The New Yorker attacks Levitt and Dubner’s geo-engineering:

Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.

So the problem is “grave,” but if you provide a solution, that’s just you trying to make yourself look clever?  Doesn’t it kind of hinge on whether or not the solution works?  Apparently the New Yorker doesn’t really care, since the next line is:

Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible

Oh, so it’s a really grave problem that requires a solution, but… we don’t really care if it works, because we’re going to be attacking you for the next few paragraphs.

Hilariously, one of the key points is that SuperFreakonomics has so many facts wrong (I managed to snag the copy in my house and finally read it) — but in their care to characterize the authors as continually wrong, they say this:

They also have proved—at least to their own satisfaction—that names like Ansley and Philippa will be popular for girls in the coming decade, that reading to your kids doesn’t matter, and that drunks should be encouraged to drive rather than walk.

Despite the fact that the chapter on that topic explicitly lays out that drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving only to the drunk, (while still less dangerous to other motorists) and that they would recommend, in the interest of saving both other motorists and the drunk, that a cab should be called.  If the SuperFreakonomics authors are guilty of failing to perform, as the article accuses, “really simple arithmetic” then can I call the New Yorker out for not even being able to read?  The analysis of whether specific technologies contribute to or diminish from global warming is certainly not simple arithmetic — not when you have to take into account things like energy costs of production or the opportunity cost of what you might be able to buy with those costs.  Simple albedo is pretty trivial compared to that.

While we’re criticizing The New Yorker’s reading abilities, let’s go with this:

have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?

Well, I think that if you’ll open your copy of SuperFreakonomics to page 194, they explain exactly that.  Balloons suspending objects isn’t particularly rocket science.  If you’ve taken a look at the lift vs. weight numbers, I’d be glad to back down if you’ve verified that it won’t work.  But you can’t slam people for not doing math if you’re not willing to even look at their numbers.

But the thing is, the article never gets around to actually analyzing the solutions.  They mainly just quote Al Gore and then proceed to criticize a solution offered by Freeman Dyson, one which SuperFreakonomics isn’t advocating.  Which is strange, because the sulfur dioxide solution is based on the exact climate science that says our planet is warming.

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness.

First of all, I’m not sure they’re “skeptical” of the climate models.  They constantly cite the IPCC conclusions (which were presented most recently with a 90% certainty by the committee itself) and then proceed to use the same climate models to justify their own proposals.

The one decent comment is this:

A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain. Meanwhile, as long as the concentration of atmospheric CO2 continued to rise, more and more sulfur dioxide would have to be pumped into the air to counteract it.

The amount of direct sunlight reaching the earth would fall, even as the oceans became increasingly acidic. There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.

“By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Okay, we should definitely analyze the potential side effects, everyone agrees on that.  If only they would have addressed that in their book!  Oh wait, they did.  Hilariously, it’s Paul Crutzen himself who explains, from page 197:

Crutzen concluded that damage to the ozone would be minimal.  The sulfur dioxide would eventually settle out in the polar regions [the specific plan does not advocate worldwide sulfur dioxide spread, just the polar caps, using much less than was expelled by Pinatudo, contrary to what the New Yorker claims] but in relatively small amounts that there, too, significant harm was unlikely.

Gosh, they can’t read, apparently they can’t hear what their own sources say, either!  That brings us to another necessary feature of geo-engineering: reversibility.  So, if The New Yorker is right and it causes problems, we can stop it.  Crutzen 9and Levitt and Dubner) again:

If a problem did arise, Crutzen wrote, the sulfur injection “could be stopped on short notice… which would allow the atmosphere to return to its prior state within a few years.”

Another reading fail, I suppose.  Their rejoinder:

“By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Sure, Crutzen has his preferences about what we should try first.  But as everyone can agree, we are not lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases.  So Levitt and Dubner are trying to propose exactly those backup solutions, and in fact they describe IV’s (Intellectual Ventures)  CEO position as believing that his solutions “gives you breathing room to move to carbon-free energy sources.”  Why is this article criticizing them again, when they hold precisely the same opinions as the scientists they approvingly quote?

The cognitive dissonance gets worse though:

Though Levitt and Dubner couldn’t have read “Our Choice,” they nevertheless manage to anticipate Gore’s position [that is, opposition to geo-engineering]. The two argue that his views are the ones that rest on magical thinking.

Yet the thing is, we have tried Gore’s solution, and it is not working.  But there’s a more important issue: even if Gore succeeds miraculously and stops the emissions of every last molecule of carbon dioxide tomorrow, the stuff stays in the air: we are going to have warming for 50 years or so.  The IPCC even states that some of it is completely irreversible, and that up to 1/3rd of the warming may be beyond human control.  So we need a cooling solution regardless of whatever emissions regime we establish.  This is the primary mistake that average climate types like Gore make: geo-engineering is not a replacement for an emissions treaty of whatever type you propose.  It is a global cooling solution to global warming.  You can support and accept the science behind the proposals in SuperFreakonomics and still work on all the things you’re working on.  Portraying it as either-or is false.

The sad part is that an article so obsessed with “just the facts” never attempts to challenge the ones that SuperFreakonomics presents.  A legitimate challenge would involve criticisms of the engineering behind the sulfur dioxide hose’s lift system, or the models that describe its polar cooling effects, or the cost structure.  But they don’t do that, despite IV being only too willing to talk to people about them.  Perhaps even sadder is the perceived disagreement — both the authors of the article and Levitt and Dubner basically share the same assumptions and desires, other than perhaps a subtle difference in the weighting of the costs of traditional emissions controls.

Aside 1: The criticism of Dyson’s “carbon eating trees” is kinda funny when you read it.  Take this as it comes from the article:

Recently, The Atlantic named the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson one of two dozen “brave thinkers” who are shaping the future. This was not for his pioneering work on quantum electro-dynamics and the exclusion principle but for his proposal that global warming will be resolved by “carbon-eating trees.”

I know exactly nothing about Dyson’s plan, but even knowing nothing, I can see where they’re going:

“Carbon-eating trees” certainly sound nice. But how, exactly, would they work? Dyson has never elaborated, and neither the Times nor The Atlantic seems to have asked.

Pshaw, they say!  How would these carbon eating trees work?  Science fiction no doubt!

Would the trees take up CO2 while they’re alive, and release it back into the atmosphere only slowly, once they’re dead? If so, the world already has those sorts of trees. They are called, well, trees.

So their critique is that there’s no way Dyson’s plan could work, because, well, trees already work like that!  Wait, what?  Doesn’t it seem rather trivial that Dyson’s plan could simply involve breeding trees that had a higher rate of carbon dioxide absorption, or even just, you know, planting lots of trees?  Again, I know nothing of his plan, but it certainly seems like a weird criticism!  And doubly weird when you realize that it’s a plan that Levitt and Dubner weren’t even proposing.