Many of you will have heard about, if not read excerpts from the much talked about Freakonomics, by University of Chicago Economist, Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner. It sold over 4 million copies world wide and made a lot of people feel like they were a lot smarter than the plodders who do plain old economics. Taking contrarianism to its statistically substantiated edge, Freakonomics purported to show that reading to your kids had little to do with later success in life, or that the Ku Klux Klan and Real Estate agents hoard knowledge in similar ways, and most explosively that legalized abortion is followed by a reduction in the crime rate. As one summary has it:

Pros

• Freakonomics is easy to read and understand
• Interesting subjects covered in accessible way
• Plenty of cocktail party conversation starters

Cons

• Very little methodology included in Freakonomics
• Not much new content since New York Times Magazine article

Description

• Questions like “Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers?”
• Easy to read, interesting narrative shows the relevance of answers to crazy questions
• Uses economic analysis to answer interesting questions and turn conventional wisdom upside down

Now we have the follow up book — SuperFreakonomics and is it raising a firestorm of criticism for the casual, and not-too-well informed treatment of climate change.  In essence, this very smart economist says, what’s the big deal?  The threat is over stated.  None of the solutions which involve changing energy sources will work as advertised, nor will people use them.  No one will change their current lives in order in ensure the future and anyway the solution is simple:  spray lots of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere — like volcanoes do — and cool things off!

Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker is slack jawed at such irresponsibility.

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

For some real tough criticism, with easy to follow numbers, do read Pierrhumbert’s post at Real Climate, which Kolbert refers to.  It’s really worth running through his analysis.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing.