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...wrestlers cheat, why drug dealers are poor, the socioeconomic patterns of naming children - the book Freakonomics brought economic analysis to bear on unexpected and quirky issues and came up with unexpected and quirky answers. It's little surprise, then, that the 2005 book - by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner - sold more than 3 million copies worldwide...
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...
...could go on - and readers who want to immerse themselves in the remarkably detailed pissing match can follow it on Climate Progress or the 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...
...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...