Filed under: Earth history
There have been some rogue postings here as I have tried to get to grips with an alternative blogging system for other purposes; I have deleted them, and apologize for any confusion. If anyone found some windfarm stats and a list of Copenhagen side events useful, I’m glad, but this ain’t the place for that.
Secondly, but of more lasting significance, belated apologies to David Schwartzman for mispelling his name in Eating the Sun. He is a man of single n. He is also a man with some interesting views about the origin of photosynthesis derived, in part, from his belief that the early earth was a very warm place indeed. If you want to catch up with these beliefs, try
“Oxygen and hydrogen isotope evidence for a temperate climate 3.42 billion years ago” M. T. Hren, M. M. Tice & C. P. Chamberlain, Nature 462, 205-208 | doi:10.1038/nature08518
Filed under: Global change
There’s a fascinating paper by Corinne Le Quéré and many other hands out in Nature Geoscience on what’s up with sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. The authors claim that the sinks are getting weaker, and that a greater proportion of the carbon dioxide emitted is staying in the atmosphere, which is a pretty big thing. They are not absolutely sure of this, and when they spoke to the press earlier this week they recognised that another recent analysis by Wolfganag Knorr suggested the sinks were sucking up just as great a proportion as they ever did. The datasets are not great, which is one reason for the uncertainty; another, as I understand it (haven’t dug into the matter) turns on how you filter out variability when looking for the trend. This matters not least because variability may be driving some of the trend: El Ninos, for example, decrease the tropical land sink because they dry places out, and if El Nino frequency is part of the long-term climate signal then removing them from the data means removing some of the trend too. Anyway, the paper doesn’t say for sure that the sinks are beginning to slow down, but the authors do find it likely-in-the-ipcc-sense, which means they assess the probability as 2 to 1 odds on or better. (Update: John Timmer at Ars Technica has more on the differences between the papers.)
SMAP also looks pretty cool
Now there’s some fascinating stuff in this, which I may come back to, but there’s also cause for deep frustration. A real sense of what the sinks are doing would be hugely helped by having better measurements of carbon dioxide, both from global monitoring networks and from satellites. But that just doesn’t seem to be a priority. Global ground based monitoring of carbon dioxide capable of showing regional effects is still underfunded — this summer in Boulder Pieter Tans was telling me that there was a lot more that could be done for relatively little money. And satellite measurements took a terrible blow when the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, OCO, didn’t make it to orbit in February. OCO could have been rebuilt and relaunched quickly: the team was all still there,the designs were good, it was as shovel-ready a piece of spending as you could wish for. But it wasn’t funded as such, and doesn’t seem to have any new money associated with it. So as I understand it the money to refly OCO will have to be gouged out of NASA’s existing earth science budget (8% of its total budget, because it’s not like the earth is a sexy supernova or galaxy or anything like that). I have to assume that that means it will fly later than it could have (and cost more); that probably means delays for SMAP, the soil moisture mission currently due to launch in 2013. SMAP would provide unparalleled data on one of the key parts of the planet — the part just beneath our feet that contains the root zones of plants and the water that those roots require.
Not to be treating such missions as a global priority strikes me as simply crazy. Now I know that there is an argument that the need for new climate science is overstated — that we know the outlook is bad, and that there is no science that is going to change the degree of action or inaction that that badness is held to merit. I understand that stressing a need for more data and science might be seen as offering reasons for delay. But the OCO and SMAP data really matter. They matter to understanding the processes going on — where the carbon is coming from and going to, how ecosystems are being effected, and so on. In SMAP’s case they even have operational implications — better soil moisture data means better forecasting. But despite the fact that great things turn on these issues, they don’t get the money. And their ground-based correlates, which offer even more bang for the buck, get penny pinched too.
Scientific monitoring isn’t going to save the world — but it will tell us what is going on as we try to adapt and to prioritise mitigations. Which means we should be taking it seriously.
Refs:
“Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide” Corinne Le Quéré, Michael R. Raupach, Josep G. Canadell, Gregg Marland et al. Nature Geoscience (2009) | doi:10.1038/ngeo689
“Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?” Wolfgang Knorr Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21710, (2009) | doi:10.1029/2009GL040613
Filed under: Uncategorized
The FT is doing a lot of climate stuff at the moment, not all of which I have caught up with, and much of which I am sure is excellent, but this para in yesterday’s broadly fine leader on following the science is flat wrong:
Fortunately the science becomes much clearer when we move from predicting the climate itself to assessing how best to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forget about esoteric “geo-engineering” proposals to cool the earth. Technology that already exists (or is in development) can do the job perfectly well by increasing the efficiency with which we use carbon-based energy.
The point here is not that I disagree with the notion of ignoring geoengineering — reasonable people can and do differ on that, as noted last week. But the idea that the earth can be cooled by using carbon-based energy more efficiently is just not true. Efficiency can slow the rate of warming — but any meaningful cooling will need zero-emissions energy and probably a fair bit of direct air carbon capture too.
Unsuprisingly, the letters in today’s issue do not point out this error, because they are from people objecting instead to following the scientific consensus — including one from a chap who claims that there was once a scientific consensus that the world was flat. Can we get a better class of sceptic please?
