

Superfreakonomics: The Anatomy of Smear - spooneybarger
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/global-warming-in-superfreakonomics-the-anatomy-of-a-smear/

======
jbellis
The degree to which environmental orthodoxy brooks no questions (let alone
outright dissent) is both scary and unscientific.

Cue the torches and pitchforks...

~~~
pmorici
It's the far left's equivalent of the far right's tired line; if you criticize
the war strategy, you don't "support the troops". It's ironic that both ends
of the spectrum pull the same stunts on their pet issues. It all boils down to
fear, the simplest of political power tools. If you can make people
sufficiently "afraid" of something you can get them to unquestioningly support
things that would be otherwise unthinkable.

~~~
borism
This is ridiculous.

It is about science, not politics.

First make a decent scientific point, then make statements like "environmental
orthodoxy" or "far left's equivalent".

Or maybe there is also a "Newton and Galileo orthodoxy" and Aristotle was
right all this time?

~~~
jacoblyles
1) What changes will occur in the global environment in the future and 2) how
we should react to it are separate issues. You will note that (1) is a
completely scientific issue, whereas (2) is not. Science can inform the
choices we make in response to global warming, but there is no correct
scientific answer to how we choose to make the tradeoffs between carbon
abatement, economic growth, and etc.

What the authors of the book were primarily guilty of was not questioning the
scientific orthodoxy about the effects of global warming, but suggesting that
carbon abatement was a costly way of addressing global warming compared to
alternative remedies. In short, they arrived at the "wrong" political/economic
conclusions, where wrong == unpopular.

~~~
araneae
Right. In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon
into the atmosphere entirely. Otherwise we're just slowing global warming, not
stopping it. And that's not going to happen. Aside from that, it's completely
unrealistic that we'll even be able to slow it, given that it needs to be done
in all nations,and that's just not going to happen.

What we need are large scale technological solutions.

~~~
eru
> In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into
> the atmosphere entirely.

There are processes that remove CO_2 from the atmosphere. Take photosynthesis
as an example. Animals have exhaled CO_2 as long as they existed. We do not
need to stop it.

(There may be a point that restricting the output to sensible levels is
worthwhile. But the sensible level can be above zero.)

~~~
araneae
Yes, there are processes that remove CO_2 from the atmosphere. And these only
have enough power to compensate for natural outputs of CO_2, like that
produced from respiration.

When we burn fossilized fuels, we're taking fossilized carbon and putting it
into the atmosphere- billions of years worth of the natural process of
fossilization reversed nearly instantaneously. In order for that to be
compensated for naturally, we'd have to increase fossilization rates. This is
impossible. Only a comparative technological solution to increasing
fossilization rate (i.e. figuring out how to bury all that atmospheric carbon)
will work.

------
protomyth
So, if I got this right, Ken Caldeira didn't proofread enough and Joseph Romm
wanted to do a hit piece on the book and fed Ken Caldeira a quote he was going
to attribute to him.

~~~
sachinag
I think that's all true. The part that's important is that Caldiera _was OK
with the fed quote_. Caldiera even updated his website to make it clear that
he's OK with the fed quote: <http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/>

If you've ever spent substantial time with the press, you'll learn that this
happens all the time. If someone feeds you a quote, it's totally OK to say
"sounds good" and have them run it. If they feed you a quote and you don't
like it, you can say "wait up, that's not right. I'd say [x] instead." Then,
sure, you can you say you were misquoted. (You can also decline to OK the fed
quote without giving a more accurate one, and it'd be wrong for the journo to
run it.)

The reason reporters/bloggers/press use fed quotes is that they're _short_.
People who are experts are fucking terrible at being pithy. Reporters have
learned to feed quotes as a coping method when dealing with verbal diarrhea.

~~~
protomyth
An honest question: in this era of blogs and online content, what is the
advantage of being pithy and not getting the full explanation (since this was
a blog not a printed article in this case)?

~~~
swolchok
Even if verbal diarrhea doesn't kill any trees, no one is going to want to
read it.

~~~
protomyth
But it would serve the reader better then changing the meaning of the answer.

The last election cycle had one too many edits to video that made people look
better / worse on both sides. Lord only knows how many quotes in print
articles got the same treatment.

~~~
dagw
Most of the time the raw unedited videos and/or transcripts where available
somewhere on the web, so the problem isn't the the information is unavailable,
it's that most people don't have the time or energy to go through it all.
Removing all summaries, good and bad, will hardly change that. People who
really care will find the relevant information.

------
mattmaroon
Interesting that it has such a positive spin on IV. I've seen more than a few
threads about Myrvhold here, mostly about how awful patent trolls are.

------
spooneybarger
and still more:

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomic...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomics-
on-climate-part-1/)

------
trevelyan
They wrote a chapter on global warming despite knowing nothing about the
subject. Their writing contains gross factual errors including the claims that
the earth has been cooling for the past few years and that increased levels of
atmospheric carbon do not necessarily warm the planet ceteris paribus. Brad
Delong's post on the matter is pretty objective, and pretty damning.

[http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-
supe...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-
superfreakonomics-i-promise.html)

These guys deserve what they're getting. They should have stuck to small scale
sociology in areas no-one else was much familiar with.

~~~
brg
The first critique of Delong's blog is: _pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put
"global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The
scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the
quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing
processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has
today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong._

But the first reply from the author's in the NYTimes article makes it clear:
_The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if
indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in
our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling
scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet
was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)_

That being said can anyone provide the text of the "brief mention"?

~~~
dtf
Here's the chapter as published in yesterday's Sunday Times, although I'm not
sure how this text compares to the print copy.

[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article687...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6879251.ece)

