You can’t read these e-mails and feel that the IPCC’s or the major climate scientists’ findings and predictions about global warming are kosher. You can’t. They may be, but if you read these you have to have a whole lot of skepticism about that. And of course, coming into Copenhagen these are going to have a big effect how the world looks at you. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute. You say these climate scientists have been telling us we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow?”

Watch it:

By asking whether “we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow,” Dubner — a top blogger for the New York Times — gets to the heart of why this bizarre theory of a cabal of all-powerful climatologists is getting support from conservative media and politicians. The incontrovertible science — based not on manipulated data but on decades of basic research — is that the burning of fossil fuels is drastically reshaping our planet’s climate, melting the glaciers, and acidifying the oceans. And the only known way to restore conditions to those safe for human civilization is to dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels. Doing so, however, would affect the incredible profits and power of the oil and coal industries, and of their ideological allies.

One of the scientists, for example, who is “telling us we have to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow” is Ken Caldeira, who Dubner and Levitt falsely portray in their book as a supporter of their mindless contrarianism. Is Dubner now accusing Caldeira of being part of this conspiracy?

Dubner continues:

But the point is this: carbon mitigation as a plan to stop global warming — even if you devoutly believe that global warming is the biggest problem we ever faced — won’t work.

This is an even more radical claim than what’s in SuperFreakonomics, in which Dubner and co-author Steven Levitt merely argue — based on flawed logic and falsehoods — that carbon mitigation would be ruinously expensive and difficult.

In fact, if we stop treating our atmosphere like a sewer, the climate system will heal itself over time, potentially more rapidly than we expect. That our past inaction will continue to bear consequences into the future is a reason to act with greater swiftness, not to dither further. The longer we delay, the more difficult and expensive the challenge to reduce pollution while adapting to a hostile world becomes.

Transcript:

DAVID ASMAN: All right, we’re talking about Superfreaks, if you recognize the song.

Well, politicians distort the truth all the time, but scientists are not supposed to do that. Still, it does happen. Stalin used to demand results from scientists that weren’t supported by evence — evidence, and of course Hitler did the same. But surely, we are above that, aren’t we? Well, “It can’t happen here,” as many people have said, but apparently it has.

New e-mails from global warming theorists appear to show that they have been covering up evidence that the earth isn’t warming as much as they thought it was. In fact, it might actually be cooling a bit. Furthermore, there’s not as much evidence that man is responsible for climate change as has been claimed by Al Gore and others. But the evidence for that too has been distorted. Shocking allegations that could affect discussions at the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen. For details of how it all shakes out let’s turn to the coauthor of the super-bestselling book SuperFreakonomics, Stephen Dubner. Stephen, great to see you.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Thank you.

ASMAN: Thank you for being here. Let’s just read one of the e-mails that was discovered as a result of this great detective work on the part of . . . If we can put up b 13 e-mail. This was an e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, he’s a climatologist at the National Center for Climate Research, they believe in global warming quite a bit. He says, “The fact is we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Now, it’s because of e-mails like this that suspicions have begun to mount that maybe they buried evidence suggesting that global warming didn’t fit the computer models. What do you think?

DUBNER: Let me start by saying the e-mails were hacked. Just so we know. So someone either wanted to get in there because they knew there was something that should be read. Or maybe there’s a whistle-blower. At this point we just don’t know. All these e-mails and other documents got released and what it seems to show is, what your e-mail shows — first of all you’ll find out how i feel about this issue — but just for the sake of devil’s advocacy for a moment. It is tough to say from one e-mail or 10 e-mail what is really going on. What seems to be going on, however, if you read these e-mails there is a group of scientists who supported each other’s work that reported to the IPPC, and formed the basis . . .

ASMAN: That organization is that United Nations . . .

DUBNER: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

ASMAN: . . . massively getting government involved in stopping global warming.

DUBNER: right. What you’ve got is a group of scientists who have very potent really at telling this UN body how it wants to tell governments around the world to deal with climate, to deal with carbon, to deal with energy, and so on. And it seems as though these guys are colluding among each other to a) make their findings be right for their position but b) even more troubling if you’re a scientist or a fan of science is to keep out the dissenters. So, you can say anything you want about scientists wanting to advocate for what they think is right, but when you’re dealing with peer-reviewed journals and the guys who publish in these journals having the podium to tell Al Gore what to say, to tell the UN what to say, and those guys are keeping out dissenters, and they’re working with federal tax money.