Filed under: Uncategorized
Not by me, not my leg...
This thought from Bruno Latour seems spectacularly apposite to my work:
The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin.
But to seize, or seize again, this world, this same, one-and-only world — to grasp it otherwise: that’s not a dream, that’s a necessity.
Image from flickr user Enro, used under a creative commons licence
Steven Levitt, at the end of a long post on his freakonomics blog about Superfreakonomics and geoengineering:
For all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.
This mischaracterises the debate/furore/ritual clubbing/whatever (see previous posts). Quite a lot of the people attacking superfreakonomics — eg Brad Delong — *do* want geoengineering to have a seat at the table. It’s just that they don’t like the superfreaks’ treatment of the subject — and may, as I do, think such treatment is going to make it harder to get that seat, not easier. They, and I, are criticising the chapter not because geoengineering shouldn’t be taken seriously, but because Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to be trying to take it seriously: their handling of the issue is partial and unsatisfactory. It mixes a poorly tempered enthusiasm for geoengineering with some tired tropes of global warming denialism (which serve no clear purpose in the argument), and it frames the idea specifically as an alternative to emissions reductions (“Mt Pinatubo versus Al Gore”, “solve the whole global warming problem”) rather than as an additional strategy should there be a need for prompt cooling.
From the evidence of his post Levitt sort-of-gets some of this: that is why he says that the chapter in question is really about “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast”, rather than other questions such as “how can we most equitably manage the risk of climate change”. But: a) while it may well be that a close reading provides textual support for the idea that the superfreaks acknowledge the narrow focus of their question, the chapter sure gives the impression that it is about climate change in general; b) asking “how can we most efficiently cool the earth fast” without asking broader questions about climate change is intellectually shallow; c) even in the narrow frame, surely “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast and keep it cool” is a better question, with a more complex answer.
Generosity dictates, though, that we should also look more generally at the real phenomenon that Levitt points to: people who don’t want geoengineering discussed at all, or only under the strictest of limits. I disagree with these people. But I don’t find it very hard to understand where they are coming from. Here are five components to their arguments, as I see them.
- Geongineering adds to the climate risks unconscionably. Volcanoes, and by implication other stratospheric-veil schemes, screw with hydrology; cloud brightening can change ocean currents; ocean fertilization radically rearranges ecosystems: we don’t know how to do any of these things well, and if we sanction the general idea that geoengineering is plausible we are prohibitively unlikely to retire all these risks before going ahead with a scheme. As applied to geoengineering research this is partly an epistemological argument (the impossibility of getting knowledge of a high enough quality) and partly a slippery slope argument. I think in general slippery slope arguments are overblown, but I can see where this line of reasoning is coming from. (There is also a linked concern about crowding out research money for other aspects of climate, but I think that’s a sceond tier argument)
- It is reasonable to distrust a priori the motives of anyone who tries to argue for any approach to global warming other than emissions reduction. People feel this because they know, from experience and analysis, that that there are extremely powerful lobbies which want to slow or derail emissions reduction, and assume that pretty much anyone saying anything along those lines is doing so as either a dupe or a tool of those lobbies. There is an element of cognitive miserliness in this; but where one person says cognitive miser another might say cognitively prudent, and ask why he or she should bother wasting cognition on a subject when past experience has given them a pretty damn good inductive basis for thinking such an investment of thought will be wasted.
- I think its clearly true that many environmentalists have a pre-existing desire for people to live low-impact, low-consumption lives, often because they sincerely believe that this will make everyone happier. To some extent, and with various levels of awareness that they are behaving in this way, some of these people see concern about global warming as an instrumental way to bring a low-consumption low-impact work of some sort about. This is not to say they are insincere in their concern about global warming: merely that it is overdetermined. I personally would rather people separated out these two strands of their thought, but I can see as a matter of fact that they frequently don’t, and I’m sure if Steve Levitt was really trying to “get” things he could see that to.
- The first moral argument. At an everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten level people think that when you make a mess you should clean it up, not paint over it, even if painting over it is much easier. This is not a particularly good argument, and will have little if any traction with people who see the world in terms of costs and benefits — but it is an argument that people can feel easily and clearly, and feelings about the morality of pollution run deep.
- The second moral argument: the purpose of environmental action is to restore nature. This means getting back to a preindustrial sort of a climate, with lower greenhouse gases and no permanent high-altitude smogs. For me, this is a flawed argument, a planet-wide application of the naturalistic fallacy; I think correct environmental action is much more complex, and that increasing the possibilities for human happiness matters more than an idealised concern for nature. But I understand that other people don’t feel this way.
There is doubtless more to geoengineering opposition than this, but these five points seem to me to cover a great deal of it. The important thing is to grasp that geoengineering is at some level just another form of climate change, that there are a great many of ways in which people disagree about climate change, and that it helps to understand them. If Steven Levitt wants to understand all this better, then he ought to buy a copy of Mike Hulme’s “Why we disagree about global warming” (Amazon US|UK), as discussed in the Copenhagen reading list post.
