While gloating that a House Committee will hold a hearing on geoengineering next week, Dubner let this one slip:

While there is a lot of room for a lot of legitimate debate about many aspects of global warming, let us say one thing here: we believe that anyone who reads our chapter without an agenda wouldn’t even find it particularly controversial. They will see that we routinely address the concerns that critics accuse us of ignoring (the problem of ocean acidification, e.g., — touched upon in the previous chapter — and the “excuse to pollute” that geoengineering solutions might afford), and that we neither “misrepresent” climate scientists nor flub the facts.

Tim Lambert over at Deltoid bats this one down by quoting the entirety of what chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics says about ocean acidification:

[Caldeira] and a co-author coined the phrase ‘ocean acidification.’ the process by which the seas absorb so much carbon dioxide that corals and other shallow-water organisms are threatened.

Lambert also notes that those defending Superfreakonomics are almost all either GW deniers or completely clueless:

While Dubner has studiously avoided linking to any of the “attacks” he links to defences. Trouble is, the only defenders he has are global warming deniers like Bret “It’s a Mass Neurosis!” Stevens and Jonah “It’s the sun!” Goldberg, or people like Jon Stewart who admit that they don’t know anything about the subject.

Super-Freaking-Silly, if you ask me.

And while it is bad enough having respected economists, scientists and journalists tearing your work to shreds, having members of Congress do so is that much worse. Via Brad Johnson, here is a clip of Rep. Inslee doing so yesterday:

Here is the best part of that clip:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

Meanwhile, Things Break and Left as an Exercise continue documenting the atrocities as they unfold.

After a stunningly non-confrontational chat with Jon Stewart last night, the authors of Superfreakonomics have now taken to the USA Today Opinion blog to continue pushing their nonsense. While they deliberately cited increasing global temperatures — as well as legitimate concerns such as oil wars and ocean acidification — the fact remains: they have gone way too far off the beaten path to successfully walk this one back. As has been the case throughout this episode, they continue to grossly oversimplify and commit numerous logical fallacies in order to make their seemingly-compelling contrarian argument.

I’ve identified 22 flaws in this latest 920 word piece. Let’s look at them individually.

Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected scientists immediately set to work, trying to find a solution to the impending disaster.

Flaw 1: Catastrophic climate change is not an ‘unforeseen threat’. Scientists began warning about the threat of increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere as early as 1896. 172 countries (including over 100 heads of state) met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to work on a collaborative solution. Referring to climate change as an unforeseen threat is not accurate.

Flaw 2: Equating mainstream climate scientists — who overwhelmingly advocate reducing emissions to prevent and minimize the impacts of climate change — with the few who advocate geoengineering as a primary solution is extremely misleading.

The first set of scientists returned with a potential solution, but it had some shortcomings. It was expensive, with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. It also required nearly every human being on the planet to change his or her behavior in fundamental ways. And even if the scientists’ scheme worked, it would take decades for the benefits to be felt.

Flaw 3: The job-creation and other economic benefits associated with developing, manufacturing and deploying clean energy technologies are well documented. Citing the economic costs of a solution without accounting for the economic benefits — despite being good enough for the Congressional Budget Office — is fundamentally dishonest. Further, the economic models such cost estimates are based on tend to undercount low-and-zero carbon alternatives and underestimate innovation.

Flaw 4: Putting the impetus for changing behaviors on individuals rather than policymakers is disingenuous at best. Smart public policy can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions without having an unpleasant impact on individual behavior. The changes in individual behavior such policies would bring about are undeniably changes that lead people to lead healthier lives. Eliminating subsidies for factory farms, switching out coal-fired power plants with natural gas or renewables and investing in public transportation rather than bailing out automakers are three simple examples. Further, assuming that drastically changing the earth’s atmosphere can be solved without changes in human behavior is a prime example of the nirvana fallacy, in which solutions to problems are said not to be right because they are not perfect.

The second set of scientists returned with a very different answer. Their solution cost less than one-thousandth as much to implement and did not require anyone to change his behavior. The scientists could get their solution up and running in roughly a year, with the benefits to be felt immediately. And if the simple fix turned out to not work as expected, it was quickly and easily reversible.

Flaw 5: While the hypothetical scientists advocating an emissions reduction strategy had a ‘potential solution’, the scientists advocating geoengineering offered a ’solution’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Institution of Mechanical Engineers:

Many people believe that we are fast approaching a critical point in dealing with climate change. Our planet is continuing to get hotter due to the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, most worryingly carbon dioxide (CO2), due to human activity.

The consensus is that we cannot allow global average temperature to rise by 2oC above pre-industrial levels. If we do – and many predict this will happen within the next few decades – dramatic changes to our climate may occur which could jeopardise modern civilisation.

What can be done to prevent this rise? For many years, governments have primarily focused on climate change mitigation: reducing the amount of CO2 each nation emits into the atmosphere. More recently, climate change adaptation has been embraced: an approach which sets out to ensure that critical assets, such as power generation, transport links and the urban environment, are redesigned and rebuilt to protect against future changes in climate.

A third, less explored approach, is geo-engineering: where technology is used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or where the planet is cooled by reflecting solar radiation back into space. Geo-engineering could be another potential component in our approach to climate change that could provide the world with extra time to decarbonise the global economy.

Geo-Engineering – Giving Us Time to Act? –

Tierney Lab:

The most commonly discussed form of climate engineering, so far, is to loft aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reproduce the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. It’s described in this report from a study group organized by the Novim Group that met last year at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and outlined a research program to test this technology.

Climate Engineering Responses to Climate Emergencies –

American Meteorological Association:

Human responsibility for most of the well-documented increase in global average temperatures over the last half century is well established. Further greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional widespread climate changes that can be expected to cause major negative consequences for most nations.

AMS Policy Statement on Geoengineering the Climate System –