… oh wait, the Latin for “queue” is going to be p3nis, isn’t it? This awesome borrowed gag having become totally unmanageable, I shall concede to your erudition, John. But Carlyle and Hegel are also both in there: and nasty or no, Chesterton is a great writer.

Yes, Quiggin want to commit some rhetorical violence and insist that Superfreakonomics – which I loath – equals contrarianism, and therefore erase contrarianism from polite society. For me contrarianism depends on the context so I disagree with Quiggin. There’s “good” contrarianism and “bad” contrarianism. Sometimes a contrarian is just a jerk. Sometimes they’re a truthteller who, say, put their job in jeopardy.

Tim Lambert managed to check off five squares of his denialist bingo card when reading Levitt and Dubner. Have a look at

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_superfreakon.php

to get a sense of how badly they mangle the science. They even manage to mischaracterize the position of the scientists they rely on for support.

Regarding contrarians, you might divide the group into successful contrarians who make good money at it, and loser contrarians who bash their heads against walls. The former are certainly to be suspected of being opportunists, lickspittles, sycophants, lackeys, running dogs, renegades, and so on. The rest of us are just self-defeating and deliberately annoying.

No it’s not.

Sorry. It’s a compulsion – having the character of duty – mirthlessly to perform certain obvious gags. The ritual observance of formalistic humour encodes, and to a limited degree sublimates, despair, grim stoicism and the recognition of a shared doom to remaining alive in dreadful absurdity. But I’ve said far too much already. How (rive) gauche. Sorry chaps, load of bollocks, carry on.

Unless of course you meant “reducing net CO2 emissions” and just didn’t say so.

I did, actually, since logically that’s what is required. But I do also happen to think carbon sequestration on the required scale is pure pie in the sky. I’d be happy to be proved wrong, but at the moment there’s nothing remotely resembling even a laboratory proof of principle for anything that could possibly be done on the required scale, within the required time frame, and without massive unintended consequences. And we don’t have time for decades of research and further decades of implementation.

This sounds a little a priori (the second half, that is). In theory we could also find or create carbon sinks that would allow CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere faster than it is added (until we reach the status quo ante, at which point we switch to “as fast as it is added” and maintain equilibrium). Of course making this not require more energy than we got from the CO2 in the first place will be a neat trick, but since there are already solar-powered CO2 fixers (i.e. plants and algae) there might be some way to grow, chemically separate (if we want to avoid burying useful phosphates, nitrates, or other non-CO2 materials in plant matter) and bury biomass. (And/or create fossil-like fuels from biomass, which would allow them to later be burned for no net carbon cycle effect.)

AFAIK research on these ideas is already underway, I don’t see why you would dismiss it a priori.

(Unless of course you meant “reducing net CO2 emissions” and just didn’t say so.)

Which is NOT Levitt and Dubner.

“Levitt and Dubner in particular may not have weighed in about Q1-3, but the people they are getting their “evidence” from (with the exception of some they have misquoted and mischaracterized in a blatant fashion) certainly fall into the community of denialists who have continually stayed just this side of advocating belief in perpetual motion machines by shifting to a less settled question at the last possible second.”

Which is not accurate. They quote people who are investigating technological means of inducing cooling specifically to counteract global warming. That isn’t 1-3 denialists at all. And the argument against it isn’t on the order of perpetual motion machines at all. It is an argument about costs and side-effects—exactly the same as with directly reducing carbon output.

(See for example the heavy resistance to nuclear power as a medium-term remedy. The argument isn’t that it wouldn’t reduce carbon output. Clearly it would. The argument is that nuclear power is otherwise too scary such that it outweighs the obvious carbon output difference that is available.)

But the problem is this—you simply cannot come to a useful convincing conclusion if you start by looking for a particular answer. Because unless the question is as settled as the laws of thermodynamics, you can always find some evidence of some almost certainly wrong position, or some problem with the currently accepted position. If you start with an obvious bias, and seek only evidence to confim your bias, you will almost certainly find something.

Basicallly, I have no reason to give any significant weight to the conclusions re: Q4 of people who were very busy arguing strenuously against the scientific consensus on the first 3 questions right up until those were considered so settled that it became hard to get media play outside of right-wing radio and fox news, or anyone with two neurons to to rub together to pay attention to you anymore. Those folks have demonstrated that they are primarily out to confirm their biases.

Levitt and Dubner in particular may not have weighed in about Q1-3, but the people they are getting their “evidence” from (with the exception of some they have misquoted and mischaracterized in a blatant fashion) certainly fall into the community of denialists who have continually stayed just this side of advocating belief in perpetual motion machines by shifting to a less settled question at the last possible second.