PS: Recent useful contributions to the superfreakonomics debate: an interview with Ken Caldeira by Jeff Goodell, whose book on all this is going to be way better than Superfreakonomics, and Daniel Davies on what contrarians should expect.
Filed under: Geoengineering
A swimming pool pump, geoengineering potential unknown
It’s clear that there are real problems with Levitt and Dubner’s take on geoengineering in their book Superfreakonomics (see past two posts Update: or more concisely, see Eric Pooley’s piece on Bloomberg, reposted here with added Joe Romm). I thought it might be interesting to see if those problems necessarily reflect mistakes made by Nathan Myhrvold, who is one of their sources (more on Nathan and some of his geoengineering ideas in this post).
Here are the things that Nathan says or is reported to believe in the relevant chapter — not necessarily a comprehensive list, but I think I got most of them:
That people who suggest global warming will lead to the extinction of humanity are probably wrong; that an Inconvenient Truth was meant to scare people; that Al Gore doesn’t lie in An Inconvenient Truth, but some aspects of the film are misleading, in that they lead people to believe significant problems such as the flooding of Florida are near at hand when they are not; that it will take decades for computer software/hardware to be good enough to implement models that do a really good job on climate; that while global warming is a real phenomenon most of the warming of the past decades may be due to a reduction in aerosol pollution (“global dimming”); that most commercial greenhouses run under high CO2 coniditions in order to benefit from CO2 fertilization; that current attempts to replace fossil fuels are insufficient to the task; that transportation is not a big sector; that doing without coal is economic suicide (though that phrase is not in quotation marks); that cap and trade will not deliver large enough carbon cuts in time; that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”; as an example of that, that the reradiated heat from solar panels, which is a lot more than the electricity they generate, will warm the planet; that the building of a planet’s worth of solar panels would itself require a lot of energy which would mostly not be generated by solar panels; that Mt St Helens kicked up a lot of dust; that his dorm room at college was messy; that “big-ass” volcanoes have climatic effects; that the ideas for implementing a stratospheric aerosol that would cool the world included in the chapter on geoengineering of the NAS 1992 report on policy implications of climate change were not very practical; that putting sulphates into the stratosphere as opposed to the troposphere gets you an extra level of cooling in a way that can be seen as leverage; that the pumps on a pipeline taking sulphur gases from ground level to the stratosphere (where it would be moored to a blimp) could be smaller than the pumps in his swimming pool; that there is a lot of stockpiled sulphur in Canada; that one sulphur-aerosol project using that stockpile could “solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere”; that in view of fossil fuel use (and possibly other things) “we’ve already engineered the earth”; that geoengineering could be “an excuse to pollute”, but that that is not necessarily a reason not to do it (the analogy is to not refusing care to a heart patient because she doesn’t have a healthy lifestyle); that unilateral geoengineering “would freak people out”; that he doesn’t dismiss global warming; that he wants to see geoengineering technology ready for use if the worst climate predictions come true, but not fielded as a matter of course; that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emission reductions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor; that “if you believe the scary stories are true, you should also admit that relying on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not a very good answer”; that the scary scenarios could come about even if there are herculean efforts towards carbon dioxide emissions reduction.
So what’s to disagree with here?
The claim that a geoengineering scheme in Canada would “solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere” is wrong. It might at best be true only for an absurdly limited definition of global warming that was purely in terms of radiative forcing; I doubt if it is true in any other — that is to say meaningful — sense. (Even if it were true, it is certainly not knowably true; as Nathan says, climate models aren’t good enough to tell one such things.) Most obviously, if you cool the northern hemisphere while leaving the south to warm you will move the thermal equator; as a result the pattern of northern hemisphere climate in a world with greenhouse warming and a cooling cap on the north will not be the same as the pattern in a world that in which there was neither. A recent study by Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood (Global and Arctic climate engineering: numerical model studies, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2008) doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0132), who both attended the meeting where the Superfrakonomics discussion is set, looked at idealised geoengineering schemes aimed at the Arctic; it found that they could not recreate a preindustrial climate in a doubled-carbon-dioxide world, but that they did do quite a lot to ameliorate such a world. That’s the most you can say, and it seems to me a very long way from saying “abracadabra, problem solved”. In general, anything aiming to be a long term solution to global warming would have to include flat carbon dioxide levels, though I would be willing to accept that it might also include some geoengineering. This sort of “geoengineering can be a solution in and of itself” stuff is really misleading, and needs to be rejected as such.
Then there’s “we’re already engineering the earth”. Again, no. David Keith nailed this trope, popular with geoengineering enthusiasts, ages ago: “Making a mess is not engineering”. Engineering is purposeful; what humanity has done to date, great though its impact has been, has not had any purpose at the level of the earth system (it has had other purposes, of course, but engineers have to mean to change the thing they are changing, and to make changes directed at a given and pre-specified goal)
“Transportation is not a large sector”: no, it is a large sector — in the US second only to electricity generation in carbon emissions. That said, in context, he was talking about Priuses, and private road transportation for passengers is a subset of transportation as a whole. But as it stands I think it’s fair to mark that as wrong.
