Superfreakonomics Flunks Climate Science

Now even friends break ranks with Levitt and Dubner over their new tome Superfreakonomics – a clear throw-back to the 1980s.

Is it time to ask for a reprint with all the errors corrected ?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aVKXZg_Z.vMY

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are so good at tweaking conventional wisdom that their first book, “Freakonomics,” sold 4 million copies. So when Dubner, an old friend, told me their new book would take on climate change, I was rooting for a breakthrough idea.

No such luck. In “SuperFreakonomics,” their brave new climate thinking turns out to be the same pile of misinformation the skeptic crowd has been peddling for years.

“Obviously, provocation is not last on the list of things we’re trying to do,” Dubner told me the other day. This time, the urge to provoke has driven him and Levitt off the rails and into a contrarian ditch.

…Having downplayed the problem, they try to solve it with a set of silver-bullet technologies known as geoengineering. One would shoot millions of tons of sulfur dioxide 18 miles into the air to artificially cool the planet. This could work; it also could have dire unintended consequences.

Caldeira, who is researching the idea, argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.”

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/superfreakonimics-climate-change-controversy.php

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/SuperFreakonomics-on-Global-Warming-220

“It all started with climate activist Joe Romm accusing the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of global warming denial and misrepresenting the research of a key climate scientist. They pushed back, and fellow New York Times blogger and celebrated columnist Paul Krugman jumped in the fray…”

Richard Black Hijacks Debate

Environmentalism has trudged a long, winding, often silent road, with many cul-de-sacs of defeat, desperation and despair.

In the last few years there has been a raising of the collective consciousness about how many problems are interrelated with an obscure corner of gas chemistry, which offers grave prospects for the whole of Life on Earth.

Ecologists and treehuggers of all varieties have started to gather round the camp fire of Climate Change, finding that people will pay attention to the destruction of Nature if they pay attention to their own fate first.

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Water Wars : Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta, Georgia is running out of fresh drinking water. I heard about it at second hand from one of my relatives who lives there.

Lake Lanier is suffering from drought. Of course there are a number of factors, not just Climate Change. But the combination of cyclical drought, US Army Corps of Engineers activities, increasing urban population and agricultural take doesn’t seem to be able to explain everything.

Of particular concern is the condition known as anoxia, lack of oxygen in the water. This will be partly caused by chemical run-off from surrounding farming land and any industrial activity, and also changes in composition of the tributary rivers which feed it, which will all be exacerbated by changes in rainfall caused by Climate Change.

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Cloud Ships. Yes, But…

Geoengineering. Sounds great. Treat the Earth like one big motoring machine, get under the hood (bonnet) and tinker with it.

But what if actually this is the equivalent of putting the Planet on a life support system ventilator, and the plug could be pulled at any time ?

How sustainable are some of the Geoengineering proposals ? Are they guaranteed to work ? Won’t they have knock-on side-effects ? Are they reversible if they prove unhelpful ? And how much will they cost ?

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