Narrator: “Forever!!!”

- The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

- Read all the comments there.

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

I am reading all the comments, right now. Many are well thought and interesting. Do read.

ADDENDUM: Why is Intellectual Ventures researching geoengineering technologies?

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

- “Steven Levitt is probably a Very Good Economist, but he has proven again and again and again that this Using Economics To Explain The World thing is utter bullshit. And he and Dubner invented this pop-econ trend that is the most annoying application of make-believe science since pop-psychology.”

- “In other words, like most pop science, it was not very scientific. And furthermore, neoclassical microeconomics is just as flawed a method of examining individual behavior as Freudian psychology.”

- “Now, primarily because of the stupid climate change chapter, a bunch of people who formerly would’ve defended Levitt and Dubner are calling them irresponsible morons. ”

UNQUOTE

Wow.

Previously: Steve Levitt is attacked for not sticking to the scientific approach.

Follow Up: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?

Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.

Via Doctor Professor Michael Giberson

UPDATE: Nathan Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on Levitt and Dubner (on their blog!) asserting: “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! … The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.” Did he even read the book?

Previously:

- Steve Levitt is attacked for not sticking to the scientific approach.

- Modeling a planet is difficult.

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: Ken Caldeira on Levitt and Dubner and Geoengineering

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

Previously: Steve Levitt is attacked for not sticking to the scientific approach.

UPDATE: More from Climate Progress

Next: Ken Caldeira about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics —as well as the prospects (and pitfalls) of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

Paul Klemencic:

Brad [DeLong], I agree with your assessment. This series of emails just made my brain explode as well.

I have spent a significant amount of time going through this information on SuperF, and my premise was that the authors did this either intentionally, or had bad luck in selecting their sources.

Now I see I was wrong. There really is no point talking to Levitt or Dubner; they don’t even understand the basics of global warming. They are unable to recognize the mistakes they have made in the book. And it isn’t clear they are capable of learning where they went wrong.

If the information they wrote was misleading and leads the reader to reach the wrong conclusion, or if the information they wrote was insignificant, and focuses on unimportant data, they respond with a shrug and ask “But is the information true?” They will never acknowledge the information as written, takes the reader to a clearly wrong conclusion.

If the information in the book is just completely wrong, then Levitt and Dubner say “But we got this directly from this expert!” and duck responsibility. So the information from Myhrvold which is incorrect, stands uncorrected because they can explain where they got the info. They apparently never checked with a climate scientist or solar power expert who actually knows something about the energy balances to see if Myhrvold’s analysis stood up.

So we now know they are ignorant of the basics of AGW theory, can’t recognize legitimate criticism of the science and economic analysis in their book, and aren’t apparently willing to learn from their mistakes. What more can we say… “Houston, we have a problem.”

It is interesting that Myhrvold was able to feed much of this nonsense to Levitt and Dubner, and they swallowed it without ever questioning whether Myhrvold had an incentive to lie and misrepresent the truth. I thought Levitt was an expert regarding the incentives based economic decisions.

William M. Connolley:

Diagnosis, in brief:

(1) they write about stuff they clearly don’t understand

(2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not (mind you, plenty of more respectable folk do the same)

(3) they pick an expert to talk to, but since they don’t have a clue about the subject they don’t know how to pick a good expert, or even understand what the expert says

(4) there is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable.

-

Addendum:

- Anatomy of a debunking: Caldeira says Superfreakonomics is “damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and filled with “many” misleading statements. Dubner continues to make false statements, parroted by Pielke and Morano. DeLong urges authors to “abjectly apologize” for the chapter.

- Brad DeLong

Previously: Modeling a planet is difficult.

Next: Steve Levitt clearly has virtually no understanding of earth science.

Next: Ken Caldeira about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics —as well as the prospects (and pitfalls) of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

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.

http://delong.typepad.com/files/superfreakonomics-chapter-5.pdf

UPDATE: Steve Dubner + Andrew Gelman + Brad DeLong

Next: Ken Caldeira about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics —as well as the prospects (and pitfalls) of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

A commenter on their blog:

I am a paleoclimatologist, and can only say FINALLY. Someone with economics background understands the difference between reality and a model for reality.