The claim that reduced scattering of sunlight by aerosols, through direct and indirect effects, has had a greater effect on global warming than greenhouse gases in recent decades is also, as far as I know, wrong. Something similar is probably true for some areas, such as western Europe and the eastern US, but I know of no evidence for it being a worldwide phenomenon and would be surprised to hear of such evidence.
Doing without coal is economic suicide: as Tim Lambert has pointed out, tell it to the French. (again, Nathan may not have said this — it could be the Superfreaks’ point). Coal is very abundant and cheap and it will take a lot to make people give it up; but a lot can be done (as can CCS, though that, too, is hard.)
That’s about it for flat out disagreement.
There’s another claim — solar cells warm the world — that needs further unpacking and which I think I will leave for a later post.
There are some more which are judgment calls. It is true that building new energy infrastructure will require energy from the old infrastructure. But it’s not clear that the amount of energy needed to create new low and zero carbon energy infrastructure will be significantly grater than the energy that would be needed to recreate the old energy infrastructure, a process that is continuously ongoing. As replacement is just business as usual, it’s already be in the figures. So it seems a bit strange to treat this is as an extra burden, and a little unnecessary, in that the burdens of business as usual are heavy enough.
The 1992 NAS geoengineering schemes, such as artillery guns for lofting aerosols into the sky, may well have been fanciful; to those not acquainted with the details it’s not clear that a great big hosepipe sticking into the stratosphere is less so. If you’ve seen detailed engineering trade offs, though, you might be convinced of such a thing. You might also know whether the pumps needed are larger or smaller than those which service Nathan’s pool. On that, I must admit, I have no clue at all.
Lumping together the other claims, I find myself in broad agreement. First, on climate: Yes, I agree that global warming is real and needs addressing, but I too don’t think climate change is likely to lead to the extinction of the human race. I do think that An Inconvenient Truth (which I have not seen, but I have seen Gore’s presentation) is designed to scare people — which is a fair goal for someone raising an alarm — and when I saw him talk I felt he skirted close to the edge on sea level stuff. Volcanoes of large ass do have effects, and there may be a (very small) possibility of very bad events even after massive reductions in carbon emissions. If the sort of climate model one really wants is one that produces projections with a sub-kilometre grid, and does so fast enough that one can run large ensembles in reasonable periods of time — and that is indeed the goal of soem respectable people in the field — then expect to wait a couple of decades for the many exaflops required. Carbon dioxide is indeed used for its fertilization effect in greenhouses (can’t say that I know it’s used in most of them, but it is in a lot).
On emissions reduction it is clear that what has been done to date is insufficient, and though I know and respect people who think that cap and trade will do much to solve the problem I do not think their case is proven, in that I do not think that a cap and trade system of sufficient scope is necessarily politically achievable. It is true that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”, though in the field of climate I would point to corn ethanol as the best example. There is definitely a risk that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emissions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor (I think that risk could be mitigated by the right policies, but I wouldn’t bet that it would be). There are also imaginable circumstances where one might want more options than emissions control alone.
On geoengineering I think leverage is a petty useful concept and use it myself, and I know there are mountains of sulphur in Canada. I agree that geoengineering, unilateral or otherwise, “would freak people out”, and that supporting research aimed at understanding what the technology might do and how it might work, as I do, does not mean endorsing deployment. I also agree that geoengineering could all to easily be seen as “an excuse to pollute” but that there would be circumstances in which that was not a good reason for not doing it.
So I think there are some factual claims that are wrong, some things which are dubious, and a lot to agree with. Getting things wrong is bad, but it happens. Letting them stay wrong in a chapter you have agreed to read over for accuracy is worse, and shouldn’t happen. That said, most of what is wrongest about the chapter does not seem to stem directly from Nathan, at least as represented in the finished product.
My overall feeling is that Nathan, who I’ve met a few times and liked, is convincing to himself and others, brash, capable of making mistakes, biased (as we all are). He is committed to particular technological approaches and overclaims for them (the besetting sin of the technologist); he does so in a big way here when he says a particular piece of geoengineering is a solution to the whole problem. This is reflected in the fact that it seems unclear, and may indeed be unclear to him, how much he thinks of geoengineering as a research project and how much as a truly likely option. He clearly likes to be contrarian, and a critical outlook and quick intelligence may make him unwilling to dig into and understand the basis of widely held positions in which he sees some immediate flaws. He could be more careful. But I can’t say I agree with Joe Romm that this all makes Nathan an “idiotic savant”.
Image from Flickr user SirWiseowl, used under a creative commons licence
Little of science or policy import in this post: mostly process.
Brad DeLong (all right one more i gotta correct the record) has used the Google cache to come up with pretty clear evidence that, pace Dubner (who may have been misinformed), there was originally a look-inside-the-book option for Superfreakonomics which has subsequently been withdrawn.
Joe Romm (anatomy of a debunking) posts quite a lot of correspondence with Ken Caldeira, some of which was in Dubner’s earlier post. One specific point to stress: Ken is in this email as elsewhere very clear that he supports geoengineering research and not geoengineering implementation under current conditions. That crucial subtlety does seem to be missing from the Superfreakonomics account of his work. In general, reading this through, it seems to me that my impression of the chapter last night is one I broadly still hold.
Paul Krugman looks at some lessons learned and points well enunciated in superfreakingmeta.
I note, by the way, that Google is currently of the opnion that no-one is using the term superfrakonomics, or for that matter superfrak’donomics. Given the number of BSG fans in the better parts of the blogosphere this surprises me…
Those interested in more on geoengineering from this blog, rather than a load of links to today’s controversy, might want to browse further in the geoengineering category; a nice start is this post and the article it links to, and the IMO post is quite fun too.
Update: missed this, an email exchange with Superfreakonomics author Steven Levitt. He doesn’t really get some of the issues, but does say:
I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions…they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know.
Probably, though, our message on geoengineering would have come through better if we had written the chapter differently.
[Updated Monday morning to include Brad's last post and Gavin's take on Real Climate, an update I take note of up here because they're both worth your time: More in subsequent post Monday pm]
As someone interested in geoengineering, and writing about it myself, I look forward to actually reading what Levitt and Dubner say on the subject in Superfreakonomics (Amazon US|UK) (you can download a copyright-challenged scan of the chapter here as of the time of writing). Once I’ve done so I may, if so moved, comment on it further, but I’ll try to keep this short [update: as you can see from the bottom of this post I did read it -- and at the time of posting the xkcd cartoon at the top looks more apposite than ever]. From what I can gather: a) they make a case that geoengineering is a serious option and should be considered as such; b) they do so in a way that spectacularly fails to convince — and indeed enrages — a lot of people who are of a different opinion on this matter, partly because some of their material seems to be the sort of thing that denialists/sceptics/whatever say a lot, and wrong. Anyway, because I feel I should post something, I haven’t read the material and don’t really want to get into this in depth right now, here is a guide to what’s out there for those who want to track it.
Outrage central (how surprising) is Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. Gists follow (nb there’s a fair amount of overlap and repetition):
Post one: Seeing belief in climate change as being akin to religion is wrong, economics not a science, Nathan Myrhvold not all he’s cracked up to be [not fully convinced by JR on this]; Ken Caldeira, a major source for the relevant part of the book, feels misrepresented. This post originally came with a pdf of the chapter, but the publishers asked for it to be removed. It is also apparently the most trafficked post on Climate Progress this year
Post two: Evil geoengineering ideas of Myrhvold’s have corrupted Bill Gates and Warren Buffett; Pinatubo cooling, which lasted for a year or so, does not validate the idea that permanent stratospheric sheidls might do better.
Post three: Amazon feature that allows you to read relevant pages of the book has been disabled. Superfreaks wrong to say the world is cooling now, and that it was feared to be cooling catastrophically in the 1970s. Union of Concerned Scientists lists problems with the climate science in the chapter.
Post four: Superfreaks have denied be “deniers” — but JR has not accused them of this. Superfreaks appear, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, to have mischaracterised/misunderstood Martin Weitzman’s argument about catastrophic risks in the low probability part of the climate sensitivity distribution.
Post 5: Outsourced in large part to Brad Delong (see below). Disputes Dubner’s claim that the book was never readable on Amazon.
There will be more from Joe over the next few days. Dubner’s main response to critics (there was an earlier I-am-not-a-denier placeholder) came out after the fifth of these posts. Gist of the main post: Not a denialist. Disputes some of Joe’s specific points, promises more to come on some, notes Joe’s ideological stance. Key point: Ken Caldeira saw the draft twice, was asked for comments, mostly didn’t object. Quotes Ken in an email to Joe and since forwarded by Ken to Dubner:
I f&@?ed up. They sent me the draft and I approved it without reading it carefully and I just missed it. … I think everyone operated in good faith, and this was just a mistake that got by my inadequate editing
In a later email Ken expanded on his interactions with Romm
Rather than acting deliberately, I panicked and commented on things that I now wish I would have been silent on. It was obviously a mistake to let myself get drawn into this, and I learned a quick and hard lesson in public relations.
Dubner goes on to say that the relevant text was never searchable on Amazon. Its noticeable that this post focuses entirely on Romm, treating him as fons et origo of all other criticism. It doesn’t address the fact that the chapter has also been criticised by economist and colleague on fellow New York Times blogger Paul Krugman. Gists:
Krugman post 1: I trust Joe Romm, and I worry that superfreakomics guys love contrarianism for the sake of it. Fate of the planet too important for that.
Krugman post 2: Starting off with the global-believed-in-the-1970s story cuts credibility. They missed the point of Weitzmann’s analysis.
Krugman post 3: More on what Weitzmann actually said. Notes Dubner’s not-a-denialist post, doesn’t think it cuts it.
Elsewhere
Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don’t understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not
William also offers chapter and verse on global cooling and other rhetoric borrowed from skeptics that the superfreaks use (rather confusingly, since they and their sources genuinely don’t seem to be deniers). He also has excellent taste in cartoons.
Levitt and Dubner do not understand the climate science literature. This by itself would not be fatal, but what has taken them off the cliff is the Freakonomics formula: “What you thought you knew about X is wrong!”
There follow some mostly good points, made more concisely than Joe Romm does.
Brad Delong has taken various shots on the subject. Here is an exchange of emails with Dubner, and here are six specific questions. He also helpfully points readers towards 4 more favourable blog posts on the book from Bryan Caplan:
Overall, [the book]’s better than the original. It’s still cutesy, but stronger in the “who cares?” factor.
[The geoengineering chapter] is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.
There is nothing too wrong with [the geoengineering chapter]. Not enough for name calling. What the authors are doing is identifying the ‘economist’s angst’ in this whole discussion.
and Robert Waldmann
As far as I can tell, [the superfreaks' critics] really don’t have very much to say against [geoengineering]. Rather they mainly object to the Steves’ proposal that we use [it] as an alternative to cap and trade. The argument against doing both seems fairly weak to me.
[Update: Then, in the optimistically entitled *sigh* last post on superfreakonomics I promise, Brad gives a full list of issues he and others have with the chapter (you need to have the pdf or a copy of the book to go through these properly). This is probably the best single place for a list of the problems that have been raised. His take home message:
It really does look to me like Levitt and Dubner:
- went to Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures.
- got wowed.
- excitedly wrote up what they heard.
- and then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told there.]
[Further update: Gavin has a post at Real Climate, which tends towards the straw-mannish, in that it suggests that geoengineering might be treated as a strategy for a world with no emission reductions, which I don't think many people, if any, are really advocating (though people might argue it could come about anyway). But it is definitely worth reading. And it points to this very good post on the topic by Michael Tobis, which puts geoengineering, mitigation and adaptation into the context of interventions which are not mutually exclusive -- a good place to put them]
Ezra Klein looks at other aspects of the book and the authors’ MO
The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one. This is evident from the very first story on the very first page of the book.
After all this I gave in and skimmed the chapter. It has some interesting discussions in it, but I think quite a few of the criticisms are well founded: there are what I take to be some errors, some suggestio falsi, and some serious omissions. I think there’s a structural delight in the contrarian which gets irksome, and I think building your understanding of geoengineering out of what is heard at an Intellectual Ventures meeting is not likely to give you a fully rounded view of the issue. I wish they had gone deeper. That said I am not convinced by all the criticisms, and I do think wider discussion of geoengineering — and indeed frank advocacy — is something to be hoped for. People need to say what they think should be done.
That said, last word for now to dsquared’s take on freakonomics in general:
My intuition is that Freakonomics has had its moment in the sun. The central selling point was always, basically, academic machismo; the presumption on the part of economists that because they were “smart” in the Larry Summers sense, they could turn their hand to anything and the rest of the world was bound to listen to them. Those days, to put it mildly, are gone.
Image from the wonderful xkcd, used under creative commons licence
Yes, it's melting
Having been a little disobliging about Pen Hadow, an explorer, in a previous post about “Heroes of the Environment” I now feel moved to return, briefly, to the subject. This morning the BBC is putting data gathered during Hadow’s recent Arctic adventure — a trek with two companions, called the Catlin Arctic Survey, that was meant to get to the North Pole but didn’t — into its main radio news bulletins at the moment. As Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge puts it in the BBC’s online version of the story and many other places:
The Catlin Arctic Survey data supports the new consensus view – based on seasonal variation of ice extent and thickness, changes in temperatures, winds and especially ice composition – that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within about 20 years, and that much of the decrease will be happening within 10 years.
Which seems fine: but not news. What we have here is a consensus for which, because it is a consensus, we must assume there is already a lot of evidence, being backed up by some incremental unpublished data (pdf of science findings) that will later be presented at the Copenhagen meeting and submitted to Cold Regions Science and Technology, a journal I am pretty sure that the BBC does not often use as a source. What Wadhams says seems true and sensible, but reporting stuff that is widely accepted as news doesn’t.
To be fair, the BBC further reports that
Pen Hadow admitted that the expedition had not led to “a giant leap forward in understanding” but had been useful as an incremental step in the science of answering the key questions about the Arctic.
but it doesn’t go on to say why it reports this incremental step. The answer, obviously, is that it thinks the public likes explorers, and will find science done by explorers interesting, even if the equipment broke down and the observations are not yet of any proven value; it also probably thinks that raising awareness about global warming is a good thing. Personally I find people who “explore” a planet that has already been pretty thoroughly explored and do so in deliberately over-challenging and attention-seeking ways (Hadow first came to fame walking to the North Pole on his own without resupply) a little off-putting, even, in my more misanthropic moods, distasteful, though on the only time I met one he seemed a nice enough chap (that said, we were both talking to Edwina Curry, so contrast may have had something to do with it). If such people want to try to contribute to science and advertise a reinsurance company as they do so, fair enough (though the apparent shennanigans with data on their website suggest that this most recent undertaking was not utterly rigorous in its approach). But following HRH the Prince of Wales, who says this is a “remarkably important project”, in treating this data gathering as news seems to be a pretty straightforward mistake, even before you get on to the mistakes in headlining that “news”, such as “North Pole ice cap gone in 10 years“.
