Superfreaks on Climate Change

I've never read The New Yorker before and after this review of Levitt & Dubner's sequel to the bestselling Freakonomics, I don't think I will again.

A chapter in Superfreakonomics deals with climate change, or "global warming" as it used to be called, and Elizabeth Kolbert is not impressed. She (correctly) summarises their position on climate change as follows:

"the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO₂ levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”

But, she adds,

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind.

Which is why their views on the subject are informed by scientists who do know what they're talking about, a fact not mentioned at all by Kolbert. In fact, all the ideas they endorse are presented by a company called Intellectual Ventures, started by Nathan Myhrvold. The company counts Bill Gates among its investor-inventors.

The reviewer criticised the authors for presenting their ideas as an easy fix for climate change, whereas, she argues, it's much better just to produce less carbon dioxide and Al Gore totally agrees. This is despite the authors making crystal clear (but seemingly not clear enough) that their ideas are a last ditch disaster-aversion measure.

Levitt and Dubner defend against their critics here, and Freakonomics, while not as interesting as the first book, is still worth reading.

Myhrvold weighs in here.