Even before publication, the book SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the topic of hot debate – on economists’ blogs, including Krugman’s, on Amazon, and, of course, on environmental sites. SuperFreakonomics’ authors are Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Stephen J. Dubner, a former writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.
The heat was generated by Chapter 5 of the book, which deals with global warming and mitigation techniques, such as geoengineering. Since the chapter is no longer available for perusal on Amazon, it’s hard to take part in the debate. But here’s one of the co-authors, Dubner, defending the chapter:
Our global-warming chapter has several sections. We discuss how it’s a very hard problem to solve since pollution is an externality – that is, the people who generate pollution generally don’t pay the cost of their actions and therefore don’t have strong incentives to pollute less. We discuss how even the most sophisticated climate models are limited in their ability to predict the future, and we discuss the large measure of uncertainty in this realm, given that global climate is such a complex and dynamic system. We discuss some of the commonly held misperceptions about climate and energy, including the fact that the historic relationship between global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide is more complicated than is generally thought.
The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer.
Here’s how Krugman, with his usual understatement, puts down the authors:
. . .they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.
And that’s not acceptable. This is a serious issue. We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games.
Here’s a review of the whole book in the Financial Times this past weekend.
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So once again those who claim the sky is falling freak out not over incorrect claims, claims which they can't disprove, but instead freak out simply because someone else isn't agreeing that the sky is falling.
Jerry Parnell and Larry Niven wrote a Science Fiction book called "Fallen Angels" when this Global Worming silliness was getting started about the ecologists plunging the world into an Ice Age. There is no known disaster for the world on the warming side but the human race can certainly plunge the world into an extreme ice age.
Fact: After averaging 18 inches rise for the last 20,00 years sea level has only risen between five and five a half inches since 1900. Two feet over the next five hundred years will not be a disaster.
We live in the coldest five million years of the last half billion years. Much of growing plant life around the world is CO2 limited; you add more CO2 and the plants grow more. Freakonomics should address the costs of human scarify if they are going to take Global warming seriously
- We should be more concerned about Global Warming and Climate Change because Typhoons are getting much stronger and there are greater incidence of Flooding. take for example the recent Typhoon Ketsana which devastated some countries in South East Asia.
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