The generally grumpy tone of this post, and the unaccustomed act of linking to Watts, brings to mind a point a friend recently made to me — that I am more critical of climate-change claims that tilt beyond science into propaganda in private than I am in public. I think that to the extent this is true it is only because most of what I do in public isn’t about that sort of thing; I don’t spend much time attacking climate sceptics in public, either, and that certainly shouldn’t be seen as suggesting support. But while I am tapping away I will take this opportunity to say that I think people who talk about a climate sensitivity of more than 4ºC as remotely likely need to explain why they think this when others such as James Annan have argued well against it*. And I think when people talk about multi-metre sea-level rises, as Jonathan Porritt did on Radio 4 recently (“I have increasingly less time for those whose nimby-ist sentiments persuade them that somehow the best route to defending their cherished landscapes is by letting it be drowned by a huge amount later on in life. Which particular bit of the landscape do you want to defend James if what we’re threatened by is a seven metre rise in sea levels? ” — rtf transcript), they need to make clear that they are talking about the situation that’s not “later on in life” for anyone who doesn’t expect to live for a few centuries.
*hint: explanations that include phrases such as “I don’t use the classical Charney measure of sensitivity because I think one also has to take into account biosphere and other long-term feedbacks to which it pays no heed” seem to me to be headed in a plausible direction; I may also show sympathy to “unlikely events in the long tail dominate the risk assessment”, though rather less so…
Not terribly relevant image from A Davies/Greenpeace, used under a Creative Commons licence
Filed under: Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis
A Greenpeace LED display in Argentina
My friend Jonathan Rauch — who is undoubtedly one of the best columnists I know — hits what seems to me a rare wrong note in his current column in the National Journal (link subject to rot after a week or so, I think). Riffing off the incandescent light bulbs issue, he moves on to the “don’t regulate, just price carbon” argument. His case against compact fluorescents is that he, and many other consumers, doesn’t find them to be very good, and that the energy savings they make possible will be eaten up by the Jevons (or “rebound”) effect:
Is this a smart way to save some energy? Or, rather, an example of ham-handed environmental grandstanding?
Europhobia aside, there is a case for the phaseout. Incandescents are famously wasteful, emitting much more heat than light. Though cheap to buy, they are expensive to run… Moreover, lightbulbs are low-hanging fruit on the conservation tree. Unlike, say, an air conditioner or a furnace, they are quick and easy to replace. Savings flow instantly. Compact fluorescents may be imperfect, but the new mandate will drive down their prices while stimulating technological advances. Everybody wins.
That case has its points. Nonetheless, I’m going to vote for No. 2: ham-handed environmental grandstanding.
It is true that consumers can and often do undervalue energy efficiency…but replacing your incandescent bulbs with fluorescents is not the same as replacing your low-efficiency refrigerator with a high-efficiency one. As someone who has recently made a good-faith effort to switch, I can tell you that fluorescents deserve their not-ready-for-prime-time reputation…The compact fluorescent lamp, at least in its currently commonplace incarnations, is a lousy product. Consumers who reject it are not necessarily numskulls. Many if not most are exercising a very understandable preference…
The incandescent phaseout is saying: Never mind that you might be willing to raise your summertime thermostat a notch or two in exchange for keeping incandescent bulbs; you still can’t have them. Never mind that your house is full of other potential energy savings; it’s CFLs for you…
Then there is the problem of what Jerry Taylor, an energy analyst at the Cato Institute, calls the rebound effect. Downsizing cars makes driving cheaper, so people do more of it, offsetting some of the gains. Similarly, fluorescents make keeping the lights on cheaper, with the same likely effect.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman notes that in the 1980s a town in Iowa gave out 18,000 free fluorescents in an effort to conserve electricity. “Despite the fact that over half of the town’s households participated, electricity use actually rose by 8 percent. Once people realized they could keep their lights on at lower cost, they kept them on longer.” Having told the public that compact fluorescents cost practically nothing to run and last practically forever, how could we expect people not to leave them on? (I know I do.)
In his fair minded way, Jon points to the strongest arguments on the other side, but I don’t think he gives them sufficient weight. In particular, as he says, the new marketplace is one where we can expect a great deal of competition in terms of better, cheaper and yet more efficient products. It seems to me that this is a really powerful point. With enlightened regulation, governments around the world (and it is important that this is happening in a synchronised way) are forcing innovation into a market where the low price and economies of scale of the previous incumbent technology made the barriers to entry very high. As John points out, if you don’t care much about energy costs, incandescents are a pretty good technology, which is why, as he also notes, compact fluorescents sat around for a long time not getting much better. Now we can foresee a creative free-for-all that will permit a range of new technologies to compete, and to change the manner in which things are lit more profoundly. As my former colleague Stefano Tonzani noted in a feature in Nature (subscribers only, I think)
The general-purpose incandescent light bulb might not be replaced by a single new source, but by a range of technologies, each suited to a particular use. For example, if organic light emitting diode (OLED) lighting can economically be produced in continuous sheets by industrial roll-to-roll techniques, it will be a natural candidate for flat panels that generate a diffuse glow for area lighting. That would make OLEDs a natural complement to the bright, directional light coming from semiconductor LEDs, which could instead be used for more light-intensive tasks such as reading. Such combinations could lead to new concepts of lighting design, so that architects could help save energy by not wasting light where it is not needed.
