth