Chicken Little

“Though X is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.”

Isn’t this pretty much the definition of contrarianism?

If the claims of Dubner and Levitt about the worthiness of climate engeneering are so outrageously WRONG, then why serious thinkers, gathering in prestigious forums like “Copenhague Consensus”, say it isn’t?

http://fixtheclimate.com/component-1/the-result-prioritization/

I think you gotta give some credit to this type of solution or at the very least adopt a more “agnostic” instance related to it, otherwise you risk giving the impression that you are becoming a bunch of secular fanatics.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center assembled an Expert Panel to consider the research presented here. The Expert Panel of five world-class economists – including three recipients of the Nobel Prize – meet in September to deliberate and form conclusions about which solution to climate change is the most promising.

Economists – is there anything they can’t do?

Thiago Maciel Oliveira @3 and 4: I guess the second time really is farce.

Thiago, you would get a better response if you’d read the thousands of words written about the Copenhagen Consensus here and elsewhere. Also the thousands of words written about Levitt and Dubner. You clearly have rolled in here and read nothing anyone has said here before.

Shorter Lomberg: As long as we don’t spend money to fight child malnutrition, it would be wrong to spend money to stop global warming.

Mr. Walt, seems like you have a “Crooked Consensus” here?

Well, I don’t want to reopen old discussions here. I just invoked the “Copenhagen Consensus” to defend Levitt from rather vociferous critics like Krugman or Kolbert (whose text is the subject of the topic, btw). The way they both put the issue, it seems like there is a consensus that geo-engeneering is just stupid and reduction of carbon and methane emissions are the only possible solution to global warming.

And what is good to Antonio is also good to Shylock: aren’t some of you just being equaly repetitive, in the Levitt-Dubner uproar?

As a great thinker used to say: “Every unanimity is just stupid.”

BBC:

The American authors of Freakonomics are in the UK promoting the sequel, and are meeting David Cameron.

Of course they are. Should surprise noone.
Fraser Nelson appears to believe that they are restating ancient Conservative truths in modern, trendy language. Perhaps though that is the pitch their PR people have advised them to take for the UK market. The Tory resurgence is a news hook, without which a couple of look-at-me Yank contrarians might struggle to draw a crowd.

I see the contrarians have moved from “there’s no anthropogenic global warming” to “combating climate change is not worth the economic cost” to “with geoengineering, we can blithely carry on as before.” I suppose that’s progress.

Lomborg manages to combine all the worst faults of contrarianism with a pretence of seriousness.

One other thing from that article caught my eye:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind.

Ouch! And this was linked by Krugman and well-appreciated by our own JQ.

It is simply not the case that criticisms of the geo-engineering solutions that we highlight in the chapter arise because we get the scientific facts wrong, unless the critics think that any of the six statements above are false.

This is very much like saying that because

A) I like my room heated

and

B) that fire is hot

that I should set the room on fire. There are more than six things to consider.

Hail to “The Space Merchants”! That book should replace Orwell’s “1984” as “TSM” is about the United States, and “us.” It is not a book about “them” and “Oh, are THEY bad!”

Pohl, an ex-Red from the 1930s, had a fairly unique perspective about the absurdities of the Cold War, and far more faith in American capitalism to prevail over communism than the Red Scare mongers. That is a true irony. The book is clever, funny and above all profound in anticipating a corporatized culture.

Bravo for mention that wonderful book.

I loved Pohl’s “Day after the Day the Martians came” which I read eagerly with the rest of Ellison’s Dangerous visions when Garden City’s Science Fiction Book Club sent it out to me in 1967 I can admire Lomborg’s policy entrepreneurailism and if he gets any politiciams to ponies up monies for helping the poor in the world well then he derserves to take a bow before the audience but I won’t be attending the his tripumphal procession because he has misinterpreted science indeed misled lots of peopl.e in what is obviously a complex systems science plus his panel of experts have never predicted anything of great consequence and their disciplines do not include climatology. Now THERE is an interesting science! and it is getting past the time where wpoeple who want to comment should actually get up to speed on it. I’m a technological optismist myself — perhaps we can bioengineer a Petri dish gelly that can suck CO@ out of the air and produce gasolin, making it a closed cycle But then at 14 I wwas a sceince fiction freak. Until something like that happens, the Lomborgian apprach of cst-benefitting without including all the costs and all the benefits and/or by fudging on the monetary values is a form of terriblee intellectual harm.

There’s nothing like a global warming post to bring out people anxious to demonstrate the Dunning–Kruger effect, particularly in the comments to Krugman’s piece.

If we are in fact at the point of peak oil production, as some are now alleging, it will be interesting to see how the global warming dialogue changes.

Thiago Maciel Oliveira @22

Neither chiasmus nor Mill seem adequate shields against the charge, that dumping sulphur dioxide to attempt global cooling can only seem a bright idea on a very superficial analysis. I notice that in the NYT post/article/column you link, there seems to be no discussion of the effect that might have on ocean ecosystems. Given how little a sentence along the lines of “we anticipate criticism on the lines of acid rain, and counter thus” would cost, I can only assume that Levitt doesn’t find it worth his time discussing.

Stupid technological fixed are easy to come up with, and to think that such ideas are original but shouted down through inertia/closed-mindedness is plain hubris. It’s the less ruinous and more robust technical fixes that require consideration and experience, if such can be found.

Having not read Levitt’s work I am in no position to judge his intelligence, charm, learning, etc etc. I just don’t understand your seeming belief that we should hear him out because he is speaking against consensus, or “unanimity” as you (pace Mill) are metaphorically describing it.

You still haven’t said if it’s OK for us to accept the stifling consensus on electrostatic repulsion and models of nuclei, I notice.

As the years pass, I grow more convinced that the two most truly prescient and insightful SF treatments of environmental issues are Chad Oliver’s short story King of the Hill (1972, in Harlan Ellison’s amazing anthologyAgain, Dangerous Visions), and John Brunner’s 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up

That is to say, I can no longer find much reason for optimism.

As regards geoengineering, there are safer options. Solar-powered fog-producing ships circulating in the Arctic Ocean could counteract the decrease in albedo of the melting ice cap in a local, scalable, temporary fashion. Photovoltaic canopies over parking lots or freeways in the southwestern US would provide both shade and juice. Sheer spectacle is the sole advantage of artificial volcanic pollution.

