Back to taking no prisoners. Big time. Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer waste few qualifiers in spelling out their concerns over global warming as “key to the larger battle for global justice” and the need for an “historic compromise” between the world’s rich and poor. Climate change science? “In mercilessly numeric terms,” the consequences of warming “will become quite severe, and even murderous … the impacts will verge on the catastrophic.”

Unidentified climate “skeptics can go to hell, and we’re basically going to ignore them,” they say defiantly. They call their book “an argument, not an overview” and one aimed at making the case for climate equity. They hope for a technological redemption (“and doing so is not entirely mad”) but say what is needed goes well beyond the Kyoto Treaty rejected by the U.S. government.

“Put it this way,” Athanasiou and Baer write: “A climate treaty that restricts a Chinese (or Indian) to lower emissions than an American (or European) will not be accepted as fair and, finally, will not be accepted at all. Climate equity, far from being a ‘preference,’ is essential to ecological sustainability. At the end of the day, it’s just that simple.”

This small 173-page paperback is easy reading even on a reasonably short flight. Make no mistake about it: You’ll know where the authors stand in the first few paragraphs and find them true to that form throughout.

Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, by Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer. Seven Stories Press, New York, N.Y.; ISBN 1-58322-477-7; paperback; 173 pages.