Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of SuperFreakonomics, has embraced charges by the right wing that a handful of illegally obtained private emails means that the scientific consensus on climate change is actually a dangerous conspiracy. Dubner lent credence to the fevered “ClimateGate” ravings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and other global warming deniers in an interview with Fox Business Network host David Asman. Dubner purports that the hacked University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit emails reveal that the supposed “consensus” on global warming is because “everybody’s scared to be an outlier, everybody’s scared to be a skeptic.” After Asman compared climate scientists to Stalin and Hitler — we’re not kidding — Dubner jumped in to accuse “potent” scientists of “colluding” to “tell Al Gore what to say,” and “distorting evidence” to “make their findings be right for their position”:

You can’t read these e-mails and feel that the IPCC’s or the major climate scientists’ findings and predictions about global warming are kosher. You can’t. They may be, but if you read these you have to have a whole lot of skepticism about that. And of course, coming into Copenhagen these are going to have a big effect how the world looks at you. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute. You say these climate scientists have been telling us we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow?”

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By asking whether “we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow,” Dubner — a top blogger for the New York Times — gets to the heart of why this bizarre theory of a cabal of all-powerful climatologists is getting support from conservative media and politicians. The incontrovertible science — based not on manipulated data but on decades of basic research — is that the burning of fossil fuels is drastically reshaping our planet’s climate, melting the glaciers, and acidifying the oceans. And the only known way to restore conditions to those safe for human civilization is to dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels. Doing so, however, would affect the incredible profits and power of the oil and coal industries, and of their ideological allies.

One of the scientists, for example, who is “telling us we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow” is Ken Caldeira, who Dubner and Levitt falsely portray in their book as a supporter of their mindless contrarianism. Is Dubner now accusing Caldeira of being part of this conspiracy?

Dubner continues:

But the point is this: carbon mitigation as a plan to stop global warming — even if you devoutly believe that global warming is the biggest problem we ever faced — won’t work.

This is an even more radical claim than what’s in SuperFreakonomics, in which Dubner and co-author Steven Levitt merely argue — based on flawed logic and falsehoods — that carbon mitigation would be ruinously expensive and difficult.

In fact, if we stop treating our atmosphere like a sewer, the climate system will heal itself over time, potentially more rapidly than we expect. That our past inaction will continue to bear consequences into the future is a reason to act with greater swiftness, not to dither further. The longer we delay, the more difficult and expensive the challenge to reduce pollution while adapting to a hostile world becomes.

Transcript: Read more

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.

Appearing on PBS’s influential Charlie Rose Show last week, SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner expanded upon their destructively uninformed portrayal of climate science, even throwing into question man’s influence on global warming. When Rose asked him about the controversial “global cooling” chapter, Levitt fatuously claimed that “what we actually said is not even very controversial.” Levitt said that SuperFreakonomics is “not denying that the Earth has gotten warmer.” After Rose interjected, “And it’s man created,” Levitt stammered, “It’s harder to know whether it’s man created”:

I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. That’s not even our question.

Watch it:

Later during the interview Dubner attempted to justify the book’s claim that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain,” arguing that it was the decrease in sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that has caused global warming, rather than the accumulation of carbon dioxide.

This is of course utter nonsense — aerosols like sulfur dioxide certainly masked the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, but global warming is caused by the greenhouse gases. If a methamphetamine addict is using alcohol to blunt the side effects of his meth habit, his hyperactivity isn’t due to a lack of binge drinking.

Dubner and Levitt’s quest to deny the reality of climate change and promote radical geoengineering to block the sun as a “sensible” alternative to reducing greenhouse gases is, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “horseshit.” Their strategy is like counseling the meth addict to become a full-blown alcoholic instead of reducing his drug use.

Despite Levitt’s argument that “it’s harder to know” whether global warming is “man created,” in reality the scientific evidence is clear and has been for years, according to the scientific organizations of the world: Read more

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has joined the critics who found that SuperFreakonomics got climate science wrong. When economist Steven Levitt came on the show to promote the book on October 27th, Stewart defended his work, wondering if critics were just part of a “secular religion.” Levitt had portrayed former Vice President Al Gore as the “patron saint” of the “religion” of global warming, who has chilled investigation into “cheap and simple” solutions because of his “moralism and angst.” However, two days later, Stewart interviewed Gore to discuss his own new book, Our Choice. In the mean time, Stewart belatedly did some reading up on this fundamental issue, and found that the “science was, according to actual people who know climate science, not good”:

We had on a guy on the show, Steve Levitt — Freakonomics — whose science was, according to actual people who know climate science, not good, but it seemed like the tone of the book was, “Why don’t we just think about these other things?” People came at him hard.

Watch it (Stewart mentions SuperFreakonomics at 4:20):

Levitt and Dubner have now admitted, begrudgingly, that they misportrayed climate scientist Ken Caldeira’s own views about his research. To be more precise, they have announced they will change the sentence that claimed Caldeira believes carbon dioxide “is not the right villain in this fight” to omit Caldeira’s name. Despite this one welcome change, the book continues to be a farrago of errors, personal attacks, and unfounded conclusions.

Stewart, however, continues to not understand why the book came under such withering criticism. In his interviews that touch upon global warming — with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, global warming denier Chris Horner, journalist Bob Woodruff — Stewart has consistently acted bemused, which is often a good interview technique. But it also seems that Stewart’s bafflement is genuine, failing to understand that billions of dollars have been spent by polluters and their political allies for decades to distort the clear need for decisive action. He does not seem to know that greenhouse gases are already reshaping the world we live in, destroying ecosystems and economies.

At least Stewart is just a comic. Our nation’s journalists have no such excuse.

Thanks to the “academic malpractice” of SuperFreakonomics on the one hand and rising scientific concern that radical measures will have to be taken within decades to preserve human civilization on the other, talk about geoengineering to combat global warming is on the rise. One such project is Ice911, an unfortunately named scheme:

Ice911 is an engineering approach to reduce the melting of the ice. It is a solution that can be rapidly implemented. It has the potential to slow down the melt, provide interim mammal habitat, and perhaps even rebuild the ice.

The Ice911 is in fact a project to develop a low-tech method to increase the Arctic Ocean’s albedo in order to stop the feedback loop that is causing Arctic ice to melt at catastrophic rates, using millions of small, white floats. Although filling the world’s oceans with yet more plastic trash isn’t the most desirable rapid-cooling strategy, it sure beats options like those promoted in SuperFreakonomics, which have possible side effects like destroying the ozone layer. Ice911 has an impressive advisory board, and is led by Dr. Leslie Field, a world-class technologist.

However, the name Ice911 recalls “ice-nine,” a substance from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic science-fiction novel, Cat’s Cradle, one of the great parables of the “unintended consequences” of finding the “cheap and simple fix” to complex, global problems. As summarized at Technovelgy, “A general had a problem: mud. Marines have slogged their way through it for generations. Is it possible to get rid of mud? Without having to carry anything heavy? Marines already have enough to carry. Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an original thinker, found the ‘outside-the-box’ answer: a single crystal of Ice-Nine would crystallize every bit of water it touched”:

“…suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle…?”
“The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.
“And all the muck around the puddle?”
“It would freeze?”
“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“You bet they would!” he cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”

The book ends with the world’s water turned to ice-nine, the book’s fictional author one of the last remaining survivors of the human race, writing down his story as he prepares for his death. The fictional Felix Hoenikker, a “father of the Atomic Bomb,” recalls Dr. Edward Teller , the Manhattan Project physicist who later championed the Star Wars satellite laser system and in 1998 promoted a “Sunscreen for Planet Earth” — “solving” global warming through the injection of particles into the stratosphere, reviving an idea first proposed in 1979 as a thought experiment by fellow nuclear physicist (and now aging climate skeptic) Freeman Dyson. Teller’s protegé, Lowell Feld, has continued to champion Teller’s ideas and worldview at Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures, now promoted on bookshelves everywhere in SuperFreakonomics.

Today, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) rebuked the authors of SuperFreakonomics for participating in a “continuing effort to deceive the American public” on the science of climate change. During an investigative hearing on forged letters sent by the coal industry to oppose climate action, Inslee condemned the industry’s effort to “hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment” of global warming pollution. Inslee then turned to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, criticizing them for “absolute deception” in their work on global warming:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

Watch it:

Levitt and Dubner’s promotion of geoengineering as a “cheap and simple” alternative to carbon mitigation is in direct opposition to the views of Dr. Ken Caldeira, Paul Crutzen, and the world’s scientific community. Although Caldeira objected to the chapter and has since repeatedly said he was misrepresented in multiple ways, the SuperFreakonomics authors have continued their deception, joining the billion-dollar effort by fossil-fuel companies and the radical right to thwart action on climate change.

Transcript: Read more

On last night’s Daily Show, host Jon Stewart heaped praise on the contrarian approach to global warming taken by SuperFreakonomics author Steve Levitt, a University of Chicago economist. Stewart was baffled by the widespread criticism of Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner, asking, “Have you stepped on a secular religion?” Stewart, often a tough interviewer, coddled Levitt, saying, “I’m sorry you’ve taken so much s**t for it.” He blamed the uproar over SuperFreakonomics on people who “feel you are betraying environmentalism”:

I’ve been somewhat surprised at how angry people are. The global warming chapter, you don’t deny global warming. You don’t say that CO2 isn’t a factor, but they feel you are betraying environmentalism or our world. Why are people so mad?

Watch it:

SuperFreakonomics mischaracterizes the field in order to argue that “moralism and angst” has blinded scientists and policymakers from pursuing the “cheap and simple solution” of geoengineering. Although the book condemns scientists for fearmongering and promotes a radical alternative to existing policy, Levitt tells Stewart, “I don’t try to pretend I know the science.”

In reality, the critics of Levitt’s treatment of climate science and policy are not “dogmatic” believers of a “secular religion” — they are highly respected climate scientists, energy experts, and economists, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira, who has said Levitt and Dubner misrepresented his views. The widespread criticism isn’t based on the book’s personal attacks on Al Gore or its mocking of global warming as a “religion,” but on the multitude of factual errors, misrepresentations, and false conclusions that the authors use to promote their mindless contrarianism. As science journalist Eric Pooley writes, “The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes.”

Levitt recommends untested, planetary scale geo-engineering to block the sun as a “band-aid” that “buys us time” if “we might need to do something,” because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time. However, scientists concerned that global warming needs to be reduced rapidly have already found a well-proven approach that’s cheaper and safer than pumping unlimited amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere: stopping black carbon emissions of soot from diesel and biomass burning.

Stewart hit the nail on the head when he concluded, “I really don’t know what I’m talking about, do I?” However, he failed to understand his mistake when he concluded that he had “apparently frightened our audience by suggesting that conservation isn’t the only way out of any of our problems.”

Stewart has excoriated other media darlings for their laissez-faire approach to serious issues, from Tucker Carlson to Jim Cramer, and just last week skewered CNN for its failure to do even basic fact-checking of its guests. Unfortunately, this time Stewart ended up being just like those he usually mocks — neither funny nor accurate.

Transcript: Read more

Yesterday morning, SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner continued their national media tour, appearing on public radio’s Diane Rehm Show. They dismissed the widespread criticism of their book by Nobel Prize-winning economists and climate scientists as the “work of an activist,” evidently referring to physicist and former Department of Energy official Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Levitt and Dubner even tried to laugh off the on-air criticism of Dr. Peter Frumhoff, a global change ecologist who is the director of Science and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The authors represent their book as merely a quizzical look at interesting issues, without “a moral or policy perspective“:

Just in case you’re happening upon this conversation in the middle and haven’t grasped the kind of perspective that we’re coming from — we don’t write about prostitution, or terrorism, or global warming or any of these things, really, from a moral or policy perspective. We just try to lay out what’s going on and from that let people proceed how they want to think about it or how they want to draw conclusions. So this is not meant to be an endorsement or a condemnation of any of these things. We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.

Listen here:

This depiction, like most of the SuperFreaks’ defense of their work, bears little resemblance to the actual text. The authors discuss global warming explicitly through a “policy perspective”:

It is this specter of catastrophe, no matter how remote, that has propelled global warming to the forefront of public policy. . . . So how should we place a value on this relatively small chance of worldwide catastrophe? . . . One good reason for waiting is that we might have options in the future to avert the problem that cost far less than today’s options.

The authors condemn a broad array of existing policy efforts: to limit carbon dioxide emissions (“not the right villain”), to establish carbon pricing (“all we can say is good luck”), expand renewable energy (“cute”), limit deforestation (trees are an “environmental scourge”), clean up transportation (“not that big of a sector”), or reduce coal use (“economic suicide”).

They also discuss global warming explicitly through a “moral perspective,” condemning “the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion,” with a “high priest,” “patron saint,” and “doomsayers” responsible for a “drumbeat of doom.” The authors quote Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, who accuses advocates of policies other than geo-engineering of being “global-warming activists” who want to “do a set of things that could have enormous impact — and we think probably negative impact — on human life.”

On the other hand, the SuperFreaks provide a strong endorsement for pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere forever as a “cheap and simple solution” that is “practically free” with a “proof of harmlessness.” Its biggest problem, they claim, is that it is “too simple and too cheap.” They claim climate scientist Ken Caldeira has endorsed this policy “solution,” but policymakers only listen to “people like Al Gore,” who think “it’s nuts.” Somehow Levitt and Dubner fail to mention that Caldeira himself has actually said the SuperFreaks’ policy perspective is ridiculous:

As a long-term strategy, it’s nuts.

Bizarrely, Levitt and Dubner never once mention the one policy area that is universally recognized as being “cheap and simple” by economists and scientists alike — boring energy efficiency. Guess they were too busy chatting with call girls and mosquito-laser billionaires.

This is part three of a three-part series. Read parts one and two 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. DeLong’s final two questions were about the lifecycle costs of deploying solar power. In SuperFreakonomics, Dubner and Levitt cite billionaire mosquito-laser inventor Nathan Myhrvold’s argument that solar power is not actually a “good thing” when it comes to tackling global warming.

Solar panels, Myhrvold argues, create both an “albedo debt” and a “warming debt.” If a “black” solar panel is placed on a light-colored surface, even as it generates electricity it will increase air temperatures. Furthermore, the construction of large-scale solar plants generates global warming pollution, which Myhrvold claims would counteract the benefit of replacing coal-burning plants. He makes the radical claim that the “warming debt” from solar plant construction would make “emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years.” DeLong, not surprisingly, finds these claims a bit dubious:

5: “The problem with solar cells is that they are black… designed to absorb light from the sun…. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest… contributes to global warming.” Surely the heat energy reradiated from a solar panel is a small fraction of the heat trapped by all the carbon dioxide that would be produced by the coal-fired plants that would otherwise generate the electricity, isn’t it?

6: “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’.” I had thought that practically none of the power plants that we will use in 2050 are now in operation, and that building them–whether for open-carbon cycle, closed-carbon cycle, or non-carbon–will cost about the same amount of energy, and thus that there is no significant extra power-plant construction debt from going green in our new power-plant construction over the next forty years as long as it is done gradually. Am I wrong?

Myhrvold has defended his arguments, saying that when he said “black,” he didn’t mean black, just, well, rather dark. Although Dubner and Levitt radically misrepresented Ken Caldeira’s opinions in their chapter, they were spot on with Myhrvold, who blogged:

If we go hell-bent for leather in building solar plants for the next 50 years or so, it is entirely possible that we won’t see much small benefit for 30 to 50 years.

This is nonsense. Take a simplified model of the world that starts with 100 percent high-emission coal plants emitting 10,000 MMT of carbon dioxide a year and no zero-emission solar plants. Let’s assume that the construction of each solar plant has a three-year “warming debt” and that the use of each plant has a two-year “albedo debt,” in line with Myhrvold’s estimates. We’ll also assume slow growth in total energy demand (an assumption which does not affect the results of this thought experiment). If all the coal plants are replaced over a forty-year period (by 2050), the world starts seeing the benefit in only twenty years (by 2030): Read more

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