“Pohl, amazingly, is still active and alive. ”

And I suppose he must take a grim satisfaction in living to see the meat and oil run out as predicted.

36 – I find Soylent Green a comforting fable. The scary part of the story was that all the humans in it still behaved as if it was the XXth century. In the end we’re all going to die so we’d better be rational about it and optimize the part where we live, that is including the part where we are young & don’t want to continuously be in an open geriatric ward (consider the ‘we’ there as a veil-of-ignoranced ‘we’).

nick s – I e-mailed both the Scoopies and McFall regarding the Freakonomics seminar in Westminster, and got a reply from one of McFall’s functionaries. The Scoopies have not got back to me as of yet. One of McFall’s staff replied to me:

“The meeting with Steven Levitt did not focus on climate change. Mr Levitt did not mention that particular chapter in his book until Mr McFall asked him to explain the chapter and the reasoning behind it, given the controversy surrounding it.

Furthermore, by hosting the meeting with the Henry Jackson Society, Mr McFall was in no way endorsing or agreeing with the views of the authors. Indeed, by hosting the meeting, Mr McFall intended to give an audience in the House of Commons (which included a number of MPs) the chance to question those views, as well as to give the authors a chance to respond to their critics. He does not necessarily share their views on climate change or any other subject.”

Sounded like a “just wanted to start a conversation” platitude, really.

Hellblazer @31:

Here is the controversial chapter five of the book Superfreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner: http://enviroknow.com/2009/01/14/superfreakonomics-chapter-5-what-al-gore-and-mount-pinatubo-have-in-common/

Remember that even the rather partial Elizabeth Kolbert recognizes that Levitt and Dubner “have a point” when they emphasize that “It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don’t want to stop, or aren’t willing to pay the price.”

I anticipate that geoengeneering discussions (stupid or not) will increasingly pervade public debates about climate change, as more and more it will become clear that people and nations — alas! — simply aren’t eager to sacrifice their style of life for medium/long run/future generations gains. Specifically, the developing world will not do it.

Call people and nations short-sighted. And that’s exactly what they are: Jared Diamond explained in his book “Collapse” that since Neolithic Period Homo sapiens have sistematically impoverished his environment, and that civilizations as ancient as Maya have succumbed to a kind of malthusian-ecological collapse.

The last ten thousand years since agricultural revolution do not authorize overly optimism about the prospect of our species dealing well with climate change merely on behavioral adaptation basis. Maybe is time to seriously discuss “not-so-politically-correct” issues like: “Are politicians in a representative democracy ready to deal with problems that concern vast temporal horizons, since they are mainly responsive to short sighted electoral polls?” and “Can geo-engeneering be our way out?”

Would not it be hilarious (and somewhat tragic) that maybe we’ll have to “terraform” Earth itself?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming
Terraforming (literally, “Earth-shaping”) of a planet, moon, or other body is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth to make it habitable by terran organisms.

The term is sometimes erroneously used more generally as a synonym for planetary engineering. The concept of terraforming developed from both science fiction and actual science. The term was coined by Jack Williamson in a science-fiction story (“Collision Orbit”) published during 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction,[1] but the concept may pre-date this work.

Freshly Squeezed Cynic @44.

Well. We are what we are. In my humble opinion, the concept of “terraforming Earth” is tragicomic — to the same extent that “Brave New World” is a tragicomic novel.

And your procedure of dismissing your interlocutor as a “sociopathic twat” remembers me what Bauman once said about — let’s put it mildly, hehehe — truth being “an eminently agonistic concept.”

“When it comes to disputing truth, the chances for an ‘undistorted communication’ as postulated by Jürgen Habermas become slim. The protagonists will hardly resist the temptation to resort to other, more effective means than the logical elegance and persuasive power of their arguments. They would rather do whatever they can to render the arguments of the adversary inconsequential, better still inaudible, and best of all never voiced in the first place due to the incapacitation of those who would have voiced them if the could. One argument that will stand the greates chance of being raised is the ineligibility of the adversary as a partner-in-conversation – due to the adversary being inept, deceitful or otherwise unreliable, harbouring ill intentions or being altogether inferior and substandard.”

Thiago Maciel Oliveira wrote:

I anticipate that geoengeneering discussions (stupid or not) will increasingly pervade public debates about climate change

I expect so too — it’s becoming increasingly clear that this is one of the positions that the right-wing and denialist camps will retreat to once “global warming isn’t a problem” becomes completely untenable.

as more and more it will become clear that people and nations—alas!—simply aren’t eager to sacrifice their style of life for medium/long run/future generations gains. Specifically, the developing world will not do it.

If people repeat this enough, then “people and nations” might begin to think that they have to make huge sacrifices and see little benefit. Perhaps we should present a realistic cost/benefit analysis to them instead of telling them in advance what conclusion they will draw. Estimates tend to be on the order of 1-2% of GDP, or of slowing down economic growth on the order of 1 year over the course of decades. Mitigating climate change will take a major effort, but it really isn’t all that expensive. Not that anyone can expect a casual consumer of the news to know this, since the right-wing voices are constantly reiterating that we can’t expect people to make this terrible sacrifice (and completely avoiding any mention of the costs of inaction).

This is all aside from the fact that the “solar radiation management” approach to geoengineering could wreak utter havoc on the global climate in ways that we don’t understand.

I’ve argued that Levitt-Dubner’s claim are not so “ludicrous” as Krugman at alii seems to imply.

Everyone else has pointed out that they are. Time to take note of that.

Job @ 50:
That was an unwise choice of words. I didn’t imagine some people would judge unhilarious the notion of “Terra-forming Earth” (“Terra” meaning literally “Earth”, in Latin).

Substance McGravitas @ 49
That is a hyperbole.

Is there a term in logic for the opposite of “argument from authority”, i.e. when someone claims that because the people that study and investigate something says that X is most likely true, that fact alone implies that X is therefore most likely false?

Ironically, it’s called The Galileo Gambit

The last ten thousand years since agricultural revolution do not authorize overly optimism about the prospect of our species dealing well with climate change merely on behavioral adaptation basis. Maybe is time to seriously discuss “not-so-politically-correct” issues like: “Are politicians in a representative democracy ready to deal with problems that concern vast temporal horizons, since they are mainly responsive to short sighted electoral polls?” and “Can geo-engeneering be our way out?”