ASMAN: But we know Al Gore is trying to keep out dissenters. He has refused to debate anybody on the issue. And there’s some real distinguished scientists who don’t believe in global warming.

DUBNER: It’s true. We make the points in in SuperFreakonomics, a few basic points about global warming. The models that seem to predict calamity are . . .

ASMAN: The computer models that a lot of the policy that the UN advocates are based on.

DUBNER: . . . are a) full of uncertainty. Predicting the future in any realm is hard —

ASMAN: I thought you were going say they’re full of something else.

DUBNER: Well, I’ll let you fill in that blank. They seem to conform quite a bit. There seems to be what a lot of scientists like to call the “consensus.” The problem is there are other scientists who argue this consensus is really false. And what it represents is everybody’s scared to be an outlier, everybody’s scared to be a skeptic, because they won’t get funding unless they produce research that kind of supports the uh, the global –

ASMAN: Bottom line, we’ve got to cut to the chase. Who do you think is doing what to the evidence? Do you think that supporters of global warming and the UN are distorting evidence to prove their point?

DUBNER: Distorting evidence, probably yes. To what degree with don’t really know yet. We’re going to find out a lot more about that. Here’s what I think.

ASMAN: But doesn’t to any degree discredit their theories?

DUBNER: Yeah. You can’t —

ASMAN: If something has been made up you can’t rely on anything else.

DUBNER: You can’t read these e-mails and feel that the IPCC or the major climate scientists’ findings and predictions about global warming are kosher. You can’t. They may be, but if you read these you have to have a whole lot of skepticism about that. And of course, coming into Copenhagen these are going to have a big effect how the world looks at you. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute. You say these climate scientists have been telling us we have to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow?”

ASMAN: Particularly in light of the fact we are on the cusp of spending a trillion dollars in a cap-and-trade program that the House has already approved here. Most Americans are already questioning this, but in light of these e-mail memos show the computer models wrong we don’t want to spend a trillion dollars for that.

DUBNER: In Superfreakonomics we say that, but then we go a step farther and say even if you cut all of your carbon, even if — we could go to a zero carbon society overnight which of course is impossible — it’s probably not going address warming, if indeed warming is bad enough to worry about. The reason why carbon dioxide turns out to not be the thing, perhaps, we should worry about most in terms of warming.

ASMAN: the thing that’s worse than car exhaust is?

DUBNER: Well, we write about ruminants, believe it or not.

ASMAN: You write about cows! Let’s just put it up on here, the exhalation and flatulence and belching with manure emit methane — put that up on the screen, which by one common measure 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide released by cars.

DUBNER: This is true. So if you want save the planet, you gotta either, you know, you gotta learn to love the kangaroo, eat the kangaroo. The kangaroo does not emit methane.

ASMAN: Let me get that — kangaroo. Forgive me everybody. Hide the kids, cover the kids’ ears, kangaroo farts don’t have methane?

DUBNER: They’re clean. It has to do with the bacterial . . . What Australian scientists are trying to say if cows emit all of this methane, which is a greenhouse gas, and kangaroos don’t, if we can’t get people to eat kangaroos, what if we could transfer the digestive bacteria from cow’s — from kangaroo’s stomachs into cows and make them, you know, methane free.

But the point is this: carbon mitigation as a plan to stop global warming — even if you devoutly believe that global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced — won’t work. It won’t work because it’s too little, it’s too late, and it’s too optimistic. It’s also very expensive. It also depends on governments and people around the world to change their behavior when it goes against their economic self-interest.

ASMAN: If we all became vegetarians, we could do a lot more for releasing these gases . . .

DUBNER: Than driving a Prius, for instance. If driving a Prius makes you feel good absolutely but if you drive the Prius to the supermarket to buy some hamburger you’re canceling yourself out many times over.

ASMAN: Many, many facts such as these are to be had in SuperFreakonomics. You and your coauthor Steven Levitt. By the way, top of the charts now, right?

DUBNER: We’re doing all right.

ASMAN: You’re selling it well. It’s a great stocking stuffer. Thank you very much for being here.

Much of what is being said is speculation at this juncture, as a great many folk are working to mine through the emails. However, the CRU has made public that they were indeed hacked and much of the information appears to already be confirmed as legitimate. If so, this could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history (it will take a while to calculate the total amount of grant money achieved by fraud and the cost of climate change legislation “Cap-and-Trade” could have been in the $ trillions). Accordingly, nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud…with the blatant attempt to perpetuate the political agenda of global warming supporters and the UN IPCC.

