Think Progress

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Brad Johnson, and Zaid Jilani

Super Freaking Wrong

SuperFreakonomics, the sequel to the pop-economics bestseller Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, "is bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again," publisher Harper Collins writes. However, "Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman opines. "The problem with SuperFreakonomics," the Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes, "is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one." Instead of relying on Levitt's interesting economic research, the authors "just decided to deploy the brand," the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Matthew Yglesias writes, "to help sell copies of what's really just a lot of third-rate political punditry." Levitt and Dubner begin the book by concluding that if you're intoxicated "driving is safer than walking" -- based not on actual research but on "shoddy statistical work." The authors boast about their time spent interviewing a $500-an-hour call girl, describing her as "essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour," while getting the economics and history of prostitution wrong. But the most serious concerns are raised by their treatment of climate change. As first reported by Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joseph Romm, SuperFreakonomics devotes 44 pages to a contrarian view of climate change, calling global warming a "religion." They pit "true believers" and "doomsayers" such as Al Gore and James Lovelock against "agnostics" and people who may be "the smartest men in the universe," led by Microsoft billionaire and scientific dilettante Nathan Myhrvold, who warns that solar power isn't a "good thing," preferring the "cheap and simple" solution to global warming of pumping acid rain pollution into the stratosphere to blot out the sun.

GLOBAL COOLING, GEORGE WILL STYLE: Levitt and Dubner spend much of their time channeling conservative columnist George Will, complaining about a "drumbeat of doom" growing louder from "doomsayers" even though a "little-discussed fact about global warming," they say, is that the average global temperature "has in fact decreased." In fact, this "little-discussed fact" is one of the most popular canards among global warming skeptics, from Tea Party activists to the heads of the American Farm Bureau and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In reality, this decade has been the warmest in recorded history. Annual variability in temperatures, due to ocean circulation and solar output, can mask this long-term rise. Depending on the data set, 1998 or 2005 was the hottest year on record -- but every year this century has been warmer than any year before 1998. And greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, guaranteeing further warming. The book also repeats Will's obsession with a supposed consensus about "global cooling" in the 1970s. Levitt and Dubner misrepresent New York Times coverage from the period, claiming an article about scientific controversy over a wide array of climatic changes -- from "hot, dry weather" in the United States to a decline in the Indian monsoon -- was "predicting the effects of global cooling." In reality, scientists were observing that man's influence was altering natural climate patterns, including aerosol pollution that cooled the atmosphere and greenhouse gas pollution that warmed it. As the New York Times wrote in 1975, "the present cooling trend in the north will be reversed as more and more carbon dioxide is introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of fuels." Levitt and Dubner egregiously misrepresent the one climate scientist they portray, Ken Caldeira, as believing that "carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight" and trees are an "environmental scourge." On Caldeira's website: "Carbon dioxide is the right villain, insofar as inanimate objects can be villains." Caldeira, whose research actually finds that tropical and boreal forests have different effects on climate change, has written that "[c]lear-cutting mountains to slow climate change is, of course, nuts."

GLOBAL COOLING, JAMES BOND STYLE: Dismissing the approach developed by economists of limiting emissions through some form of carbon pollution pricing as "too little, too late, and too optimistic," Levitt and Dubner -- like fellow contrarian Bjorn Lomborg -- instead embrace radical geoengineering, "if the doomsayers turn out to be right." "Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst," they write, "the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem: how to get 34 gallons per minute of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere." However, "the reasons why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering so much," according to climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, "are based on a misreading of the science, a misrepresentation of proposed solutions, and truly bizarre interpretations of how environmental problems have been dealt with in the past." "On international coordination, for example, it's a lot easier," Yglesias writes, "to imagine China agreeing to binding emissions targets than to imagine China agreeing to let the United States conduct a doomsday weather control machine or us agreeing to sit idly by while China launches a satellite capable of blotting out the sun." "Plausibly, 6 billion people would benefit and 1 billion would be hurt" by a higher-carbon, lower-sunlight world, even if precisely the correct amount of sulfur dioxide were pumped aloft. And that's ignoring the catastrophic acidification of the oceans this "cheap and simple" solution would do nothing to avert. "Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions," Caldeira has explained previously. "If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it's pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly." It would be, he says, "a dystopic world out of a science fiction story."

THE SUPERFREAKS ATTACK: "The authors appear to have taken a purposefully contrarian position on climate change science and economics," the Union of Concerned Scientists finds. "While such a position may help draw attention to their book, their reliance on faulty arguments and distorted statistics does a disservice to their readers." California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called Myhrvold's critical depiction of solar power "patent nonsense," and economist Yoram Bauman finds the chapter "terribly misleading." Economist J. Bradford DeLong "can't conclude anything other than that Levitt and Dubner have failed to sit down and think any of this through to its conclusion," finding error after error after error. Unfortunately, Levitt, Dubner, and even Myhrvold have responded to criticisms of their fatuous contrarianism by accusing the critics of ideological bias, falsehood, and smears. Dubner is baffled that Caldeira "doesn't believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions." Myhrvold complains about "personal attacks and counterattacks" that makes discussions of climate science "degenerate" into a "personal and venal brawl," but then calls Romm a "bitterly partisan true believer," one of the "extremists" "at the fringe of every political movement" who make "shrill attacks in all directions." In December 2008, Romm, a physicist and former Department of Energy official, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for "distinguished service toward a sustainable energy future and for persuasive discourse on why citizens, corporations, and governments should adopt sustainable technologies." Myhrvold also repeats his unscientific critique of solar power. Levitt claims "the foundation of these attacks is essentially fraudulent." He argues -- based perhaps on an alternate-universe version of his book -- "the entire point of our chapter is to discuss global-warming solutions." In an interview with Yale's e360 published this morning, however, Caldeira explains the solution he believes in was the one dismissed in SuperFreakonomics: "I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don't think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon."
 

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