Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future.

Kahn (Green Cities) takes a sanguine look at how cities will fare under climate change. He admits that global warming could be catastrophic, but "a small cadre of forward-looking entrepreneurs will be ready to get rich selling the next generation of products that will help us all to adapt" and that "the story will have a happy ending." Analyses of global cities yield such scattershot observations as that by helping people rebuild in disaster-prone areas such as flood zones, governments "actually put more people at risk;" that "due to its recent economic development, China will be spared horrible outcomes faced by other developing nations;" and that globalization will protect us against local agricultural failures (and if crops fail everywhere, entrepreneurs will have incentives to provide dried fruit instead of fresh). On how the urban poor will cope with climate change, Kahn shrugs his shoulders writing, "the truth is that this group has always faced hardship…the question is, how much worse will their quality of life be?" In comparison with the abundance of thoughtful and astute books predicting life under climate change, this one is remarkably shallow. (Sept.)