It is true that by banning incandescents governments are imposing a cost on current consumers who, like Jon, don’t like fluorescents. But for that one-time cost they are bringing into being a more permissive technological state of play with the potential for far more efficient and better products down the line. (Though I’ll admit, in my turn, that the lower turnover of light bulbs in the post-incandescent era will slow this process down, with people locked into the intermediate CFL technology in a way they haven’t been locked into the often-blowing incandescent technology. Unless, that is, they just throw out old fluorescents, which defeats part of the purpose.) This opening up of innovation seems, on balance, a good way to use regulation.
The way that regulation can change contexts bears on Jon’s more general point that the best thing to do is to simply price carbon, rather than also regulate some activities and piurchase choices that lead to carbon emissions. This seems to ignore the degree to which consumption takes place in a complex system defined, in parts, by regulatory frameworks. There are all sorts of things that make it hard or easy to emit carbon that pricing carbon, in and of itself, doesn’t effect very much, but on which regulations and other government decisions have a huge impact. It is possible, and laudably nifty, to find ways to put new low emissions technology straight into existing systems, for example by making roof shingles that work just as roof shingles always have, but also generate solar electricity. In general, though, changing the price of carbon without changing the system in which people live on its own is going to be a suboptimal strategy. Matt Yglesias was making this point recently while writing about Stockholm buses:
A decision to take the bus is heavily influenced by someone’s decision about where to put the bus stops, where to make the routes go, how frequently to run the buses. [It] is also influenced by the relative paucity of parking spaces in the city, which in turn relates to public policy decisions about minimum parking regulations, maximum allowable density and so forth. …Nobody drives on freeways that weren’t built any more than anyone rides subways that don’t exist.
Whether or not putting a solar panel on your roof makes economic sense depends in part on whether you can sell energy to the grid during surplus periods … Whether or not it makes sense to build a huge wind warm in Kansas depends on whether you have a grid robust enough to transmit that energy to population centers.
We also have regulatory issues limiting our ability to innovate…Multi-family structures are more efficient to heat than are detached houses (it’s a surface area to volume thing) but in many places it’s illegal to build a multi-family structure. So if what you want to do is leave this up to the market, you need to take active legislative steps, not just impose a price and say we’ll let the chips fall where they may.
Nick Stern argues, in a manner that might be seen as fence-sitting but which I find convincing, that carbon markets, carbon taxes and regulations all have roles to play in emissions reduction. Carbon taxes work on transport fuel, for example, in a way that cap-and-trade would not. At the same time, people in Europe don’t think it odd to have fuel taxes as well as regulations on efficiency; the situation reflects, among other things, the fact that fuel taxes high enough to force large efficiency improvements across the whole fleet would prove politically unpalatable. And this seems to me to be a key point. If you insist on thinking that the best thing to do is just to price carbon, even within a system not set up to help people cope with that pricing — if you think that using just the price tool, rather than all the tools, is in principle a superior approach — you have to face the fact that in some cases, for some types of emission, a price that makes a real dent in emissions is not going to be politically feasible. This is the territory on which Boxer-Kerry, and all such attempts to impose prices, will be fought. If a carbon price causes real pain to big significant lobbies it becomes very hard to set. Unless you can solve that, gains made through regulations seem a reasonable path.
As to the Jevons effect: yes, but… Yes, efficiency gains tend to spur consumption, to a degree that is often ignored, and this means efficiency does not represent the cornucopia of low-hanging fruit that it is sometimes suggested to be. But as Jon honestly points out, this effect does not necessarily eat up all the efficiency gains. What’s more, there is a time lag between the efficiency gain and the increase in use, and that time lag represents real saving. There is also the point (systems thinking again) that in the presence of energy taxes or other complementary interventions we might expect the size of the effect to be diminished (another reason why we have both efficiency standards and fuel taxes).
And we should not forget that it is possible to saturate the effect, at least in specific modalities. If I keep my house well insulated, efficient-boilered house warm enough to suit me, I will be emitting less carbon than I did when it was less well insulated and the boiler less efficient (this is a hypothetical example: I hope to make it a real one in the next year or so). And once things are efficient, I am unlikely to turn the house into a sauna just because I can. Similarly, I can look forward to a time when I will have a range of devices in my house that allow me any level of illumination up to that of bright daylight and down to that of dim moody glow in any room, with keylights and fills and bounces and spots and so on allowing me to compose my my experience like my own director of photography — and the whole thing will still consume less energy than having a bunch of incandescent bulbs doing a less good job. Of course, the money I save may be used on some completely different sort of consumption. But the more that is done to make consumption of all sorts more efficient, the less that worries me.
I don’t discount the Jevons effect; it is real and powerful, and shows that efficiency alone is not enough. But within an overall system which is trying to make it sensible for people to use less energy while having better experiences in all sorts of ways, the effect can I think be diminished.
Image from Martin Acosta/Greenpeace, used in accord with these conditions.