Fad diets are objectively a better solution to obesity by this standard than exercise and calorie counting. Even if they don’t work at all, they have the appearance of sudden action.

Also, using the term “politically correct” means your entire statement is vacuous. Sorry!

Fad diets are objectively a better solution to obesity by this standard than exercise and calorie counting.

Yes, and “short sighted electoral polls” are so much less reliable than the short-term planning of those who have purchased enough political cover to avoid pricing in negative externalities, which the rest of us will have to pay for them.

Damned democracy, getting in the way of our Natural Leaders.

JM @56:

I’m not against representative democracy because I concur with Churchill’s witty statement that it’s “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

But it has many shortcomings like giving too little weight to medium/long run environmental policies that imply present costs. The benefits of this kind of policy are diffuse and its targets often haven’t born (or can’t vote) yet.

The following article by The Economist magazine gives an example of the shortcoming at issue: http://rss.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13824446
A recent study of some 300 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Science, shows that deforested areas enjoy a short economic boom, then quickly fall back to previous levels of development and productivity as the frontier moves on.

However it is very difficult to break down this vicious cycle, since local elections at Brazil occur every four years and the economic boom lasts twelve to sixteen years, according the article. Therefore politicians are not willing to interrupt the relatively short-lived “boom” as they won’t reap any political dividends from their good actions (quite the contrary).

I should add, for those who aren’t familiar with him, that Heinlein was something of a myopic libertarian extremist.

So just as it is unfair to blame science fiction, it is also unfair to blame Dubner and Levitt’s myopic libertarian extremism. I say: blame arrogant assholishness.

So just as it is unfair to blame science fiction, it is also unfair to blame Dubner and Levitt’s myopic libertarian extremism. I say: blame arrogant assholishness.

It’s amazing how many of my favorite childhood sci-fi authors were fascists of one sort or another. I guess I was too young to detect that among all the competitively selected, genetically superior, steely-eyed defenders of civilization they kept writing about.

@JM: You didn’t get a hint that Heinlein might not be 100% correct when he implied that you can tell how morally and spiritually “advanced” a man is by how well he kisses?

John Emerson @65
Unless you are sending a new species of meta-referential trolls, hehehe.

Lee A. Arnold @67
It was not just Economist’s “error” as Danish government co-sponsored the original project. Your harsh verdict against Copenhagen Consenus is… er. TOO harsh. Even critics like Henry Farrell recognize that the project has produced “a set of well-informed papers, and thoughtful comments, dealing with some of the most serious problems facing the world, and assessing some possible responses.”

But it seems you have already discussed at length all issues Copehangen-Consensus-related so that in order to avoid criticisms a la Walt @9 (“Thiago, you would get a better response if you’d read the thousands of words written about the Copenhagen Consensus here and elsewhere. (…) You clearly have rolled in here and read nothing anyone has said here before.”) I will follow Hamlet’s last words in this issue.

I find the geo-engineering approach as somehow an alternative to slowing carbon emissions to be bizarre. If we were going to attempt geo-engineering at any level, the first essential foundation would be vastly better models of the effect on the atmosphere. After all we have empirical evidence to check our CO2 models against, it took us thirty years to get where we are today. How do we predict what happens when SO2 is being spewed out?

Its not just the global warming you have to get right, you have to make sure that you do not cause another environmental catastrophe that you hadn’t expected.

There is a reason we no longer favor using introduction of non native species to control some pest. Too many histories of habitats destroyed introduced species by well meaning types who trusted that no bad results could come of good intentions.

It really isn’t that difficult to meet the C02 targets, wind power is capital intensive but dirt cheap to run. We currently have an economy that has huge amounts of unoccupied capital. If worst comes to worst they can always shut down on fifth of the Pentagon and the redirect the resources to renewable power. How many wind, solar power stations can you build for $150 billion/year? More than enough I suspect.

Why is the idea of returning the military budget to the same level it had before the neocon crazies took over somehow more ludicrous than the idea of constructing 18 mile hoses?

Thiago Maciel Oliveira #68,
There are all sorts of government projects, conferring a government’s prestige I suppose — but the Danish judgment came down that it is unscientific, though it escaped censure on a genre technicality. And the quote is John Quiggin’s assessment, not Henry Farrell’s, about the papers in the later 2003 book, although you neglected to include John’s comments that the papers are worth reading only if you keep in mind that most of the experts “were not experts under the fields of discussion,” that they didn’t have enough time to consider the fields in depth, and that it is packaged as an exercise in “political propaganda,” slanted to deny the importance of mitigating climate change in the face of other dire human problems, which are then given some up-to-date treatments. Fair enough — as I wrote, I hope for technological solutions too, and I noted the virtues of policy chop-shops. But it is just this sort of continual misinterpretation of facts and events that is troubling, from both the viewpoint of expecting a policy chop-shop to put scientific accuracy foremost, not least upon climate change where we are talking about a good deal of money and strife, and from the viewpoint of getting a coherent argument out of its admirers. In this debate, the rest has always been silence.

“More honored in the breach than the observance” is another generally misused phrase from Hamlet. We usually use it to note that we don’t actually do that, but what Hamlet actually meant was that celebrating the king’s toast with a cannonade did the Danish court no credit.

Further to musical mountaineer @ 20 — it is clear in this article by Dyson (which Kolbert presumably read because it contains the “converting into liquid fuel” idea) that “carbon-eating trees” are not Dyson’s invention but one of several ideas he discusses from a book under review by William Nordhaus, and he does actually give more explanation than Kolbert pretends, whatever one thinks of its plausibility:

Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.

Thiago,

I am sure you would have got 100% agreement from the Easter Islanders who cut down the last stand of trees so another massive head could be erected on the shoreline. No doubt, they thought God, the ancestors or some form of technology would bring them more trees.

Toby

Thiago #74 Yes we have changed the ecology of the planet in major ways. C02 being an example. The changes you cite were unanticipated and unintended, except for the introduction of the potato which led to unanticipated negative consequences when it became a monoculture in Ireland.

The point is that we have a lousy track record on projects of this type and to prefer them to moving from fossil fuels to renewables is simply perverse.

Building contraptions is not the solution here. As an engineer I have seen enough engineers who are over-infatuated with their own inventions. Such people are very bad at requirements capture and resist looking at possible negative effects.

