In the latest of many fawning interviews promoting SuperFreakonomics, author Stephen J. Dubner claimed the critics of his “global cooling” chapter have issued a “fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.” On Public Radio International’s morning program, “The Takeaway,” Dubner told hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee that he was right to call global warming a “religion.” In fact, he considers the criticism the book has received from economists, climate scientists, and energy experts to be “essentially a fatwa“:
In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.
Listen here:
A fatwa is an Islamic clerical legal ruling. Dubner is evidently alluding to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s twenty-year-old fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by hardline Muslims. Rushdie has suffered assassination attempts and decades in seclusion. Translators of the book were stabbed, shot, and killed, and bookstores were firebombed.
Despite this supposed global warming “fatwa,” however, Dubner is heroically appearing all week on the Takeaway to flack his book, co-written with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. The SuperFreakonomics authors have now enjoyed softball interviews from Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, 20/20, the Guardian, the UK Telegraph, and others. The Diane Rehm Show did a much better job, bringing in IPCC lead author Peter Frumhoff to debunk their nonsense.
SuperFreakonomics has been edged out on the bestseller list by Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots.
Update
Dubner actually trotted out the “fatwa” claim last month on a different WNYC program, saying on the Leonard Lopate show on October 21st:
The movement to stop global warming has some of the components of a religion and I’ll tell you we’ve certainly experienced that in the past few days. It feels very much like a fatwa has been levied. As with fatwas there’s obviously a bizarre twisting and omission of facts.
Update
,Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists responds:
Levitt and Dubner are unfairly equating reasoned critiques of their arguments from scientists with personal attacks. They need to respond to UCS, Gavin Schmidt, Jeffrey Severinghaus and other scientists who have pointed out how the book’s chapter misrepresents climate science. Additionally, geoengineering is not an alternative to reducing emissions. Levitt seemed to acknowledge that during an interview with a UCS scientist, but in subsequent media interviews and in a USA Today op-ed, he and Dubner have continued to inaccurately present geoengineering as an alternative to reducing emissions.
The book has been out for a month. UCS issued its criticism five days before the book came out. Levitt and Dubner say they want to contribute to the debate about how we should respond to global warming. If that’s true, they should respond to arguments from scientists and they should do so as soon as possible. The longer they wait to respond, the more credibility they will lose with scientists studying this issue. As a group, scientists are happy to rationally weigh the merits of an argument regardless of who is forwarding it.
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