http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/11/long-awaited-freakonomics-post-this-is.html
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2006/03/freakonomics-review-part-2-heterodox.html
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-has-been-so-absurdly-trailed-it.html
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/09/freakiology-yes-folks-its-part-4-of.html

If anyone bugs you about “Climategate,” try the following for rebuttal (but appreciating rebuttals takes intelligence and admitting to them takes honesty …):

1. The modern theory of AGW (increasing CO2 absorbs more IR and leads to warmer temperatures) was laid out way back in 1896 in a seminal paper by future Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius. He wasn’t trying to promote socialism or be a flunky for Al Gore. Indeed, SA thought the warming would be beneficial – so he didn’t promote the theory to scare people.

2. Even in a case of actual cheating and cover-up, or even fabrication don’t disprove an idea itself. Look at prosecutors “framing guilty men” by “improving” evidence to ensure conviction, look at the Piltdown hoax which sure doesn’t mean evolution is false and other evidence couldn’t be rounded up. (BTW what CRU did wasn’t even that bad anyway, but this rebuttal just makes the point of the irrelevancy of human failings to the material point. In my bitter experience conservatives are very into projecting from personal factors into imagined objective consequences.)

3. CO2 is a stimulus similar to lowering interest rates are for an economy: the effect is not direct and linear. There are variations and other influences. Tell someone who says, “how come it got cooler during the last ten years” (it may not have, but play along here): How come there was a cooler spell during (e.g.) April, before summer came along? Does that make you doubt the idea that the changing axis angle causes seasons?!

4. Most of the things we would do to lower CO2 are good for the economy and national interest anyway: save money on gas and other non-renewables, reduce dependency on other nations (including Muslim ones!), it will run out anyway in decades to centuries, etc.

5. An effect doesn’t have to be “certain” or uniformly and highly damaging to be worth trying to avoid – what about terrorist threats, the irony of Cheney et al’s “One percent doctrine” etc.

6. The skeptics and doubters are way more dishonest and controlled by money interests than almost anyone who promotes AGW dangers. (You may need to dig for the evidence there, but consider common-sense appreciation of oil profits etc.)

According to Chapter 5, Caldeira originally estimated about 100,000 metric tons per year, although the IV-predicted low cost of the straw would enable that to be increased dramatically and easily if needed. So over the course of years, the total would be in the megatons. That said, I chose not to investigate whether Caldeira or other modelers had developed more refined models that called for more SO2 dumped into the stratosphere, as I didn’t feel it was necessary to the point of my article.

Geoengineering technologies and techniques are not equal, and all should be researched in more depth. Some show significant promise, while others do not. Soil sequestration of biochar appears to havve significant potential, but it’s a relatively young idea and there are a few of important open questions – where are we going to get the biological material to create large amounts of biochar, what can we estimate the unintended consequences to be, and can we do biochar sequestration on a large enough scale?

Another one, using a space shield, has recently been modeled and the model illustrated that it wasn’t likely to be as effective as hoped.

1. Your warning about precipitation winners and loosers is phrased very mildly. Caldeira’s simulation shows reduced precipitation in India and China. That just happens to be the most important precipitation in the world from the point of view of the average human. It is reasonably likely that SO2 climate engineering would have unacceptable costs because many more people would be precipitation losers than winners, since a very large fraction of people are farmers in India and China who rely on rain.

2. hundreds of kilotons of S02 ? Odd the masses I’ve read are megatons.

3. The Geoengineering illustrated in your wonderful figure is all fairly high tech (well except for planting trees). There are also proposals to bury charcoal not liquid C02 or to put agricultural waste in the desert or deep Ocean. Such approaches might not sequester C02 forever (although look the sulfate aerosols have a half life of a year or two) but they use avaiable technology and can be scaled down so the role of the public could just be certification.

Still, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is better than not going the right thing at all.

If so, I see that strengthening the argument I made above, while also undercutting Levitt and Dubner more. Most billionaire industrialists are smart people themselves, or they’re smart enough to employ smart people who know about stuff like climate disruption. And they’ll know that they can’t just go on dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere forever without economic and political consequences. That’s the basis behind a the USCAP organization for one, and the fact that two major Silicon Valley business groups came out against the US Chamber of Commerce’s attacks on EPA regulations and the various climate/energy plans working through Congress.

What should be recognized here is that the intended audience of Superfreakonomics isn’t the average person (although their political assistance – or complaisance – would be required). It is the industrialist who wants the benefits of the process while not having to bear the costs of cleaning up his mess (Is that not “externality”?). The authors are thus attempting to promote to wealthy if not well-educated billionaires that they can keep fattening the cash cow and still save the planet – whether they can or not. Just open the checkbook and stand back!

I especially appreciated your calling out the irony of their basing geoengineering effectiveness on the very models that they criticize earlier in the chapter.

Great discussion of the modeling. And, thanks for the graphic re detail over generations of models. Never saw it before, good tool to explain increasing detail in the work.

JS – thanks.

Great job!

This is a nice post, but a bit dated. Didn’t you get the memo that climategate is the only thing matters? That it invalidates each and every paper listed on http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/ ? That all 1500 researchers listed at http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html are scoundrels and thieves?