The nuclear industry is a prime example of this type of behavior. They were so infatuated by the idea of free limitless power that they ignored the problem of nuclear waste as a detail to be solved later. Having begun the process by building the bomb, it was impossible to ignore safety completely. But it was much easier to declare their designs intrinsically safe and fail safe than redesign the military technology from scratch to make it so. By the mid 1950s the nuclear incidents at Windscale started to pile up. It took another thirty years before they were uncovered and the authorities forced to admit them.

Pumping pollutants into the atmosphere is an inherently unsafe approach to geo-engineering. It should be a last resort even amongst geo-engineering options. We are nowhere close to exhausting the carbon sequestration options. But reducing carbon emissions is by far the most preferable approach.

Building the contraption is a one shot deal. If it does not work we are screwed. Building renewable power systems is an incremental approach built on well understood technology. And it has the side benefit of reducing demand on a scarce resource that comes with expensive political dependencies. There is simply not enough oil produced in the world for China to reach US levels of per capita consumption.

Skidmarx #80 “shouldn’t that be “typos” rather than “typo’s”?

A title about rhetorical uses of typos that contains a typo. Can you see now why the paper has to be written?

;-)

Its not just the global warming you have to get right, you have to make sure that you do not cause another environmental catastrophe that you hadn’t expected.

When I was a kid, conservatives used to cited “unintended consequences” all the time as an argument against government action. Nowadays, conservatism is defined by the will to forcefully intervene in any situation without contemplating the consequences at all.

No doubt after we dump massive amounts of SO2 into the atmosphere, we will be greeted by the environment with candy and flowers.

“All in all, I think it is very funny people speaking out against Levitt-Dubner’s one-sidedness in a topic kick-started by a reference to Krugman—certainly not(!) my platonic model of a dispassionate and objective thinker. Yours?”

IIRC, the original criticism was that L&D were not climate scientists, and didn’t bother to learn from climate scientists. Not being an expert in the field was only a problem because L&D didn’t bother to learn from the few that they talked to. Or rather, deliberately distorted what they were supposed to have learned.

Meanwhile Krugman has set a standard for being right about reality that has been met by few columnists in the last decade.

However, I think this witty remark is a double-edged sword as so many people—from the right, center, left, whatever—seems so anxious to dismiss this or that kind of solution, without much argument whatsoever.

Yeah, you keep saying that, but you refuse to identify why you think the thousands of words that have been linked here are insufficient.

You’ve got an epistemological problem here that I don’t suppose I’ll be able to talk you out of, but I will note it here. You want to evaluate claims by the reputation of the people making them, and you don’t want to do any serious investigation into the merits of those peoples’ reputations.

So the Copenhagen Consensus Center is highly regarded, and the merits of their reports aren’t really worth discussing – so not worth discussing, that you are unable to recognize the existence of a voluminous discussion about them. Krugman is not an objective thinker, not because you have an example of his lack of objectivity, but because everyone knows this.

I’m probably more sympathetic to appeals to authority than most – especially on climate change, where I’m not an expert. But if that’s the mode you’re going to operate in, it seems to me that you’re compelled to acknowledge that there’s a remarkable amount of unanimity among actual climate change experts, and that when people like Levitt and Dubner lock horns with the experts, they tend to make mistakes so basic that even non-experts like me can spot them.

Political Football #89:

You said: “So the Copenhagen Consensus Center is highly regarded (…) so not worth discussing, that you are unable to recognize the existence of a voluminous discussion about them.”

Well, I’ve cited Copenhagen Consensus not with the intent of reigniting old wars of yore, but with the sole purpose of making a very, very specific point, which is: it is hard to believe that Levitt-Dubner’s claims about geoengeneering are so ludicrous since very intelligent and capable people can concur with some of them — and Copenhagen Consensus came from the top of my hat.

Having said this, I will not discuss substantive matters related to Copenhagen Consensus ( #69 supra).

PoliticalFootbal #92
So … what?>

Wooow! You aren’t the biggest fan of ellipsis, are you?

Make your points, claims arguments. I’ll read them respectfully and I’ll try to respond.

I’m not sure what you want here. I’ve made my claims and I don’t expect a better response out of you than what you’ve provided.

But okay, I’ll play along: What do you think of the actual arguments in the Kolbert piece?

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

Kolbert provides the link to RealClimate:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/#more-1488

To this layman, Pierrehumbert’s critique seems devastating, as does most of the rest of Kolbert’s argument.

But you’ve already responded quite directly to this, to wit:

If the claims of Dubner and Levitt about the worthiness of climate engeneering are so outrageously WRONG, then why serious thinkers, gathering in prestigious forums like “Copenhague Consensus”, say it isn’t?

Now of course, I’ve pointed out the manifest inadequacies of this response, and I don’t have anything to add, so I don’t really see the point of this exercise. But if you’ve got a substantive response that isn’t just another appeal to an authority whom we aren’t permitted to rebut, I’d certainly be interested in hearing it.

Well, at least in this particular discussion, it is the first time somebody brings to game Real Climate. So I’ll play along.

First Mr. Pierrehumbert expends 1639 words to trash the following section of Levitt-Dubner’s controversial chapter:

“A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,” Myhrvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat—which contributes to global warming.”

Pierrehumbert argues very persuasively that “waste heat is a trivial contribution to global warming whether the waste heat comes from solar cells or from fossil fuels”, because “the extra heat trapped by CO2 at the point where you’ve burned enough coal to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration is (…) over 300 times the effect of the waste heat.”

So, Myhrvold (apud L&D) isn’t actually wrong, but misleadingly overstated the contribution of wast heat to global warming. But I really cannot see how this utterly collateral excursion made by an interviwee undermines L&D the central arguments. Seems to me a classical example of “typo-like” arguments, in which a disloyal disputant picks up very tiny little puny insignificant straws and concocts a pandemonium out of them — “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”; “Can possibly a man that writes “mam” be right?”

Then Pierrehumbert tries to redress the following statement by Myhrvold (apud L&D):

Although a widespread conversion to solar power might seem appealing, the reality is tricky. The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term “warming debt,” as Myhrvold calls it. “Eventually, we’d have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take thirty to fifty years.”

That seems to me an important point. But –lo!– Pierrehumbert does not really address this claim as he assert that “the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells” isn’t “the matter at hand here.” Why not? It most certainly is.

However, Pierrehumbert decides to abruptly change subject as he rebukes L&D for a (putative) belief that “the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense”, and that L&D believe that solar cells are black when actually they aren’t. Well, I’ve trancribed the relevant passages of the book and cannot see this kind of utter stupidity.

