They wrote a chapter on global warming despite knowing nothing about the subject. Their writing contains gross factual errors including the claims that the earth has been cooling for the past few years and that increased levels of atmospheric carbon do not necessarily warm the planet ceteris paribus. Brad Delong's post on the matter is pretty objective, and pretty damning.
"the cultural, economic, diplomatic, and ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. "
He's not talking about military power alone. His argument is that consensus among the four major world powers would be able to accomplish carbon reductions. It's a reasonable point.
Interpreting what someone says by dropping 4/5 of their argument isn't really grappling with it in good faith. Try, "I disagree that anything short of military force can accomplish meaningful international action on emission reductions."
In which case, assuming you actually believe this, you would be contradicting yourself and agreeing with DeLong that it isn't totally futile to expect concerted action to achieve significant emissions reductions.
All that being said, there are many cases of international efforts reducing the emissions of environmentally damaging substances (i.e. acid rain, ozone depletion) without resort to armed conflict. So I don't think your position holds up to the scrutiny of the real world. It feels more like an ideological reaction to the existence of global warming (which no-one seriously disputes these days) than an attempt to think through the underlying issues.
The first critique of Delong's blog is:
pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.
But the first reply from the author's in the NYTimes article makes it clear:
The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)
That being said can anyone provide the text of the "brief mention"?
The term "global cooling" has a dominant usage in public discourse. So does the term "global warming".
These guys are trying to weasel out of having written what they've written by claiming the words they use don't mean what everyone else uses them to mean. Which is funny, because not knowing the language of your field is arguably a sign of worse ignorance than getting facts wrong in good faith after doing serious research.
These guys are pandering to the market for global denialism because that market buys books. Nothing wrong with that, but people who know their stuff are dead right to eviscerate them in the NYTimes because it's a bad faith pollution of the public discourse. So bring on the down-modding guys, I've got plenty to burn.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-supe...
These guys deserve what they're getting. They should have stuck to small scale sociology in areas no-one else was much familiar with.