Word: globalization
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...During the boom years, banks lent vast sums of money to developers as property fever gripped the newly wealthy nation. But when the bubble burst with the global meltdown last year, these unpaid loans left huge holes in the banks' books and the liberal lending of the Celtic Tiger era came to an abrupt halt. To steady the ship, the government placed a blanket guarantee on deposits in six Irish banks last September. At the time, according to Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, it was "the cheapest bailout in the world." But that claim soon came back to haunt...
Numbers like that demand a sequel, and this month Levitt and Dubner delivered theirs: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. But while their first book focused mostly on smaller stuff, SuperFreakonomics takes on one very big subject - global warming - and it has got environmentalists and climate scientists across the blogosphere feeling dismayed by the Freaky Ones. (See the top 10 green ideas...
What's the problem? For starters, Levitt and Dubner begin their chapter on climate change by citing the concerns over the risk of global cooling, which were held briefly by some scientists in the early 1970s - that's a common trope for climate contrarians, who say that if concerns over cooling turned out to be false, maybe the same thing will come of the current worries over global warming. They go on to question the accuracy of today's climate models, and by extension, whether we should really be concerned about potentially catastrophic temperature increases over the coming century. They...
...Freakonomics blog. But if you want my moderately informed take on SuperFreakonomics' climate-change chapter, I think Levitt and Dubner went into it with a contrarian mind-set, which saturated their interpretation of existing climate-change science. In doing so, they vastly underplayed the real risks posed by global warming...
...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; when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded in 1992, for instance, the SO2 sent into the atmosphere created a brief global cooling spell. Levitt and Dubner advocate pursuing this geoengineering scheme, which could potentially avert a hotter world for pennies on the dollar, compared with the long-term work of shifting to a low-carbon economy. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...