97: See, there you go. That’s a substantive response to the argument. Well done. The problem is, in every relevant particular, you agree with Pierrehumbert. Pierrehumbert doesn’t say so explicitly, but I feel certain that he would agree with you that he only addresses the issues that he addresses.

I have a little trouble with this, though:

So, Myhrvold (apud L&D) isn’t actually wrong, but misleadingly overstated the contribution of wast heat to global warming.

You’re using some exotic definition of the phrase “isn’t actually wrong” that I haven’t seen before. I would say that massively overstating the variable under discussion is “actually wrong.”

As for the entirely separate issue of building the infrastructure, I’m interested in that and don’t know much about it.

Pierrehumbert dismisses the issue as being similarly trivial, and your only response to Pierrehumbert is, alas, to fall back on an appeal to authority. We’ve already established the value of Myhrvold’s authority on this subject compared to that of Pierrehumbert, so I’m not sure what you would want to do that, but here’s what I’d want to know:

-What is the carbon cost relative to the benefit? Levitt, Dubner and Myhrvold got this wrong (or, as you say, “not actually wrong”) with waste heat. What do they say about this, and why should we believe them?
-What is the carbon cost of (say) solar energy construction relative to the carbon cost of construction of current technologies? Do they consider this issue at all? What do they say?

steven @77: Thanks for the link. Dyson is my kind of writer. Both Dyson and Nordhaus seem to be on the right track here, rejecting the “ambitious” options in favor of some plan involving a low-cost backstop. (I only skimmed the article yet, it’s pretty long.)

I think the objections to geo-engineering are pretty cogent, actually. Of the proposals I’ve read about, carbon-eating life-forms actually seem the most feasible. Assuming you want to sequester the carbon and not re-use it, it seems to me that for several reasons you’d want to do it with algae and sink the crud in the ocean, rather than use trees and bury it in soil. Presumably, if your tech is advanced enough to make graphite or charcoal using biological processes, you could also engineer a genetic half-life into the organisms (and hope to God it’s mutation-proof), so as to control the quantity of carbon removed.

All this is highly speculative, of course. But anything (including no solution at all) is preferable to “let’s just fix it with Good Old-Fashioned Political Power”.

Musical Moutaineer: Of the proposals I’ve read about, carbon-eating life-forms actually seem the most feasible.

What kind of “carbon-eating life-form” candidate that would be?

It would be a genetically engineered one. But it would be on land in a laboratory, and produce gasoline, as I wrote above. Craig Venter among others has mentioned it.

But “no solution at all” is NOT an option.

Wildlife ecosystems are already in an increased extinction-debt, because of habitat diminution and fragmentation. It looks like we don’t know enough about ice-shelf dynamics to predict sea levels. Sudden shifts in the hydrological cycle may endanger water availability and agriculture. The U.S. Defense Dept. has even done a study on some alarming security issues.

Against this, we read boilerplate that the world has always been changing, anyway. We read phony cost-benefit arguments against climate mitigation — phony, because they cannot estimate the full benefits of innovations which are spurred by new preferences and because they don’t include the reduced social transaction costs of new institutions. Indeed we read that it is not useful to try to come to agreements, because humans will never agree. We read misinterpretations of the position of modellers, such as Nordhaus.

Perhaps there is a poisoning, a fatal flaw in not owning-up to basic prior errors, such as misinterpreting the mechanisms of wild species extinction and the argument for its acceleration by climate change. Very serious stuff, and probably beyond any real cost-benefit.

Well. Living in a Third World Country that had just discovered the greatest oil field that will ever be discovered in this century ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_oil_field ), and knowing that my fellow countrymen are as eager as their american counterparts were in similar occasions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Be_Blood ), I cannot help myself but glimpse some streks of truth in Levitt-Dubner’s statment that “those” (3rd World Developing — especially BRIC — “countries can hardly be blamed for saying, Hey, you got to free-ride your way to industrial superpowerdom, so why shouldn’t we?

As a president american once put it: “It’s the Economics, Stupid”

Now, I know how short-sighted this sound. But maybe climatologists should here and there listen to economists and vice-versa.

ops. “american president”, hehehe.

Lee A. Arnold #108
I think Byrds’ song you just having been alluded to is almost as beautiful as William Blake’s

http://www.progressiveliving.org/william_blake_poetry_jerusalem.htm
“And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

But as the greatest writer from my country has once put it: “It’s better to fall from clouds in the sky than from a third floor window.”

All this is highly speculative, of course. But anything (including no solution at all) is preferable to “let’s just fix it with Good Old-Fashioned Political Power”.

I’m trying to visualize this. Okay, we invent the magic algae without the aid of government-backed research. I’m with you – corporations are known for their concern for public well-being, and their willingness to forgo profit if there are negative externalities associated with that profit. I’m sure they’ll band together in some non-governmental kind of way to address this issue, just as they did to fight the Nazis and end the Great Depression.

But once you’ve got your technological fix, who’s going to implement the solution, if not governments? You figure that benign terrorists will steal the magic algae from the benevolent corporations and seed the environment with it?

PoliticalFootball #114
Levitt-Dubner’s flamewar-catalystic-chapter’s central argument was –in my humble opinion– essentially an economic argument — and a very Eco 101, indeed. Something like “a market failure will exist when there is an inefficient allocation of resources due to the presence of an externality.”

Global warming is indeed a GIGANTIC market failure and their central claim are not thwarted by a “solar cells aren’t really alwalys black” sort of argument.

As Levitt-Dubner put it:

Once again, as with pollution, the answer has to do with externalities.

When a doctor fails to wash his hands, his own life isn’t the one that is primarily endangered. It is the next patient he treats, the one with the open wound or the compromised immune system. The dangerous bacteria that patient receives are a negative externality of the doctor’s actions—just as pollution is a negative externality of anyone who drives a car, jacks up the air conditioner, or sends coal exhaust up a smokestack. The polluter has insufficient incentive to not pollute, and the doctor has insufficient incentive to wash his hands.

This is what makes the science of behavior change so difficult.

Okay, we invent the magic algae without the aid of government-backed research.
…
But once you’ve got your technological fix, who’s going to implement the solution, if not governments?

