The Global Warming Combat Manual describes the practical measures that readers can take in their daily lives to reduce their carbon footprints, while showing how to link one's personal choices with the big-picture science and the big-scale campaigns to combat global warming on the political, legal, economic, and technological fronts. The emphasis throughout is on practical tips for ways in which people can help combat global warming in their everyday roles as citizens, consumers, homeowners, employees, commuters, tourists, sportsmen, business owners, or farmers. Johansen—assisted by climatologist James Hansen's foreword and appendix—gives general readers the tools they need to calculate and put into action the most rational and ethical green choices.

Dovetailing the personal with the technological and public-policy dimensions, this book lays out the whole battery of existing, emerging, and speculative solutions for global warming. These range from the humdrum and easy (keeping your tires properly inflated), through the necessary and hard (retooling the ways you transport, house, and feed yourself for maximum energy efficiency and minimum carbon footprint). They also encompass the possible (switching over a large fraction of our carbon-based energy sector to alternative sectors based on biofuel, wind, solar, and geothermal power), the visionary (creating a bacterium that will consume CO2), and the improbable (deploying giant reflecting mirrors in space), as well as the weird and dangerous (pumping sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere).