"SuperFreakonomics"

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318-lMyQjAxMDA5MDIwNjEyNDYyWj.html

Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most influential economist under the age of 40. He, along with Stephen J. Dubner, wrote the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics". The sequel to that book is "SuperFreakonomics" which has just been published.

Dubner and Levitt made the mistake of including a chapter in their sequel on "global warming". This egregious error has stirred the "Al Gore Forces" (the AGF, as we like to call them) into action. It would seem that the AGF, led by Al Gore himself, object to observations in the sequel like "...belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined." They also note that sea levels will not rise much more than 18" by 2100, which is less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations. Further, they observe that "not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity." They quote Nathan Myhrvold (former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer) as saying that Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."

And, as the WSJ points out, more subversively Levitt and Dubner indicate that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding ... rather than scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another."

Again from the WSJ, "Perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions." In this case, a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose, and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.

Worse than the AGF criticisms, we have Paul Krugman blasting "SuperFreakonomics" for "grossly [misrepresenting] other people's research, in both climate science and economics." I never thought I'd see Al Gore and Krugman on the same side of a sophisticated arguement but I would suppose there is a first time for everything. My thought on this is that Krugman needs to stick with what got him his "economics" Nobel (which itself has been devalued lately), unless, of course, he has political aspirations. Krugman would also be wise to remember that people like Dubner and Levitt always check what they write with those they interviewed to be sure of accuracy. Regardless of what opinions I might have of the "dismal science" (economics, for those who have not heard that term before), climate science would seem to me to be something open to debate. Straining my aging memory, it seems to me that I've read consistant reports that the earth has been "cooling" for the past ten years (see our recent "Global Cooling" post).

"SuperFreakonomics" will outsell anything Krugman has written lately. Perhaps that's Krugman's problem. Gore's problem is a much larger one. "Proof" of warming is difficult when everything is cooling.