Un-friggin-believable.

Nathan Myhrvold, who Levitt and Dubner call the “polymath’s polymath” — who is one of the primary “experts” the authors rely on to make the case for their central geoengineering-only approach to global warming — has just publicly repudiated that approach. Apparently he never read the chapter — or didn’t understand it if he did.  And apparently in their rush to print this “rebuttal” to my debunkings, the Superfreaks didn’t bother to read it closely, since he just wrote this jaw-dropper on their blog:

Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming!

… The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.

You can’t make this stuff up.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists posted here about Myhrvold’s amazing defense repudiation of Superfreakonomics:

That is exactly the opposite of what the book argues and represents a complete repudiation of the chapter from one of the main sources on which Levitt and Dubner relied.

Or go to the Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira that backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics for an independent view of what the book is about — and what the authors think the book is about:

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

Are you baffled also?  The two leading experts (well, one expert and one F.A.K.E.R.) that Dubner and Leavitt relied on for their geoengineering-only solution don’t believe in it!  Well, Caldeira doesn’t believe in it.  As we’ll see, it’s impossible to figure out what Myhrvold believes.

Myhrvold is not a ”polymath’s polymath.”  He repudiates the Superfreaks, so he’s a contrarian’s contrarian.

Why exactly does Myhrvold think the Superfreaks were so desperate to push the (incorrect) statement about Caldeira that his “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain”?  Since the Superfreaks made me take the PDF of the book down, go to the NPR interview of Levitt (transcript here):

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From today’s The Rush Limbaugh Show (via Media Matters):

LIMBAUGH: I think these militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys. Let me explain this. What do the jihad guys do? The jihad guys go to families under their control and they convince these families to strap explosives on who? Not them. On their kids. Grab your 3-year-old, grab your 4-year-old, grab your 6-year-old, and we’re gonna strap explosives on there, and then we’re going to send you on a bus, or we’re going to send you to a shopping center, and we’re gonna tell you when to pull the trigger, and you’re gonna blow up, and you’re gonna blow up everybody around you, and you’re gonna head up to wherever you’re going, 73 virgins are gonna be there. The little 3- or 4-year-old doesn’t have the presence of mind, so what about you? If it’s so great up there, why don’t you go? Why don’t you strap explosives on you — and their parents don’t have the guts to tell the jihad guys, “You do it! Why do you want my kid to go blow himself up?” The jihad guys will just shoot ‘em, ’cause the jihad guys have to maintain control.

The environmentalist wackos are the same way. This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Yes, one of the few remaining intellectual leaders in the conservative movement — whose views dominate conservative discourse because few if any conservative politicians will publicly disagree with him — has just told the lead climate reporter for the New York Times to commit suicide.  Who among the deniers and delayers will have the courage to denounce Limbaugh here?

What incited Limbaugh?  Here is Revkin’s NYT blog today (emphasis added by MM):

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A group whose entire mission is built on the notion that immigrants are contributing to global climate change, Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), has released two new ads which claim that “saving the earth in California starts with reduced immigration.” According to CAPS’ logic, “immigration and births to immigrants” lead to unsustainable population growth which leads to global warming and is amplified by the fact that immigrants’ energy use quickly becomes “Americanized” when they move to the US.

The television ad informs Californians that they have some “tough decisions to make” about immigration and global warming:

“Concerned about Americans’ huge carbon foot print? Then you should be concerned about immigration… Reducing immigration won’t solve global warming, but it is part of the solution. We’ve got some tough choices to make.”

Watch it:

The corresponding radio ad tells Californians that they have to face an “inconvenient truth” about immigration and climate change:

“The inconvenient truth is that population growth and environmental degradation go hand in hand…by 2050 our population will reach 60 million — driven almost entirely by immigration and immigrant births. And when immigrants come to California, their carbon footprint quadruples what it was…So if we’re going to do our share to save the earth, our immigration levels must be reduced. That’s a tough pill for compassionate Californians to swallow, but swallow it we must.“

Listen:

A CAPS press release indicates that the ads are based on the shoddy research presented by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a group which has been described as having “never found any aspect of immigration it likes.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for New Community, both groups were founded and funded by John Tanton — a man with “troubling associations with racists, white supremacists, and political extremists.” Other “Tanton network” organizations have parroted similar claims, including NumbersUSA, Progressives for Immigration Reform, and the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform which recently launched a new social networking website, fairdebate.org, aimed at “furthering the debate” on “US overpopulation and the role that immigration plays.”

All of Tanton’s organizations are fixated on scapegoating immigrants and sidestep the fact that the central problem has more to do with US consumption patterns. Rather than asking Americans to get rid of their gas guzzling automobiles, CAPS suggests getting rid of immigrants. However, energy consumption is driven by a host of factors totally unrelated to population size, such as societal dependence on polluting and non-renewable fossil fuels; utilization of energy-efficient technologies; and the development of mass transit systems that minimize individual automobile use. That explains why the World Resources Institute found that though the US is home to 23% fewer people than the European nations of the EU-15, it still produces 70% more greenhouse gases.

Ultimately, CAPS is essentially suggesting that the world would be better off if immigrants stayed poor in their less consuming, less industrialized countries. Based on this logic, illegal immigration isn’t the problem, increased wealth and international development are. However, quite the contrary, “immigrants, in essence, are doing precisely what planners want the rest of us to do,” says to UCLA professor Ali Modarres who recently found that, compared to Americans, more immigrants walk, bike, bus, or metro to work and fewer drive cars in the state of California. While CAPS and others blame immigrants for everything from traffic jams to depleting aquifers, Mordares suggests that, “immigrants are greening our cities, how about giving them a break?”

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released its third quarter (Q3) market report today.  Their news release noted:

Since the early July announcement of rules to implement the stimulus bill, the wind industry has seen over 1,600 MW (enough to serve the equivalent of 480,000 average households) of completed projects, and over 1,700 MW of construction starts. These projects equate to about $6.5 billion in new investment….

The total wind power capacity now operating in the U.S. is over 31,000 MW, generating enough electricity to power the equivalent of nearly 9 million homes, avoiding the emissions of 57 million tons of carbon annually and reducing expected carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2.5%.

Thank you President Obama and Congressional Democrats (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!”

Here are some more factoids from the release:

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This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here.

Blogging economist J. Bradford DeLong has read the “global cooling” chapter of SuperFreakonomics and has asked six wonkish questions about climate science and policy. Below are responses debunking Levitt & Dubner’s myth of decreasing temperature, and their claim that moving away from “cheap” coal would cause “economic suicide.”

3: “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased…” As best as I can see from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt, this year is: 1/5 of a degree F warmer than last year, the same temperature as 2007 and 2006, 1/7 of a degree F cooler than 2005, 1/10 of a degree F warmer than 2004, the same temperature as 2003 and 2002, 1/7 of a degree F warmer than 2001, 2/5 of a degree warmer than 1999 and 2000, the same temperature as 1998, and warmer than every single other year since the start of the Industrial Revolution–a full degree F warmer than 1960, for example.

How do you get from that temperature record to the statement that “over the past several years… average global temperature… has in fact decreased”?

The assertion that this “decrease” in temperature is a “little-discussed fact” is nonsensical. A search for “1998 cooling global” returns seven million hits. This “little-discussed fact” is one of the most popular canards among global warming skeptics.

Levitt and Dubner, like Marc Morano, Prison Planet and the Free Republic, are relying on the UK Met Office Hadley Centre temperature set — which has 1998 as the hottest year on record — as opposed to the NASA temperature set DeLong cites — which has 2005 as the hottest record. However, both sets agree that the temperature of every year since 2001 has been within the 95% confidence interval of 1998′s temperature. On a decadal scale, the average global surface temperature is increasing at a quickening pace.

Moreover, this “fact” of “global cooling since 1998″ is an error based on semantic confusion and misinterpretation of data. “Global warming” refers to the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That effect has been consistently rising as emissions accumulate. It does not refer to year-over-year surface temperatures, which are influenced by solar output and atmospheric-oceanic circulation, both of which contributed to raise the average surface temperature of 1998.

The New Scientist, as Joe Romm has repeatedly pointed out, has a comprehensive analysis of the misunderstanding behind claims of recent cooling. The New Scientist also discusses the differences between the NASA and Hadley datasets:

The main reason is that there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest. The Hadley record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.

Based on this exclusion, Romm writes, “it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.” Read more

Clearly, pretending to loft your kid across the countryside in a balloon is the big story.

But what about the fairly extraordinary effort that the kids at 350.org and Bill McKibben are mounting next weekend?

They’ve taken serious scientific analysis””the contention first raised by Jim Hansen that 350 ppm co2 is the target we should be aiming for””and turned it into a real movement. On Saturday, their day of global action, there will be at least 3,800 events and rallies and demonstrations in almost 170 countries. It’ll be one of the most widespread days of political action in the planet’s history.  People are rallying all over the place:

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Brazil seeks climate target for all Amazon nations

Brazil wants to forge a common position among all Amazon basin countries for a global climate summit later this year, the country’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said on Monday.

Brazil has been seeking a growing role in climate talks designed to agree upon a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which are blamed for global warming.

Lula was considering inviting the presidents of all Amazon states to discuss the issue on November 26, he told reporters after a meeting in Sao Paulo with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Brazil, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, is expected to announce its own targets for the December summit in Copenhagen by the end of this month. It is considering freezing its total greenhouse gas emissions at 2005 levels.

Lula last week said Brazil, which harbors the vast majority of the Amazon rain forest, would cut deforestation 80 percent by 2020 from a 10-year average through 2005. Other countries of the Amazon region include Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana.

White House Announces Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) Program as Major Part of `Recovery through Retrofit`; Renewable Funding Envisioned the Model and is National Leader in Financing PACE Programs

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This is a Roll Call op-ed by Lincoln Chafee, former Republican Senator from Rhode Island, and John Podesta, former White House chief of staff and CEO of the Center for American Progress.  The source of the graphic is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

It is imperative that the United States find effective and economically viable solutions to the climate crisis. Our elected officials and business leaders ask how we can afford the global transition to a low-carbon economy. Around the globe, developing nations ask how they can afford to reduce their emissions without sacrificing their hopes for a better life. There is no single answer, but there is one unexpected solution that offers hope on both fronts.