Al Gore, Jim Hansen, Paul Krugman, and many on this page want us to base public policy on models claim to predict the future of the climate, even though they do not model cloud formation correctly, do not incorporate the Sun, and do not model the biosphere feedback at all (just for starters). This is not (necessarily) a criticism of modelers. Modeling a planet is difficult; many things will be left out of a model. It is likewise not surprising that these models have failed to predict anything (that is, say in advance what is going to happen). Not hurricanes, not El Nino, not the cooling of the past few years. Nor do they “retrodict” things from the past that the modelers did not know about and therefore did not parameterize into their models. Not the Pliocene warming. Not the Ice Age terminations, nothing.

Those of us who work with models are not surprised by this at all. We are still crawling in climate modeling, and one must crawl before one walks. The only surprise is that politicians should have become so fixated so strongly on science that is just not there.

Jim Hansen had an interesting hypothesis; that feedback cycles that amplify CO2-caused increases in temperature might overwhelm feedback cycles that damp this perturbation. Maybe. Any good scientist would consider it as a hypothesis. But it is clear now that it is a poorly supported hypothesis, and is certainly no grounds for determining public policy.

The problem arises because Al Gore declared Hansen’s hypothesis “a winner”, made a movie and won a Nobel Peace Prize. And so non-scientists (including many people writing on this page) think they have “settled science” in their pocket. This is not the first time that science has been corrupted by politicians selecting a winner. Stalin re. Lysenko; and back to the Pharaohs.

On this page, we have people who display none of the critical thinking required for science who nonetheless think that their opinion is “scientific”. Gecko thinks that the European heat wave means something (no, weather is not climate). Tom Olson is certain that your chapter is “flawed” (It probably is, but does Tom have a clue why?). Nell is certain that “virtually all climate scientists and … governments understand that global warming is … happening faster than predicted.” No we do not, and no it is not. Bart Verheaggan is convinced that “CO2 is the major culprit in the warming.” The preponderance of the evidence opposes that.

Crf also thinks that science is based on “virtual consensus” and asks scientists to defer judgment to a government panel, the IPCC. Science begins, as Feynman points out, “assuming the ignorance of experts.” Also, scientists have agendas, like every other human being. The agenda of the governmental IPCC is known; it is different from the agendas of Pearson (racial Darwinism of the 1930’s), Stalin (Lysenko) and other examples from our politico-scientific past back to the Pharaohs, but the IPCC is just as obstructive of the scientific process as any of these historical examples. Which is why researchers are couching their observations inconsistent with the anthropogenic CO2 hypothesis in cover language; they fear political reprisals from the Gores, Krugmans, and Obamas of the world.

Decades of bad science education, and here we are. What a sorry state.

— Steven too

For the criticism of Super Freakonomics, go to Climate Progress, and search for Super Freakonomics. Tons of posts against Steve Levitt’s book.

UPDATE: Steve Dubner + Andrew Gelman + Brad DeLong

UPDATE:

Real Climate:

There is one further contradiction in the idea that geo-engineering is a fix. In order to proceed with such an intervention one would clearly need to rely absolutely on climate model simulations and have enormous confidence that they were correct (otherwise the danger of over-compensation is very real even if you decided to start off small). As with early attempts to steer hurricanes, the moment the planet did something unexpected, it is very likely the whole thing would be called off. It is precisely because climate modellers understand that climate models do not provide precise predictions that they have argued for a reduction in the forces driving climate change. The existence of a near-perfect climate model is therefore a sine qua non for responsible geo-engineering, but should such a model exist, it would likely alleviate the need for geo-engineering in the first place since we would know exactly what to prepare for and how to prevent it.

Next: Steve Levitt clearly has virtually no understanding of earth science.

Next: Steve Levitt is attacked for not sticking to the scientific approach.

Next: Ken Caldeira about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics —as well as the prospects (and pitfalls) of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: Ken Caldeira on Levitt and Dubner and Geoengineering

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review

I like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner very much, and I wish the polemique will end well for them.

Previously: Super Freakonomics — Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner — The Follow-Up On Freakonomics

Super Freakonomics — Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner – (co-authors of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics)

UPDATE: Steve Levitt responds.

Union Of Concerned Scientists

Climate Progress – Search for Freakonomics. Many posts about the polemique.

UPDATE: Steve Dubner + Andrew Gelman + Brad DeLong

Next: Ken Caldeira about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics —as well as the prospects (and pitfalls) of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system

UPDATE: Steve Dubner apologizes.

UPDATE: The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

UPDATE: Climate Progress + AP

UPDATE: Harvard Business Review