Left as an Exercise

Edit: By request, click here to skip the history and go straight to the links to criticisms.

Contrarian positions can occasionally provide great insight into academic research - indeed, one of my research heroes, Rodney Brooks, is (in)famous for exactly this. However, sadly, contrarianism is more frequently used as a simple bid for attention, and if it’s done irresponsibly by the right people, it can have dire consequences for real people - the antivaccination promoters rallying against “western medicine” (I’m looking at you, Maher) come to mind.

I bring this up because contrarianism was the whole point of the landmark book Freakonomics, arguably the most well-known book in the ‘academics applied to everyday things’ subgenre (one can argue that The Black Swan and Outliers are written for similar audiences, for context). The authors, Levitt and Dubner, took contrary points to conventional wisdom and told their version of the events as just-so stories (not always entirely accurately).  This model sold rather well, so they went for a sequel, not-so-controversially titled Superfreakonomics.

There’s a major problem with it, though - they decided to keep the contrarian position on areas that neither of the authors had any expertise in whatsoever. Chapter 5 is dedicated to climate change, and predictably, they adopt a position very similar to that of well-known arch-delayer Bjorn Lomborg - essentially, it’s not a serious problem, and it’s more cost-effective to geoengineer our way out of it. (Lomborg’s version has an extra facet - essentially “given limited resources, here are other social causes that give us more bang for our buck than climate, we should focus on them (but I won’t)” - but Superfreakonomics likely wasn’t written as an inactivist policy work.) Due to the popularity of the original book, I’m predicting that this book will give new life to zombie arguments that were laid to rest ages ago.

Note that, apparently, people writing on the Freakonomics blog about this issue tend to have their comments quietly deleted (Update: photographic evidence of same.). When the authors eventually did respond, they ignored charges of misrepresentation, called their accusers’ claims “essentially fraudulent” without addressing any of them, and dubbed the Union of Concerned Scientists an “environmental advocacy group” (they link to, but do not name, the group, leaving people who read but don’t follow links to think it’s Greenpeace or something). Levitt also says that they don’t deny AGW, but ten posts earlier, his co-author posted favorably about pro-denialist coverage, and dismissing the pro-science side as “shrill” without looking at their points. This makes the Unscientific America fiasco look patently honest by comparison.

EDIT: 18/10/09: The authors keep the deceptive terminology and nameless linking in their subsequent post, except here they claim that the whole attack on them is a smear. They offer an (unsubstantiated) defense on the misrepresentation claim by saying Romm himself engaged in misrepresentation, but ignore the other substantive critiques.

EDIT: 27/10/09: The Associated Press wrote an excellent piece on temperature trends recently (they sent the unlabeled data to several statisticians and asked them what they’d make of - and surprise, no cooling trend), and as part of it spoke to Levitt on his claims of global cooling:

Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, said he does not believe there is a cooling trend. He said the line was just an attempt to note the irony of a cool couple of years at a time of intense discussion of global warming. Levitt said he did not do any statistical analysis of temperatures, but “eyeballed” the numbers and noticed 2005 was hotter than the last couple of years. Levitt said the “cooling” reference in the book title refers more to ideas about trying to cool the Earth artificially.

(Emphasis mine.) You’re welcome to read the chapter yourself (Brad DeLong links it below) and see if his book purports the idea of a cooling trend in an “ironic” fashion, what with the subtitle of the book being “global cooling” and including quotes like “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder of the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.” (Emphasis in original)
(It reminds me of another incident, where well-known Australian denialist Jennifer Morohasy posted these two anti-AGW arguments, which violate elementary thermodynamics, and then tried to save face by posting the definition of Socratic irony.)

For the record, read about their newest form of defense here - it’s changed again.

UPDATE: 16:37/28/10/09: Levitt and Dubner have a new op-ed out. Guess what? They’ve changed their defense again, this time comparing those skeptical of geoengineering to flat-earthers. An acquaintance of mine summed it up adroitly: “This is frantic back-pedaling disguised as elaboration, isn’t it?” You can check this yourself by seeing how their defense tactics have changed over time.
(Minor update: Josh at EnviroKnow also notes this piece’s factual accuracy leaves much to be desired.)

UPDATE: 10:33/29/10/09: Levitt’s been doing the promo circuit (as many authors do). His appearance on the Daily Show took some flak (see below), but I was just informed of another appearance, on the Diane Rehm Show, in which he put forth this whopper. This is significant because it’s the first time either Levitt or Dubner has mentioned ocean acidification, a critical problem with carbon emissions that their favored flavour of geoengineering won’t fix. Levitt’s solution? “Pour a bunch of base into it”. See the link for an explanation on just how fractally wrong this is.

UPDATE: 14:49/03/11/09: Steve Dubner was interviewed by Metro. In it, he claims “I don’t know why everyone keeps calling it the Global Cooling chapter” (hint: you say it yourself on page 186), accuses his critics of being financially motivated, and closes with “We’re heading towards cataclysm and carbon mitigation alone is not enough…there’s no excuse to forget about alternative energy” (hint: See page 186 again, where you start by attacking wind energy and transition to an attack on solar power, page 187 where you claim abandoning coal is “economic suicide”, or indeed the entire climate chapter, where you claim carbon mitigation strategies don’t work because, contrary to your entire earlier book, economic incentives don’t change behaviour in this one case). This, on the heels of Dubner’s earlier lie that ocean acidification was covered in the book, suggests he’s gambling on people either not reading the book or not understanding the issues. Exactly how is assuming your critics are ill-informed going to help address their concerns, Mr. Dubner?

In the same manner that Things Break collects links to responses to George Will, I’ve been collecting people responding to Superfreakonomics‘ climate chapter on a forum I frequent, but I figure I should put this up on the blog, if for no other reason than increasing the chances a search will uncover it. Check below the fold for the links.

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