Super freaking wrong

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book promotes a contrarian view of climate change that has no scientific merit

Brad Johnson
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 October 2009 21.00 BST
Superfreakonomics is a super freaking mess. US publisher Harper Collins promotes the sequel to the pop-economics bestseller Freakonomics, authored by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, as "bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again". Too often, however, the book provokes by just getting things wrong – including matters involving life and death.
Levitt and Dubner begin by arguing that if you're intoxicated, "driving is safer than walking" – based not on actual research but on "shoddy statistical work". The authors boast about their time spent interviewing a $500-an-hour call girl, describing her as "essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour", while getting the economics and history of prostitution wrong. But the most serious concerns are raised by their treatment of climate change.
Superfreakonomics promotes a contrarian view of climate change, calling global warming a "religion" and lionising Microsoft billionaire and scientific dilettante Nathan Myhrvold. Myhrvold unscientifically pooh-poohs solar power and promotes the "cheap and simple" solution to global warming of pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to blot out the sun. But this Bond-villain fantasy solution cannot come to pass, the Superfreaks bemoan, because the "people like Al Gore" think "it's nuts".
The chapter "What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?" essentially cribs from previous contrarian work, repeating confused arguments against climate science by conservative columnist George Will, and following slavishly a 2006 Rolling Stone profile by Jeff Goodell of Star-Wars physicist Lowell Wood and climate scientist Ken Caldeira. Like Will, Levitt and Dubner complain about a "drumbeat of doom" growing louder from "doomsayers" even though a "little-discussed fact about global warming," is that the average global temperature "has in fact decreased".
Of course, this "little-discussed fact" is one of the most popular canards among global warming sceptics – from Tea Party activists to the heads of the American Farm Bureau and the US Chamber of Commerce – and this decade is the warmest in recorded history. The Superfreaks also repeat Will's obsession with a supposed consensus about "global cooling" in the 1970s, falsely portraying articles that discussed scientific controversy over a wide array of climatic changes as "predicting the effects of global cooling".
Most tellingly, Levitt and Dubner shockingly misrepresent the one climate scientist they interviewed, the Carnegie Institution's Ken Caldeira, a renowned climate modeler. They say Caldeira believes that "carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight". In fact, Caldeira says, "Carbon dioxide is the right villain." They say Caldeira has found that trees are an "environmental scourge". In fact, Caldeira, whose research actually finds that tropical and boreal forests have different effects on climate change, has written that "Clear-cutting mountains to slow climate change is, of course, nuts."
They write Caldeira "endorses" the "solution" of injecting millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere as a response to global warming – forever. In fact, "geo-engineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions," Caldeira has explained. "If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geo-engineering as a way to deal with it, it's pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly." It would be, he says, "a dystopic world out of a science fiction story". "As a long-term strategy," Caldeira said in 2006, "it's nuts."
After economists, scientists, journalists and energy experts condemned Superfreakonomics for its error-ridden, fatuous contrarianism, the authors reacted with rage and confusion, accusing critics of ideological bias, falsehood and smears.
Superfreakonomics is a circus sideshow. Levitt and Dubner may think they're being super, but this time they're actually just the freaks.