It is, of course, the likes of Zumwalt and other right-wing defenders of a pollution-based economy that are the actual “global warming supporters.” Sen. Vitter, whose career was tarnished by the revelation he used prostitutes, is one of several Republican senators who deny the reality of manmade climate change, despite the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Coincidentally, Vitter is a strong ally of Lousiana’s oil and gas industry, which faces regulation under climate legislation.

Zumwalt’s conspiracy theory, sent this morning and addressed to “friends,” includes the Fourth Estate. He writes that the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin — who wrote a front page story sympathetic to the rabid claims of conspiracy — “was mentioned in some of these emails as one of the people in the press they use, so his motives are questionable.”

Zumwalt even offers a top-ten list of the climate scientists’ supposed crimes:

1. Suppression of Data

2. Destruction of data subject to FOIA requests

3. Organized subversion of the peer-review process

4. Coordinated efforts with media outlets

5. Blacklisting of scientific journals for political reasons

6. Blatant scientific fraud and misrepresentation of data

7. Manipulation of data for the UN/WTO’s political agenda

8. Strategies for tax evasion

9. Deceit of International and U.S. agencies for funding and grants

10. And much more…

Zumwalt recommends recipients learn more about the “coordinated effort to achieve the IPCC agenda” by searching for blogs using the keywords “Hadley, hacked, global warming, email, fraud.”

As a side note, Zumwalt’s email contains several basic errors of fact, evidently copied from right-wing blogs. He incorrectly calls the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit the “UN IPCC’s Climate Research Unit,” “also known as Hadley.” Similarly, he incorrectly says the “I” in IPCC stands for “International,” not “Intergovernmental.” These errors, while minor, are consistent with the disdain the Climategate conspiracy theorists have for reality.

Download the Vitter staffer’s “ClimateGate” email here.

— “If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

– Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

– The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

– “The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

– The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

If only we could have changed the weather. We hope Mother Nature is nicer to us next year, hopefully delivering less rain and more sunshine.

In addition, waffles are on the hit list, as supplies of Eggos are disappearing. “Heavy rains that soaked Atlanta last month knocked out Kellogg’s waffle operations,” ABC News reported on Tuesday. September’s epic flooding actually exacerbated a shutdown caused by an earlier virulent outbreak of the deadly bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. Kellogg’s initially only referred to the food poisoning threat as “equipment issues,” preferring to let global boiling take the blame.

Unfortunately, we have changed the weather.

“2009 continues to climb up the rainiest-years-ever chart” in Illinois. This year’s rainfall in Peoria of 49.34 inches — 50 percent above normal — has already exceeded the total of 2008, itself 25 percent above normal. With only six more inches of precipitation, 2009 will break the record rainfall set in 1990.

Similarly, the September 21st flood in Atlanta, Georgia “was worse than what’s statistically projected to happen once every 100 years — even worse than every 500 years.” It was “extremely rare”, “epic” and so “stunning”, the U.S. Geological Survey says the “flood has defied its attempts to define it.”

This kind of extreme precipitation is part of the changes to our climate wrought by global warming, which increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold and changes circulation patterns. As the U.S. Global Change Program reported in June, 2009 on the impacts of climate change in the Midwest and the Southeast:

– In the Midwest, both summer and winter precipitation have been above average for the last three decades, the wettest period in a century. The Midwest has experienced two record-breaking floods in the past 15 years.

– According to climate models, precipitation in the Midwest is projected to increase in winter and spring, and to become more intense throughout the year.

– In the Southeast, average autumn precipitation has increased by 30 percent for the region since 1901. There has been an increase in heavy downpours in many parts of the region.

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

A fatwa is an Islamic clerical legal ruling. Dubner is evidently alluding to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s twenty-year-old fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by hardline Muslims. Rushdie has suffered assassination attempts and decades in seclusion. Translators of the book were stabbed, shot, and killed, and bookstores were firebombed.

Despite this supposed global warming “fatwa,” however, Dubner is heroically appearing all week on the Takeaway to flack his book, co-written with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. The SuperFreakonomics authors have now enjoyed softball interviews from Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, 20/20, the Guardian, the UK Telegraph, and others. The Diane Rehm Show did a much better job, bringing in IPCC lead author Peter Frumhoff to debunk their nonsense.

SuperFreakonomics has been edged out on the bestseller list by Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots.

