Readers may already have encountered the kerfuffle over a new book by the best-selling Freakonomics team, Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt, who in a single chapter manage to stand up and push forward most of the brain-dead –aka zombie — arguments on the subject of climate change.
It's sad to see such smart guys make such dumb arguments. Really. A couple of hours of Googling on these issues, or a couple of days of interviewing, and they would have at least known not to repeat claims that have already been thoroughly discredited.
To pick just three: one, they claim that scientists in the l970's were as worried about global cooling then as they are about global warming now. This was disproved by a landmark collaboration between reporter John Fleck and two prominent scientists, who published together a paper in the American Meteorological Society bulletin called "The Myth of the l970's Global Cooling Scientific Consensus." (For more, see the abstract in the link.)
Two, the Freakonomics team alleged that a well-known climatologist from Stanford, Ken Caldeira, claimed that carbon dioxide was not the villain in the story of global warming, which was flat wrong — a total misquote, as Caldeira himself made clear as soon as he was asked about it.
And three, they claimed that the problem could be relatively easily solved with a Budyko's Blanket of sulfur piped into the Arctic stratosphere, an enticing "solution" to an overheating planet akin to "solving" a fever by putting an icepack on a patient's head. Even scientists who think the time has come to begin researching geoengineering, if only to buy ourselves time to avoid disaster, stress that these are desperate measures for a desperate situation. The Freakonomics team makes it sound like a really cool project, like a science fair exhibit, only with a real planet.
As a columnist for The Economist put it:
There was a time when I encountered contrarian arguments like those
made by Mr Levitt and Mr Dubner and thought, hm, that's really cool. In
recent years, when I encounter such arguments, my tendency has been to
think, yeah, that's probably a lot of hooey. If journalism is about to
affect a turn away from contrarianism, it's none too soon.
Well, we can hope.
Kit Stolz 