Ken Caldeira Contradicts SuperFreaks: ‘Carbon Dioxide Is The Right Villain’
Ken Caldeira Contradicts SuperFreaks: ‘Carbon Dioxide Is The Right Villain’
Superfreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have lashed out at physical scientists who have criticized misrepresentations of climate science in the “global cooling” chapter of their book. They disparage the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose staff includes Nobel Peace Prize-winning climate scientist Melanie Fitzpatrick, as an “environmental-advocacy group” that “pressured NPR into reading a statement critical of the book.” Dubner wrote to J. Bradford DeLong, an economist and blogger, claiming that physicist Joseph Romm’s “attack is full of deception and outright lies,” especially in its depiction of climate scientist Ken Caldeira:
His attack is full of deception and outright lies. He makes it sound as if we somehow twisted and abused Caldeira’s research; nothing could be further from the truth.
Funny, because Caldeira himself disagrees with the portrayal of his research in SuperFreakonomics.
The “SuperFreaks” claimed that Ken Caldeira’s “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight”:
Caldeira has responded on his professional website: “Carbon dioxide is the right villain, insofar as inanimate objects can be villains”:
Melanie Fitzpatrick, one of the climate scientists on the Union of Concerned Scientists' staff, produced a rebuttal of the SuperFreakonomics chapter which points out the many ways it misrepresents climate science. Our communications team simply passed this critique on to media outlets that were planning on covering the book, including NPR. Our organization believes it is incredibly important for scientists to accurately communicate climate science to the media and the public. UCS's criticisms are valid and NPR rightfully recognized the value of informing their listeners that the book misrepresents climate science.
I don't see a whole lot of political momentum toward seriously addressing the problem, just a lot of superficial things that will be ineffective. That's because politicians have a lot to gain from appearing to address it, but little to gain from actually solving what is a multi-decade problem.One scenario is that we won't really do anything until a catastrophe happens, and then people will demand that we do both [transition away from fossil fuels and conduct geoengineering]. When the s-- really hits the fan--when huge droughts in the Midwestern breadbasket are collapsing our agriculture system, ice sheets are melting, sea levels are rising, and we're getting hit by Katrina-scale hurricanes--geoengineering might be an emergency backup system we could deploy.
We should avoid geoengineering if possible, but we need it in our toolbox in case of catastrophe.
2 Responses to “Ken Caldeira Contradicts SuperFreaks: ‘Carbon Dioxide Is The Right Villain’”
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Why is this surprising? the original Freakonomics was smoke and mirrors apologetics for the relevance of mainstream economics based on cherry picking “sexy” questions for which marginalist analysis alone without historical or institutional empirical grounding could yield “interesting” arguments – given, of course, the control of the agenda that comes with the control of the framing of the questions.
There is nothing in Freakonomics apologetics of mainstream economics that offers any defense from the failures of mainstream economic approaches to see what was happening to the financial sector in the lead up to September, 2008, while there were, of course, multiple heterodox approaches that did, in fact, successfully point out some of the risks that we were facing.
There is nothing in the Freakonomics style of defense of mainstream economics that promises a capacity to effectively address ANY question that is not cherry-picked, but is rather the focus of attention because it is an important question that must be answered.
October 18th, 2009 at 1:04 pmTo the degree history is a guide, by the time a catastrophe hits (and the above phrasing of such as a future event (back in 2007) is ironic—given the catastrophe going on in the Arctic that year: the current record for ice extent decline and a renewed increase in the average level of methane in the atmosphere), the social order required to effect the “transition away from fossil fuels and conduct geoenginering” has a very high probability of having collapsed. The collapse will, in and of itself, do much for the referenced transition. It will effected a reengineering of human society. But the probability of that being both enough—sufficient to un-tip a tip into klimakatastrophe—is low.
While how green or sustainable what follows a collapse might be remains to be seen, history, again, suggests there is a high probability that the transition will be a violent one. Unless a collapse is emotionally and rationally anticipated, such paradigm shifts surprise, trigger fear, and evoke less than the most intelligent response a society might otherwise be capable of mustering.