In its present form, I would not vote for it. I have some real questions about the real complexities on cap and trade.

Last year, Webb asserted that “we can’t just start with things like emission standards at a time when we’re at a crisis with the entire national energy policy.” Webb seems to be aligning himself strongly with Republicans who believe that climate change is not a real threat that requires significant reductions in emissions. Perhaps the veterans and military leaders that have mobilized in Operation Free should give him a few briefings.

The Alexander-Webb Clean Energy Act, by providing taxpayer subsidies for nuclear energy but no economic incentive to shift from carbon power or keep costs down, “could pave the way for the same kind of industry-wide meltdown that happened in the 1970s and 1980s.” Dr. Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, has found that “even with climate change policy looming, nuclear power cannot compete in the marketplace, so its advocates are forced to seek to prop it up by shifting costs and risks to ratepayers and taxpayers.”

The federal government has long played a prominent and productive role in the research and development of advanced new technologies, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deserves increased funding. There are elements of the Webb-Alexander bill that would make sense as part of the Clean Energy Jobs Act. But the aging, capital-intensive, increasingly expensive nuclear industry is not ever going to be a driving source for new jobs. As standalone policy, this bill would simply raise economic and security risks for Americans for the benefit of bankers and polluters.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is trapped by the toxic coal-dominated politics of his struggling state. He seems to be hoping global warming will simply disappear over time, like Republicans who have called for delay after delay in action. “I’m totally unconcerned about Copenhagen,” Rockefeller told Politico, justifying his own calls for delay. “I’m concerned about West Virginia.”

Because of the dilatory tactics of Webb, Rockefeller, and other Democrats, Kerry and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are struggling to keep the consideration of green economy legislation on track. Kerry is now backing off his commitment to “providing the ‘framework’ of legislation before the Copenhagen meeting.” Reid has placed financial reform on the calendar before the Clean Energy Jobs Act, and is now calling for a “jobs creation bill” as well.

Unfortunately for unemployed Americans, the Senate continues to ignore the obvious — that strong climate legislation would reward companies for creating jobs instead of pollution.

The Board of Directors is the principal governing and policymaking body of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself, with more than 100 corporate and small business leaders serving from all sectors and sizes of business, and from all regions of the country.

In fact, a Wonk Room analysis has found that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board is overwhelmingly Republican, having contributed six to one to conservative over liberal politicians.

The nation’s business community, however, is a bipartisan participant in American politics, contributing about equally to both parties over the last ten years. The Wonk Room has found that from 1999 to 2007, corporate contributions broke 53% to 47% in favor of Republicans. After the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and other Democrats massively outraised that of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans, the split from 1999 to 2009 stands 52% to 48% in favor of Democrats:

Source: Center for American Progress Action Fund, from Federal Election Commission data compiled by the OpenSecrets project of the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Chamber — when not lying about the effects of climate or health care reform — has grossly inflated the numbers of its members. It also seems it’s misrepresenting the nature of the few members who make its misguided policy decisions.

Methodology: Contribution data from OpenSecrets.org of the top 50 industries to Congress from the 1999-2000 to the 2009-2010 cycle were compiled. Donations from unions, candidate committees, civil servants, ideological and issue groups, education, and retirees were excluded.

I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. That’s not even our question.

Watch it:

Later during the interview Dubner attempted to justify the book’s claim that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain,” arguing that it was the decrease in sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that has caused global warming, rather than the accumulation of carbon dioxide.

This is of course utter nonsense — aerosols like sulfur dioxide certainly masked the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, but global warming is caused by the greenhouse gases. If a methamphetamine addict is using alcohol to blunt the side effects of his meth habit, his hyperactivity isn’t due to a lack of binge drinking.

Dubner and Levitt’s quest to deny the reality of climate change and promote radical geoengineering to block the sun as a “sensible” alternative to reducing greenhouse gases is, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “horseshit.” Their strategy is like counseling the meth addict to become a full-blown alcoholic instead of reducing his drug use.

