9:15am EST: Representative Ed Markey and Senator James Inhofe on Fox News.

10:40am EST: John Aravosis of AmericaBlog will be on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Here is John’s preview:

We’ll be talking about the climate change debate, and Sarah Palin’s op ed and Al Gore’s interview, and then we’ll also discuss press coverage of Obama’s Nobel.

I did a bit of research on something in particular – the claim by climate change denialists that some stolen emails from climate change scientists in Britain “prove” that climate change is a hoax. Well guess what – it doesn’t prove that it’s a hoax, and in fact both AP and FactCheck.org agree on this one. Climate change is real, and the emails do nothing to change that fact.

1pm and 5pm EST: Paul Krugman and Bjorn Lomborg on CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria. Joseph Romm is predicting fireworks for this one.

What else is on?

Please read this in full:

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy’s growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait — on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

Update: Crooks and Liars has video.

Transcript via ABC.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, he is also going to be dealing with health care, right now on the floor of the Senate. He announced this week to Copenhagen to deal with climate change. And it comes at a time when the politics seem to be changing a little bit in this.

Let me show our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. It shows whether people believe global warming is occurring. That number is going down. July 2008, 80 percent of the public; down to 72 percent now. And there’s been a sort of a real partisanship. Look at Republicans, 74 percent believed global warming was occurring back in 2008. Now, a 20-point drop to 54 percent.

George, there has been a partinizing of this issue, and let me turn to one more complication we’ve had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their e-mail account and showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide information that runs counter to their theories.

WILL: It raises the question of — we’re being asked to wage trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the consensus far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as they say it is. The e-mails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing criticism, gaming the peer review process for scholarly works and all the rest. One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn’t be embarrassed about that. It’s a complicated business, and that’s why we shouldn’t be (inaudible).

KRUGMAN: All those e-mails — people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There’s not a single smoking gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn’t actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that’s loose wording. Right? Everything is about — we’re really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there’s no trend here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain…

WILL: One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years…

KRUGMAN: It’s not — read — this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don’t have a start on it. There’s a lot of loose use of language when you’re just talking among each other. And what (inaudible) really meant, deleting would be meant that, you know, we don’t know when this thing started, because we don’t have very good data back then. There weren’t any weather stations. And that’s what the context was.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I noted the obvious:

When Paul Krugman, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Joseph Romm, Bradford Delong, Brad Johnson, Matt Yglesias, Melanie Fitzpatrick, David Roberts, Tim Lambert, Felix Salmon, Corbin Hiar, William Connelly, Oliver Willis, Scott Lemieux, Ezra Klein, Daniel Davies, Brian Dupuis, and Mark Thoma have all published scathing criticisms of your book — several days before the book is actually released — something has gone terribly wrong.

The authors of Superfreakonomics have now responded on their blog, characterizing the entire dust-up as a smear. They go on to deny the charges made against them:

They have given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific. Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not.

But the economists and scientists I mentioned yesterday — you know, the people who actually follow this issue closely — have not relented.

Here are a few key responses to to Dubner and Levitt’s denial of their denialism (how meta!):

Paul Krugman writes:

Legalistic quibbling about who said what in an email isn’t going to help Dubner and Levitt here: in this crucial chapter, there’s an average of one statement per page that’s either flatly untrue or deeply misleading.

Bradford Delong:

I have a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize. And I would then start editing the chapter thus…

Delong goes on to provide a pretty damning page-by-page list of factual mistakes in the chapter.

John Quiggin:

The main point, though, is that the fuss over the global cooling chapter in Levitt and Dubner’s new book is the first occasion, I think, where the refutation of specific errors has taken a back seat (partly because, in this case, it’s so easy) to an attack on contrarianism, as such. The general point is that contrarianism is a cheap way of allowing ideological hacks to think of themselves as fearless, independent thinkers, while never thinking (in fact reinforcing) the status quo.

Ken Houghton:

First, the climate scientists called b*llsh*t. Now, the economists are coming out—and the song remains the same.

I have a feeling this won’t be ending anytime soon.

Once again, here is the chapter in question:

Mr. Levitt and Mr. Dubner:

When Paul Krugman, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Joseph Romm, Bradford Delong, Brad Johnson, Matt Yglesias, Melanie Fitzpatrick, David Roberts, Tim Lambert, Felix Salmon, Corbin Hiar, William Connelly, Oliver Willis, Scott Lemieux, Ezra Klein, Daniel Davies, Brian Dupuis, and Mark Thoma have all published scathing criticisms of your book — several days before the book is actually released — something has gone terribly wrong. I mean, wow.

And while most who argue against meaningful action on climate change limit themselves to disputing either the science or the economics, you have apparently accepted no such limitations.  Perhaps if you had limited your arguments to one of these angles or the other you wouldn’t have made so many egregious factual errors.

But perhaps this was all just a clever marketing ploy.  I can’t help but wonder if chapter five was deliberately crafted to cause an uproar.  Some sort of hail mary attempt to draw attention to an otherwise less-than-spectacular book.  If this is the case — and you truly have adopted the ‘all news is good news’ mantra — then I guess congratulations are in order.  Your book is almost as relevant as the balloon boy.

P.S. This is not fooling anyone.

Here is the chapter everyone is so upset about:

Superfreakonomics –