Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

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.

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So, 2009 is the year of Geo-engineering.

All the debate aside, I think it is an absolute certainty that something like this will be tried at some point.  Even though we are becoming, as a species, more efficient, it isn’t fast enough to negate the effects that have already been charted out by the IPCC.  So we have two scenarios:

1. The world passes some kind of global warming pact.

2. The world does not, or only a few countries do.

Both of these scenarios will result in an almost overwhelming incentive to use geo-engineering.  The problem is that even though “global warming pact” is seen as a substitute for “crazy geo-engineering,” it really isn’t, at least not for the next 50 years.  Even if we cut all emissions today (haha), the earth is still going to warm quite a bit over the next few decades.  I haven’t read Superfreakonomics because a certain member of my household keeps monopolizing it, but I’m sure they mention this.  Anthropogenic warming deniers can say it was just natural, but whatever: it is going to happen and we will need to do something about it.  And it will be extremely tempting to use one of these relatively low cost methods to deal with it, because even if we do come up with an amazing Kyoto-esque agreement, it’s not going to really impact the near-term warming.

So ironically, it becomes precisely the loudest advocates of “we must do something about global warming” who are ignoring solutions to near-term warming — because even according to the data we all agree is right (the IPCC) there is nothing their solutions (emissions cutting) will do to affect it (near-term warming).  It’s not like there won’t still be things to work on: you will still have toxic waste, run-off, smog and air pollution that we will want to cure.  But Levitt and Dubner are the first to make the point explicitly (more importantly, in a popular book) that these are separate problems that require separate solutions.  If the problem is “the earth is getting warmer over the next 50 years” then you must examine geo-engineering as a solution.   And if the effects of this warming are as dire as people think, then there is no doubt they will use it.

This stuff is really interesting:

THE SCARIEST THING about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Apparently proposed anti-climate change responses are estimated to be super-cheap — within the range, as the article notes, of wealthy individuals, and even the smallest countries.  Lots of the solutions are pretty scary in their potential to go horribly, horribly wrong — but if there is some gradualist solution (some presented seemed to fit this bill) that can be slowly enacted to gauge their response, why shouldn’t we try it?

My only quibble with the piece is how it seems to imply that the risks of standard methods of dealing with climate change are not themselves extremely high.  Any plan to cut carbon emissions by enough to severely curtain warming is going to negatively impact the development of many countries — especially India and China.  Their massive uptick in pollution has directly led to much of the economic growth in those countries — pulling billions out of poverty.  What’s the cost of preventing the next billion from achieving the same?

Either way, given the likelihood of any comprehensive climate change plan ever being put in place, eventually we will be forced to consider geo-engineering.  Even if the US adopts a vastly more stringent form of the current Waxman-Markey bill at some point, for any of this to matter, India and China need to be on board.  If the US is barely managing to keep W-M alive today, the governments of India and China certainly aren’t going to do something even more radical.  And in reality, by “we” I am almost certainly referring to the Chinese government.  If it comes to a point where climate change is creating unmanageable problems, they will definitely use some form of geo-engineering to combat it.  Hopefully they won’t call their device the Annihilatrix.