You overstate my opposition to government. Like you, I don’t immediately see how a free market can fix what is basically a problem of the commons, if the fix is mere sequestration of carbon. Back to that in a moment.

Now, if carbon-eating trees will produce fuel, leading to carbon recycling, then the economic incentive is obvious. Indeed, there are already businesses on this model: power plants powered by wood from specially-bred crop trees. But suppose we can get octane from trees: well then, whoever has the trees can sell the fuel. I’m sure Monsanto would be more than willing to front the R&D to get that business. You don’t reduce atmospheric carbon this way, but at least you don’t increase it any more.

Sequestration of carbon could be profitable, but not on a large-enough scale. Since we’re pie-in-the-skying here, why not have plants that convert atmospheric carbon into graphene, buckyballs, diamonds, etc? Grow a space elevator and use it to transport blocks of graphite into orbit so they can be cheaply propelled into the sun. No, I don’t really believe it either. I just don’t think the market for carbon products will get big enough to consume the amounts of carbon we’re talking about here.

So, whatever, government steps in. That’s okay. What I’m arguing against is the notion that we should preemptively bankrupt ourselves and establish a global regulatory bureaucracy to forcibly solve everything using current technology minus nukes. I don’t think that approach will save the planet, and I would expect it to make life not worth living. As far as I know, nobody has yet been killed or even seriously inconvenienced by global warming. So for now, I say we should keep an eye on it, and keep polluting, and keep getting rich. We won’t ever have carbon-eating trees or much of anything else if we’re all broke.

Someone on this thread said something about a cost of 1-2% of GDP. To achieve what, I’m not sure. But I don’t believe this number. There’s magical accounting going on there: failure to reckon opportunity costs or something. Wind and solar are outrageously expensive. A forced transition to those power sources would raise energy prices (and the cost of everything), by a far greater factor than 1 or 2 percent. GDP might not be affected, but that’s just a money number, not a measure of wealth or well-being. If forty percent of what you produce is solar panels, you’re poor. You can’t eat solar panels. If you replace your car with an electric car (and pay your share to build electric infrastructure to charge the thing), you’re not better off. You still just have a car. The money you spent to get there is GDP, but if you left well enough alone you could have spent the money on carbon-eating tree research. Now you’d have the option of the electric car OR the trees. Or both, if you’re rich enough.

There’s magical accounting going on there: failure to reckon opportunity costs or something.
Actually, you are simply wrong there. I worked a little bit with some of the pretty detailed models and calculations that lead to such 1 or 2% figures (perhaps estimates is a better word), and opportunity cost is exactly what they calculate. The models look a lot like the models used to estimate the effects of taxes on the economy: putting a cost on greenhouse gas production leads to shifts in supply and demand curves, and the new equilibrium has a lower GDP, by means of lost opportunities compared to free CO2 spewing

I don’t put to much trust in these models and estimates, even if they are the best we can do. But they are a lot more subtle than you appear to think, there are learning effects, depreciation of the existing capital infrastructure, estimates of unexploited and undiscovered fossil fuel reservoirs and theri effects on prices, and hosts of other relevant factors.

The error margins on such claculations are of course huge, perhaps so huge to make the effort of limited value. This is especially true on time scales where the current captial base (power plants, oil refineries, distribution ) is no longer a constraint to the possibilities, and where slight differences in discount rates start to add up. But they are not forgetting something extremely obvious, like opportunity costs or Myhrvolds’ carbon debt from construction.

Zamfir, to judge by your spelling, you’re drunker than I am. Though I do allow mitigation for English as a second language. English is hard.

Care to provide a cite?

“He’d distill your blood to get water to flush his toilet.”

Cite?

Maybe because the typical american voter would trash him in the polls and even Palin or Limbaugh could be America’s next president if Obama dare a more radical carbon reduction approach?

In this case, my meta-irony detector. I beg your pardon.

JoB #128. Like when somebody makes an irony and somebody else piles up an irony upon the first one. I didn’t have in mind nothing so convulated as your tale about spies. Anyway, I’ve already apologized Alex so let’s not convert this incident in another meta-discussion.

Did somebody leave the nitrous oxide on in this thread?

I thought economists were all about “people respond to incentives.” You know, silly idealistic liberals think that you can just change the world by wanting something to be true, but hard-headed economists understand that people behave the way they do for good logical reasons.

Now it turns out that “changing behavior is impossible.” You know, silly idealistic liberals think that you can just tinker with taxes and government policies, but hard-headed economists understand that human behavior is what it is and should be treated as inflexible and unchanging. Only technology can bring about change.

Well, the real problem is that by itself “people respond to incentives” is vacuous nonsense, because people face many incentives and it is highly unclear a priori which ones will really matter. And yet I can think of a couple of millionaire economists (Mankiw, Levitt) whose fortunes were built on writing books that were “about” the fact that people respond to incentives.

MG-

Right. And in the case at hand, Levitt/Dubner and their admirers here also ignore the fact that in the past decade, while overall US power generation has been esstinally flat, wind power has grown at a steady clip of 30% annually. In 2006, according to the EIA, nearly half (5.3 out of 12.1 gigawatts) of net new generating capacity was from wind. Arguing in 2009 that replacing fossil fuels with renewables is impractical or cost-prohibitive is equivalent to arguing that no one will ever debate politics on the Internet.

129 – stackable irony, heh, comes in handy when you have to store it for later use!

(thanks MG, that ís a good one)

I forgot to mention: the text from “A raft of recent studies” to “behavior change so difficult” is an excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s controversial chapter on global warming.

And global warming is caused by an unpriced externality? Seriously, you think this is a new argument that we needed to hear from Levitt and Dubner? Next up, Levitt and Dubner explain the economic concept of “payday”, and how it occurs on “Fridays”, thus finally resolving the mystery of the money that appears in my bank account every week.

incentives don’t work very well in the presence of an externality

Come on. When there are no externalities, no one cares what anyone else does. We live in a nice little Econ 101 bubble where we create the most social benefit by looking out for ourselves. Since presumably most people have fundamental biological, psychological, and logical incentives to look out for themselves, there are no social problems and no social solutions.

The whole point of analyzing incentives is to adjust for the externalities created by self-interested behavior. If you pollute too much because you don’t pay the full price of pollution, then a tax that increases the price you pay may help rectify things. Why is that? Because you respond to incentives. The more you pay for pollution, the less you pollute. If the “people respond to incentives” crowd can’t get behind that, then who cares that people respond to incentives?

