Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any aspect of economics.

In other words:  it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.

Hard to believe such an illogical statement (page 203) comes from Levitt and Dubner, the same folks who wrote the runaway bestseller Freakonomics:  A Rogue Economist explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

For the record, it’s perfectly logical to believe that — indeed, I daresay most of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that if you could curtail all new carbon emissions (including from deforestation) starting now (or even starting soon), you would indeed avoid apocaplyse.  None, however, would use the loaded word “simply” I’m sure and most, like Hansen, would like to go from curtailing emissions to being carbon negative as soon as possible.  The Superfreaks, however, are simultaneously skeptical of global warming science, critical of all mitigation measures, but certain that geo-engineering using sulfate aerosols is the answer.

“Rogue” is a good word for Levitt, but I think “contrarian” is more apt.  Sadly, for Levitt’s readers and reputation, he decided to adopt the contrarian view of global warming, which takes him far outside of his expertise.  As is common among smart people who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions and get it so very wrong, he relies on other smart contrarians who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions.  In particular, he leans heavily on Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who has a reputation for brilliance, which he and the Superfreaks utterly shred in this book:

“A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold 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% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming.”

Impressive — three and a half major howlers in one tiny paragraph (p 187).  California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this “patent nonsense,” when I read it to him.  And Myhrvold is the guy, according to the Superfreaks, of which Bill Gates once said, “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan.”  This should be the definitive proof that smarts in one area do not necessarily translate at all

In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I’m gonna call them F.A.K.E.R.s — Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled?  I'm still working on this acronym].

The most famous FAKER was Michael Crichton.  I thought Freeman Dyson was the leading FAKER today, but Myhrvold makes Dyson sound like James Hansen.  I will devote an entire blog post to the BS peddled here by Myhrvold (who now runs Intellectual Ventures) because I’m sure he’s got the ear of a lot of well-meaning, influential, but easily duped, people like Levitt and Dubner — see Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: Who else have Nathan Myhrvold and the Groupthinkers at Intellectual Ventures duped and confused? Would you believe Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?

Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record:

Read more

The most widely read ‘green’ site on the Web has a firehose worth of material, in part because they themselves fill their hydrant with almost everything green that is published online.  I’m going to try clip some of the highlights regularly for CP readers:

Yet another reason EVs trump FCVs (see “Climate and hydrogen car advocate gets almost everything wrong about plug-in cars“) — — people are actually spending big bucks to building the EV infrastructure

France to Spend $2.2 Billion on Electric Car Charging Stations

Build It And They Will Come
Electric cars and charging stations go together, but there’s a kind of chicken & egg problem; who’s going to build charging stations along highways and public roads if there are no electric cars, and who’s going to buy a electric car if there are no charging stations? The French government seems to have decided that the way to crack this dilemma is to build a network of charging stations using taxpayer money as part of a broader initiative to encourage the development of clean vehicle technology and battery manufacturing in the country.

Charging Sockets to Become Obligatory in Office Parking Lots
‚¬1.5 billion (about $2.2 billion) will be spent by France on the network of EV charging stations, but also “the government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012.”

Via Wall Street Journal

Coal-Fired Power Generator To Supplement Boiler Feed With Switchgrass And Sorghum

Read more

Our story so far:

On September 22, I debunked the global cooling myth for the umpteenth time (see “NYT‘s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation“).  To see whether the status quo media and the professional Deniers, Delayers, and Disinformers believe the cooling crap they are pushing, I proposed what should be seen as a generous bet (from their unscientific perspective):

that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.

Led by Triple D All Star Chip Knappenberger (“Is Joe Romm a ‘Global Lukewarmer’?”) my attempt to call out suckers deniers who insist we are entering a long-term cooling, was somehow turned into a statement of my belief as to what the science says is going to happen on our current emissions path.  What is especially bizarre about that is I have written about 2 million words on the subject, so my views are no mystery at all (see, for instance, “Intro to global warming impacts“).

What is especially laughable is that the deniers, led by Knappenberger, who should know better (well, I guess that’s a contradiction in terms), then ascribe their ignorance of the science to my statement and with an anti-scientific linear extrapolation for what I am supposedly predicting the warming will be this entire century.  That is to say, because I supposedly believe we will only warm 0.15°C next decade (which I don’t), that means I am also asserting we will only warm only on the low-range this century, perhaps only 1.5°C.

That represents such a staggering lack of understanding of the basic science of climate change that it should immediately disqualify anyone who advances it from the debate — including Thomas Fuller, who took my bet!  In fact, as everyone who understands the science knows, the warming is projected to be quite nonlinear, in part because the climate system has feedbacks, and the major ones all appear to be positive (see here).  Also, aerosols (human and volcanic) have “dimmed” or muted the full impact of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases we would have seen so far (to a remarkable degree, see here).

Anyone who bothered to look at the IPCC report, which you would think is the minimum required of someone claiming to be interested in an “intelligent conversation” about the science, would see that.  As the Figure above shows, in the high-end scenarios, like A2, the warming is much slower in the early decades of this century than in the later ones.

Fuller took my bet (see his comment here), but it wasn’t until I saw this inane headline on the Swift Boat smearer’s website (complete with my photo) that I realized just what Fuller did:

Read more

Coal is not healthy for kids. As one U.S. study found, “Closing coal-fired power plants can have a direct, positive impact on children’s cognitive development and health” (See “If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants“). Hence, Coal for Dummies.

Perhaps the only thing worse for kids than living downwind of a major coal plant is living downwind of coal itself.  As the BBC reported in February (see Chinese birth defects “up sharply”), “A senior family planning official in China has noted an alarming rise in the number of babies with birth defects”¦.  The coal-mining heartland of Shanxi province had the biggest problem.”

Do coal companies have any responsibility to directly protect children from the harmful effects of air pollution?  Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) thinks so, but Massey Energy thinks otherwise, as Think Progress explains.

Read more