Word: dubner
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Still, Levitt and Dubner do tackle one legitimately controversial topic, one that I think could benefit from a somewhat contrarian perspective: geoengineering, or using technology to directly cool the earth to compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth...
...without reducing carbon emissions. We could end up in a situation in which we can't abandon geoengineering without risking sudden, disastrous warming due to unchecked CO2 emissions. Then, what was meant to be a quick, cheap fix would turn out to be a trap. And while Levitt and Dubner say the fix is appealing at least in part because it's politically impossible to imagine the world agreeing on a common carbon cap - pointing to the problems with the Kyoto Protocol - in reality, the geopolitics of geoengineering are even tougher. Would the world stand idly by if China unilaterally...
Levitt and Dubner included in their book input from Ken Caldeira, an ecologist at Stanford University who has made no secret of his research into the possible effectiveness of geoengineering schemes - even as many of his colleagues have shied away from the subject, partly out of concern that it would wrongly convince people that there is a cheaper way to counter global warming. Since SuperFreakonomics was published, however, Caldeira has claimed that Levitt and Dubner mischaracterized his views. He says he's in favor of researching geoengineering in order to gauge its effectiveness and its potential side effects...
Ultimately, that is the right way to use geoengineering and to approach climate change. While geoengineering shouldn't be ignored, Levitt and Dubner's biggest mistake in their examination of the topic lay in being seduced by a clever-sounding, cheap and contrarian shortcut. Climate change, however, is one issue for which the conventional wisdom still works, even though it's costly - and even though conventional wisdom won't sell 3 million books...
Four years ago, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner produced a sensation. Their book, Freakonomics, described how Levitt and a few other scholars used the techniques of economics to examine quirky topics and controversial ones. There was a chapter on cheating among sumo wrestlers, another on the profitability of drug-dealing, yet another on the possible link between liberalized abortion laws and falling crime rates - and much more (the subtitle was A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything...