The Wonk Room

‘Academic Malpractice’: Fellow U Of C Professor Calls Steve Levitt Out For ‘Laziness And Sloppiness’

University of Chicago professor Pierre Rayhumbert

Adding his voice to a chorus of criticism, a University of Chicago climate scientist finds his colleague, economist Steven Levitt, guilty of “academic malpractice” in SuperFreakonomics. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences, responded to one of the many scientifically illiterate assertions into the book, that “the problem with solar cells is that they’re black” — so that the heat reradiated from the cells “contributes to global warming.” As Pierrehumbert explains in detail in the RealClimate science blog, the albedo debt of solar cells is minimal compared to the amount of warming from burning fossil fuels to produce a comparable amount of electricity:

The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading? Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

“And it’s not as if the ‘black solar cell’ gaffe was the only bit of academic malpractice in your book,” Pierrehumbert continues, citing Levitt’s false portrayal of geoengineered stratospheric cooling as a “a harmless and cheap quick fix for global warming.” Pierrehumbert recommends Levitt walk five blocks for some “friendly help next time”:

May I suggest that if you should happen to need some friendly help next time you take on the topic of climate change, or would like to have a chat about why aerosol geoengineering might not be a cure-all, or just need a critical but informed opponent to bounce ideas off of, you don’t have to go very far. For example…

But given the way Superfreakonomics mangled Ken Caldeira’s rather nuanced views on geoengineering, let’s keep it off the record, eh?

Update Levitt responded at Chris Mooney's Intersection blog and on RealClimate, accusing Pierrehumbert of an "intentional misreading of my chapter on global warming," claiming that he "totally misses the point" because "Myhrvold’s main argument was about the energy required to *make* the solar panels, not the radiated heat."

However, Pierrehumbert rightfully had dismissed that fallacy as well: "A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells." The exact same kind of basic arithmetic Pierrehumbert used to demonstrate that albedo issues are practically irrelevant applies to the construction issue, as shown previously at the Wonk Room.

2 Responses to “‘Academic Malpractice’: Fellow U Of C Professor Calls Steve Levitt Out For ‘Laziness And Sloppiness’”

1. BruceMcF Says:

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   The original Freakonomics was about cherry-picking questions that the traditional marginalist microeconomics could handle without embarrassing itself in public and then carefully framing the question and answer to make the end result seem more impressive than it really was.

   It is therefore unsurprising that when a question is picked because it is important, rather than because it is convenient for the marginalist approach, that the Freakonomists blunder.

   Indeed, a quite similar blunder was made by his partner Morris in a blog posting this summer about High Speed Rail, when he referred to a report on the CO2 impact of HSR versus other transport options in the UK, and then later asserted that what these reports never consider is the CO2 impact of the HSR construction – when the report he referred to did just that for the HSR. Rather, what it omitted was the CO2 impact of expanding the status quo systems.

   While I critique many of the limitations of the marginalist approach when taken as the sole and solitary toolkit to study the economy – it must be stressed that this sloppiness is by no means intrinsic to being a mainstream economist. Dean Baker is an example of a mainstream economist who does not fall into the kind of intellectual laziness that Morris and Levitt have recently been exhibiting.

   November 2nd, 2009 at 4:11 pm

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2. A Siegel Says:

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   There is truth and truthiness to Levitt’s comment. Truth in that Myhrvold’s main point wasn’t about the albedo impacts. Truthiness because Levitt/Dubner opened that section of the discussion with a paragraph specifically on that

   “A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,” Myhrvold says. As an example, he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity and the rest is reradiate as heat — which contributes to global warming.”

   This is the point that Pierrehumbert addresses. It is hard to see how any fair reader would agree that he, as Levitt wrote, “totally misses the point”.

   Levitt seems to to be refusing to engage Pierrehumbert’s devastating critique of that one paragraph by holding up a bright shiny object and saying “what about that other thing?” My question to Levitt: Why not deal with the critique at hand rather than trying to move on to that next thing?

   My discussion: Fellow Univ of Chicago Professor Owns Super Freaky Economist Levitt

   PS: Not surprisingly, some great work across the posts re the Freaky Economist’s distorted look at climate change.

   November 3rd, 2009 at 3:35 pm

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