To date, the climate debate has focused on reducing fossil fuel emissions and ramping up crucial clean energy alternatives. Far too little attention has been paid to the role tropical deforestation has in warming the planet. It accounts for 17 percent of global emissions “” more than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined. This is a serious oversight; if left unaddressed, deforestation will undermine all our efforts to solve the climate crisis.

The good news is that protecting “climate forests” is a major global warming solution that can be implemented immediately and affordably. Many developing nations, including Brazil and Indonesia, which together account for 50 percent of global deforestation, are eager to partner with the United States to protect their climate forests. Indeed, Brazil has established a goal of reducing emissions from the Amazon by 80 percent by 2020 and is already making impressive progress in that direction, including robust monitoring and verification systems. Indonesia is moving in a similar direction. These efforts could be focused, honed and replicated globally.

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Blogging economist J. Bradford DeLong has read the “global cooling” chapter of SuperFreakonomics and has made some suggested corrections. He also asked six wonkish questions about climate policy, spurred by the misleading portrayal of the field by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner. The Wonk Room will be answering DeLong’s questions. Here are answers for the first two questions about passages from SuperFreakonomics:

1: “Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about one and a half feet by 2100…” I had thought that the most authoritative estimates suggest a 1 to 7 feet rise in sea levels by 2100–not 1.5 feet. Am I wrong?

“Most authoritative” is a value judgment, of course. If we consider literature that was reviewed and summarized by the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change report (AR4) as the “most authoritative,” then the climate models considered there provide estimates of sea level rise of 0.18 – 0.59 m (0.59 – 1.93 ft), depending on future emissions and “excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow.” [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group 1, Summary for Policymakers, 2007]

However, that exclusion is a major caveat, and all the literature on “dynamical changes in ice flow” points to a much higher estimate for likely sea level rise by 2100. The MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has found that the likelihood of warming of 4°C is almost 100 percent without efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions. At the 4 Degrees and Beyond climate conference this September, lead climate researchers presented their latest estimates of sea level rise for 2100 given 4°C warming. Pier Vallinga summarized recent estimates of sea level rise under warm scenarios:

40 – 85 cm [KNMI, 2006]
50 – 140 cm [Rahmstorf, 2007]
40 – 140 cm [Delta Vision, Blue Ribbon Task Force California, 2007]
80 – 200 cm [Pfeffer et al., 2008]
60 – 110 cm [Vellinga et al., 2008]

These estimates give a range of 0.4 to 2 m (1.31 to 6.56 ft), on average estimating 0.95 m (3.1 ft). It should be noted that sea level rise by 2200 will be about twice that of 2100, as the oceans continue to rise due to thermal expansion and the disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets. In short, Wood is only off by a factor of 100 percent.

2: “Ken Caldeira… mentions a most surprising environmental scourge: trees…” I grant that covering the reflective Greenland ice sheet with green leaves might not be a good idea. But surely Ken Caldeira of Stanford did not say that your average tree is doing less to cool the earth by sucking up carbon dioxide than if the tree were cut down and decomposed and some other more-reflective typical use were made of its spot, is he?

In a word, no. In a 2007 New York Times op-ed discussing his research and opinions on forestation and climate change mitigation, Caldeira wrote:

This effect is most pronounced in snowy areas — snow on bare ground reflects far more sunlight back to space than does a snowed-in forest — so forests in areas with seasonal snow cover can be strongly warming. In contrast, tropical forests appear to be doubly valuable to the earth’s climate system. [New York Times, 1/16/07]

He also noted: “Clear-cutting mountains to slow climate change is, of course, nuts.”

Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled best-seeler

Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change.

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had objected to the “wrong villain” line but Dubner and Levitt didn’t correct it; instead, they added the “incredibly foolish” quote, a half step in the right direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.

Levitt and Dubner do say that the book “overstates” Caldeira’s position. That’s a weasel word: The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes. Caldeira told me the book contains “many errors” in addition to the “major error” of misstating his scientific opinion on carbon dioxide’s role….

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

That’s award-winning journalist Eric Pooley in his terrific Bloomberg story today, “Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change.” Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time‘s chief political correspondent, and Time‘s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting.  His story vindicates my original reporting in Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and patent nonsense “” and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says it is an inaccurate portrayal of me and misleading in many places.

For me, the “villain” quote was not actually the main issue.  The main issue for me was the misrepresentation of Caldeira’s core belief that you have to cut emissions dramatically for geoengineering to even have a chance of making any sense.

That misrepresented view is the one that actually represents a real threat to humanity — should enough people come to believe it.  That’s why I am still writing about this — that, and the fact that the Superfreaks are going to be spreading their confused misrepresentations for weeks to come.  Their amazing press schedule is here — they’re getting a full hour on 20/20 on Friday, plus Good Morning America (twice!) and The Daily Show.

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