Listening to Weekend Edition Saturday’s interview on _Superfreakonomics_ yesterday, I was struck at how much Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of need” theory played into the assumptions framing that interview, particularly in the parts of that discussion about the concept of “simple” and “cheap.” While the following is not how his work is commonly understood and embraced, consider: his theory was crafted and gained popularity after WW II in the mid-’50s, when the US was the only industrial nation in the West that was not in post-war shambles (and, consequently, without economic competition); reflecting on the systemic environmental, social, and economic injustice of the global capitalism that has arisen out of this hegemony (and the popularized benevolent affect it has been bestowed with in the West, withstanding), systemically, Maslow’s model functions more as a rational for feeling moral about otherwise immoral behavior than is its popularized perception. To what degree was his work embraced because it felt like a better story for understanding human behavior than what the behaviorists were crafting; than what Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as a social mirror—and published at the same time as Maslow’s work—reflected. Anyway, consequently—even if unintended, the subsequent adaptation of Maslow’s “hierarchy of need” model into the social meme for—eventually—becoming moral, can be seen as setting us up for being surprised by the consequences of an unfelt, but functionally, immoral economic model for socially defining and creating “wealth.” We just don’t quite have all we need (yet), but in our ongoing greed we are on a moral path!
Given such logic, isn’t it therefore rational to argue, as I did here at the Wonk Room in a comment to Brad Johnson’s post on Elmandorf and the CBO, that these concepts of “simple” and “cheap” have been so divorced from justice by our culture—and with deference to freakonomic’s insight into unintendended consequences—that these terms now morally mask irresponsible, non-rational, and unsustainable greed? To the degree this is so, it is due, in part, to how Maslow’s work has been adapted. An additional consequences of this Orwellian doublespeak is that global capitalism’s greed, itself an iteration of fear, is felt to be both “moral,” and “simple and cheap?”
In the linked argument, the terms “simple” and “cheap,” as (rationally mis)used yesterday during the NPR interview, factually reference the opposite of what seemed to be intended to be communicating: that, pragmatically, “simple and cheap” geoengineering is all that human behavior can be expected to embrace to fix a warming planet (and this, in the context discussed in this post, that what is scientifically 90% assured to be the cause of the unfolding climate warming should be given the same social importance as has has, at best a likelihood of being wrong). Isn’t such a from of circular reasoning and a non-rational feeling-based moral judgment? If so, why, to the degree it does, are the irrationally feelings seemingly trusted by both the interviewer and interviewee?
I find it tellingly Ironic that great complexity and vast expenditures of environmental, social, and economic capital were easily and pragmatically discussed in the interview as being “simple and cheap.” Regardless, and consequently—intended or not, the promised “balancing” debate (announced—and added to—at the taped interview at the end of this segment), will be an emotional Sisyphean task for any representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists that participates. Given the irrational framing for the concepts of “simple” and “cheap” that has been established by yesterday’s interview, going into the science that deconstructs the posits of chapter 5 of _Superfreakonomics_—and such is something a scientist would tend to do—will fail to accomplish such as the conversation has already been defined, not by science, but by the irrationality of emotions and what predominately feels moral in this culture. Consequently, given a choice between a false “simple and cheap,” and a factual complex and costly, in an interview hosted by a media persona (who has demonstrated a moral bias toward an irrational understanding of what is “simple and cheap” (and, thereby—and likely unintended but consequentially—revealed an emotional incapacity to grasp the complexity of the science), such an interview has a high probability of affecting an “interview” that will effect a further drawing of the media curtain and screens us/US from our fears. Using the ruse of a scientific debate, the subsequent segment will have a propensity toward affording a feeling of morality to a cultural trust in greed.
An alternative framing for the promised followup interview would be for a Superfreakonomic author, a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the NPR host to engage in the interaction with a representative of the field of motivated reasoning, like Drew Westen of Emory University, adding “color”—should the interviewees and interviewer submit to having fMRI’s being recorded and interpreted so as to reveal just how our tendency to confuse non-rational thinking with rational thought plays out a “balanced” debates framed as this one is proposed to be done. The reporting medium of radio and taping would allow such an interview, with color, to be facilitated.
October 18th, 2009 at 2:50 pm