And global warming is caused by an unpriced externality? Seriously, you think this is a new argument that we needed to hear from Levitt and Dubner?

In TM Oliveira’s desperation to make L&D seem non-despicable, he attributes an argument to them that nobody criticizes. Obviously, concern about climate change is motivated by the acknowledgment of externalities. People who think L&D are full of shit think so because L&D are full of shit – not because some aspect of their argument agrees with people who are not full of shit.

TM Oliveira’s specific charge – that opposition to L&D is a result of opposition to this the externalities thesis – is really despicably dishonest. One wonders if TM Oliveira can come up with one single example where this is the case. I haven’t seen one, and I’ve seen a lot of the criticism.

you could start by googling the Stern Review

Well…okay.

Let’s turn on some irony detectors here, please. I think someone was poking fun at New Age blather

I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that, Thiago.

Musical Mountaneer #149
Well, seems like I’got this twice wrong. But just to confirm: do you think it would not “be so hard for Obama to get us to band together to save the population of the planet?”, that’s it?

TMO begins thus:

They’d tried other things as well. I didn’t transcribe all the section, for brevity’s sake, but let’s do it so that you can see is pretty difficult change behavior in the presence of an externality:

And ends thus, after a filibustering transcription:

Why was it so hard to change their behavior when the price of compliance (a simple hand-wash) is so low and the potential cost of failure (the loss of a human life) so high? Once again, as with pollution, the answer has to do with externalities.

TMO’s excerpt says absolutely nothing about externalities making behavior more difficult to change. Had there been no externality, hospitals would have had at least as hard a time getting doctors to wash their hands.

Externalities make it more important to make change – not more difficult. In a badly run political system, polluters can benefit because the costs of pollution are external, and don’t impose an incentive to behave otherwise. In a sensible political system, externalities are taken into account. If you think carbon in the air is costly, you impose a carbon tax, or do something else to align incentives with costs. This is so basic even Levitt and Dubner understand it.

PoliticalFootball #147
I’m playing devil’s advocate here, actually. I really don’t like seeing people misquoting and generally misrepresenting their adversary’s points so they better can “win” an argument.

Actually, this attitude is delusional, in my humble opinion, as passionante debates aren’t really great ways of convincing people (see http://www.slate.com/id/2219486/ ).

Anyway you can learn a lot engaging in discussions, as people here and there try to coalesce some of their ideological hunches in something more substantial — all of us included.

Substance McGravitas #156
The claims of misquoting and misrepresenting adversary’s points were greatly focused on Ken Caldeira, which had said:

“I believe all of the ideas attributed to me are based on fact, with the exception of the ‘carbon dioxide is not the right villain’ line,” he wrote. “That said, when I am speaking, I place these facts in a very different context and draw different policy conclusions.” He added that “I believe the authors to have worked in good faith. They draw different conclusions than I draw from the same facts, but as authors of the book, that is their prerogative.”

I think very insightful this piece — http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/global-warming-in-superfreakonomics-the-anatomy-of-a-smear/ — that, if proven correct, would be an excellent example of how some people can retreat to ecological trotskysm — as though worthwile ends could possible justify sordid means.

Barbar # 152 and politicalfootball #153
Unfortunately, when Politicalfootball says that an externality does not hinder attempts of changing behavior, he is just fooling himself. In fact, by its very definition externalities imply inefficient allocation of resources and counteracting them will always depend on some sort of governance mechanism — be it the government, the market or communities themselves.

I think it is relevant to mention that Elinor Ostrom co-winned a Nobel Prize showing that sometimes people can internalize the externalities concerning the administration of common goods and identified eight conditions that made that kind of solutions more likely. But unluckly — and forseebly — they are not remotely met in our Global Warming conundrum.

Now, the fact the the externalities involved in Global Warming are… well… GLOBAL actually render the problem one or two orders of magnitude more complex. First, the governance problem now has to come to terms with the “coasian” nature o Public International Law, consisting in the fact that it is fundamentally based on self imposed sanctions and as such does not have anything remotely similar to central enforcement by a state-like agency. Secondly, I would like to restate what I’ve said on #107 supra.

That of course does not imply that changing behavior is an impossible task but only that it is actually harder to do than some people misleadingly seems to suggest.

Lee Arnold #160
Generally, I like to put a link when I mention or actually attach some fragment from another website so that–as in Ken Caldeira’s public acknowledgment that Levitt & Dubner don’t wi(l)dely misquoted his research– you can check it or assess its full original context . I think that is the most transparent course of action.

Okay, now in chap 5 of Superfreakonomics the authors liken negative externalities to doctors not washing their hands, a preference which was corrected to a 100% compliance rate by the placement of a screen-saving reminder. In other words, the behavior turned out finally to be easy to change. This outcome is in direct contradiction of the authors’ prior insistence that “when people aren’t compelled to pay the full cost of their actions, they have little incentive to change their behavior.” Now it’s pretty clear that, quite aside from their silly reportage of climatology, the authors are relying on cost-benefits of carbon dioxide mitigation that undersell the possible dangers of the warming, while overselling the likely economic disamenities of the mitigation. In fact there may be no net disamenities, when everything is finally tallied — they simply don’t know, and economics models are in far worse shape than climate models when it comes to predictions. (Indeed they are most concerned about the plight of the poor in other countries, though it is just those countries which poll highest on the need to reduce global warming: here again, it is hard to credit the authors’ insistence on respecting people’s preferences.) So, aren’t these economists fooling themselves with talk of “externalities” into falling-back upon the language of economic incentives, when their chief illustration shows that altruism works with reminders?

Ops. I meant “ingenious solution” not — of course — “ingenuous solution”.

There’s really no point in having a discussion with someone who thinks that the more patients who die when doctors don’t wash their hands, the harder it is for hospitals to get doctors to wash their hands. Dunning-Kruger effect indeed.

I’m putting here a link to the (in)famous stratoshield paper by Intellectual Ventures Corporations in order that you assess the (un)reasonableness of their proposal:

http://intellectualventureslab.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Stratoshield-white-paper-300dpi.pdf

It’s what happens when you try to mini-ha!-ha! the higher water…

What shall we call the market failure of misinformed consumer preferences that result from the propaganda of an oligopoly, (such as the fossil fuels industry) — “rational ignorance” wielded by the “lopsided distribution of income?”

