Annette Saliken is a car lover. Until recently, she drove a BMW sports car. Before that she owned a new SUV and before that she drove another new SUV. But after she completed her master's thesis on global warming, she sold her Beamer. Now the Kitsilano resident walks and takes transit.

But you won't find even the teensiest mention of this in her Cocktail Party Guide to Global Warming. With her first book, Saliken's kept herself completely out of the picture. Instead, she outlined the fundamentals of global warming so readers can reach their own conclusions.

Saliken was motivated to write the guide after hearing misinformation swirling around her at a cocktail party in Vancouver for members of her master's of business administration grad class from Royal Roads University. The Vancouver Island university is home to the first MBA school in Canada offering core courses about sustainability to teach business leaders how the environment and making money can be complementary.

Saliken noted that people were having a hard time putting the various "sound bites" together, despite being inundated with news about global warming, climate change, greenhouse gases and alternative energy. So she strove to lay out the links in layperson's terms.

Hers is not the first book to explain global warming for non-scientists, but Saliken said a book like Global Warming for Dummies starts with the assumption that humans cause global warming. "I really back it way up and start at the very beginning," she said, noting readers of her book are meant to decide for themselves what they believe.

"Right now, most climate experts do believe that humans contribute to global warming, however they're not a hundred per cent sure," she said. "So that's why it's important to look at the evidence and be able to make those decisions on the evidence that's available."

A common misconception is that pollution causes global warming. "While all pollution can be harmful to our health and environment, it is specifically greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming," Saliken writes in her book. "In fact, some pollution causes global cooling. Therefore, if governments impose regulations on certain types of air pollutants instead of greenhouse gases, they could unwittingly reduce global cooling and increase global warming."

Saliken's 175-page paperback, which she will launch in Vancouver tomorrow, has become the number one bestselling global warming book on Amazon.ca in just a few weeks.

Saliken, a technical writer for 24 years who specializes in marketing communications, wrote Cocktail Party Guide to Global Warming in a year after completing her thesis. She said she enjoyed interpreting thousands of pages of scientific data from credible sources such as the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization in 1988.

Her final chapter on alternative energy ends the book on an uplifting note. But with all her detailed research, is Saliken truly optimistic about our ability to address global warming? "The solution will probably not be in one particular alternative energy. I think that it will end up being a mix that will together, as a combination, be potentially a solution for global warming in our lifetime," she said. "Human beings pulled it together to solve the ozone problem, and I think we can pull it together to solve the global warming problem, too."  Read rest...

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