I’ve been skimming Stern Review (a very good economic report about climate change endorsed by someone above in this thread) and I think this passage is particularly relevant:

“Large-scale uptake of a range of clean power, heat, and transport technologies is
required for radical emission cuts in the medium to long term. The power sector
around the world will have to be least 60%, and perhaps as much as 75%,
decarbonised by 2050 to stabilise at or below 550ppm CO2e.

According to the report, this will require not only the reversion of the current historical trend of emissions growth but also a decrease “of 25% or
more against today’s levels” of carbon emission.

Cutting to the chase, I think you can discriminate two large groups of people, as they believe (or not) that the reversion and decrease of carbon emissions just mentioned are
(or not) feasible.

As for me, I suspect that we will be capable of reducing the rate of increase but not the absolute emissions per se, as Third World Countries — first and foremost BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) but others as well — are as a general rule increasing their pace of economic growth and countries in the middle range of economical development tend to be the most polluting — a trend that recede as these countries become more technological-intensive and services-oriented. Until then, however, it is very difficult to imagine that they will actually reduce their emissions.

Besides, economic growth brings new patterns of consumption. Meat become more importante on the daily diet and people star to buy their own cars. That’s what is happening in China, India and Brazil at the last fifteen years, at least, and I think this trend will actually spread widely to other Third World Countries.

And –alas– ambiental claims have not the same weigth in the South as they have in the North, because people here are still trapped in quite unsatisfactorily (“unacceptable” being an even better word) standards of life.

Finally, world population will stabilize and begin to decline as late as 2050 or latter.

That’s why I’m rather sceptical we’ll achieve Stern Review’s reduction target of at least 25% by 2050.

The problem with the massive geoengineering approach, though, is that it is drastically not robust to errors. If the sulfur dioxide approach works perfectly as planned, its utility compared to other approaches is debatable, but if it has unforeseen effects, those could easily be disastrous and may not be detectable until the thing is at full-scale, and even then perhaps not immediately.This is the general problem with large-scale geoengineering: it is too immodest regarding human understanding of complex systems. It is amusing to see economists jump on this, as it is so unlike their skepticiswm of central planning.

I cannot respond. Help me!

Yeah! It seems like the ban has been lifted off. So:

I’ve been skimming Stern Review (a very good economic report about climate change endorsed by someone above in this thread) and I think this passage is particularly relevant:

“Large-scale uptake of a range of clean power, heat, and transport technologies is
required for radical emission cuts in the medium to long term. The power sector
around the world will have to be least 60%, and perhaps as much as 75%,
decarbonised by 2050 to stabilise at or below 550ppm CO2e.

According to the report, this will require not only the reversion of the current historical trend of emissions growth but also a decrease “of 25% or
more against today’s levels” of carbon emission.

Cutting to the chase, I think you can discriminate two large groups of people, as they believe (or not) that the reversion and decrease of carbon emissions just mentioned are
(or not) feasible.

Besides, economic growth brings new patterns of consumption. Meat become more importante on the daily diet and people star to buy their own cars. That’s what is happening in China, India and Brazil at the last fifteen years, at least, and I think this trend will actually spread widely to other Third World Countries.

And—alas—ambiental claims have not the same weigth in the South as they have in the North, because people here are still trapped in quite unsatisfactorily (“unacceptable” being an even better word) standards of life.

Finally, world population will stabilize and begin to decline as late as 2050 or latter.

That’s why I’m rather sceptical we’ll achieve Stern Review’s reduction target of at least 25% by 2050.

And—alas—ambiental claims have not the same weigth in the South as they have in the North, because people here are still trapped in quite unsatisfactorily (“unacceptable” being an even better word) standards of life.

Well. I’ve met some kind of difficult posting, and have been trying to sail around the “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” ban. But it is getting harder…

[There is a comment about South-North relationthips that seems banned, so I’ll skip it]

Finally, world population will stabilize and begin to decline as late as 2050 or latter.

That’s why I’m rather sceptical we’ll achieve Stern Review’s reduction target of at least 25% by 2050.

I am live tweebblogfeeding my reading of Superfreakonomics Chapter 5. A stylistic howler a page:

p. 166 — The authors move directly from an extreme statement by Lovelock to the “consensus of climate scientists” — will most readers know that these are NOT the same thing?

p. 167 — They state that buying meat cancels buying a Prius — without remembering the previous paragraph, when the old farts had been driving to the store at 10 miles a gallon. And they don’t mention that methane farts, while being far more powerful a greenhouse gas, have a tiny “atmospheric half-life” by comparison with CO2. The authors SHOULD know this, since friends always stand near each other, and always discover this sort of thing.

p. 167 — “And think how hard the cattle ranchers would lobby Washington to ban kangaroo meat.” No, really — this is printed there, on that page. This is a big problem coming, babes.

p. 168 — Suggests that the economic models are in better shape than climate models — oh no don’t get me started, who in hell is running this damned internets exactly. this would take a book to examine. does everybody have to write a book back?

p. 169 — Suggests that a terrible case scenario kicks in at 10 degrees Celsius. But no: probably at around 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, if species attempt to migrate from diminished and fragmented ecosystems, for their own reasons of temperature or moisture, and then run into various human barriers, causing cascades of localized species extinctions of those organisms not compatible with humans. But of course! the terrible case 10-degreewise is from Economists, who are infamously ignorant of Ecology, and so I suppose we shall have to let it pass just one more boring time. How long ago did Weitzman write it anyway?

p. 170 — Here again, Lovelock’s call for a “sustainable retreat” appears to be imputed, by an unclear segue, to be the opinion also of the “patron saint” Al Gore — who as far as I know isn’t calling for that. I think Gore is in favor of growth, but along different avenues. I haven’t read all the way through Earth in the Balance, though. Did he go on to express “belief?” I hardly doubt it were not Christianphilic. Yes, I know these sorts of comments are longer than tweeps.

p. 171 — Externalities are adumbrated in a curious manner, as heretofore animadverted. (77 characters)

I am discontinuing my preference to do this, for now. If there is demand for more of this sort of sad pallbearing, I suggest you hire an advertiser to correct the incentives! Perhaps we have found another book which shall have to be excused upon principles of literary genre? Well you might have expected this sort of thing, in a science fiction future.

You’ve all seen that grand success, Reagan’s “Star Wars”! Now the sequel, “Climate Wars”!