Despite Levitt’s argument that “it’s harder to know” whether global warming is “man created,” in reality the scientific evidence is clear and has been for years, according to the scientific organizations of the world:

American Association for the Advancement of Science: The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. [10/9/06]

U.S. Global Change Research Program: Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. [June 2009]

American Physical Society: Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now. [11/18/07]

American Meteorological Society: Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond. [2/1/07]

American Geophysical Union: The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century. . . . Evidence from most oceans and all continents except Antarctica shows warming attributable to human activities. [December 2007]

American Quaternary Association: Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. [10/24/06]

The national science academies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa: It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change at the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. [May 2009]

Transcript:

DUBNER: We address topics in this book that are less trivial than the first book. We don’t write about sumo wrestlers we don’t write about baby names so much, even though it was fun. We’re writing about things like terrorism and like global warming and we try to bring to those topics a different way of looking at them, an economic approach. In other words, instead of looking at them on an emotional level or someone involved in those arenas might look at them — if you’re in the global warming industry you have interests to protect and you have an argument you want to make. And we try to look at it from the outside.

ROSE: And not everybody is thrilled at what you say about global warming.

LEVITT: Most of the people who aren’t thrilled about what we said about global warming aren’t talking about what we actually said. I mean what we said is not even very controversial. We’re not denying the earth has gotten warmer. It has gotten a lot warmer over the last one hundred years . . .

ROSE: And it’s man created.

LEVITT: I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. But that’s not our question. We say if the earth gets too hot or is too hot, what’s the best way to cool it down. And the conventional wisdom is to reduce carbon emissions drastically. That’s a reasonable solution, it could work, it has three problems. One, it’s incredibly expensive. I mean there’s a reason we produce and use a lot of fossil fuels, they’re cheap and they drive the economy. Trillions of dollars it will cost to switch the economy over. Number two, you need seven billion people to get together to coordinate if you want a solution to cut fossil fuels. Number three, even if we could do that, because carbon dioxide stays in the air so long, we’re looking at 50 years, 100 years before you start start to feel the full effects of it.

So, it seems like if you really think global warming is a terrible problem, you need a solution that’s faster, and that’s more certain, or easier to do. So, turns out geoengineering, extremely controversial but so sensible.

I mean, there are ideas out there that are cheap, they’re totally versible, totally reversible, which is incredibly important. You wouldn’t want to do anything that’s irreversible, because the science isn’t that certain. And they don’t require massive behavior change. We’re not saying we should go out tomorrow and build one of these machines say, to put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, but what we are saying is, “How can that not that be part of the debate?” We’re just trying to give geoengineering a seat at the table, but the interests that are out there don’t want . . .

ROSE: So you put sulfur dioxide in the air, through hoses. This is Nathan Myhrvold, isn’t it?

LEVITT: Absolutely. Nathan Myhrvold is, has . . . it’s an old idea. A Nobel prize-winning environmentalist put it out a while ago. Nathan has the engineering solution that allows us to quickly and reliably do that for something like 20 million, 50 million dollars. Now compare that to the trillions of dollars we’re talking about on the old solution. Now, now, why not at least have that kind of solution ready in case, as an insurance policy, in case some kind of global catastrophe involving the Greenland ice shelf or something happens and we need to cool the earth down quickly.

ROSE: Explain how it would work.

LEVITT: It’s pretty straightforward.

ROSE: You pour sulfur dioxide in the air and it puts a shield.

LEVITT: Exactly. It puts a shield. Really, the science is based on what Mother Nature has been doing for eons, which is when there are big volcanic eruptions, among the other things that are spewed out is sulfur dioxide. And it sprays it so high it gets into the stratosphere. The key is that getting the sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere where it forms into this haze which reflects something like one to two percent of the sunlight. And that’s enough to cool the earth. And all you need to do is just have a steady flow of it. And if you can figure out a way to get it up there, Nathan’s idea and his compatriots is to just essentially build a glorified garden hose. They put one at the north pole and south pole. It sounds like scientific fiction, but they have the engineering solution. It wouldn’t be that hard. And if you don’t like it, you just turn the spigot off . . .

ROSE: And what did Paul Krugman say about this?

DUBNER: I don’t think Paul Krugman thought of that. he went off a paper Marty Weitzman wrote and Paul Krugman thought he caught us in a mistake, and I hate to say it, but he’s wrong. And at some point, you know, there’s so much fervor about this topic, part of the problem is . . .

ROSE: It’s like theology.

DUBNER: Well, it’s interesting you say that, Charlie, because, you know, it’s one of the many things a very small portion of kind of climate activists have objected to, is that we said, there’s a sentence, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something along the lines of, “The efforts to stop global warming have the characteristics of a religion.” There really are these kind of dogmatic principles, there are believers, there are heretics and so on. And we’ve seen that.

You know, um, the interesting thing is geo-engineering is a pretty broad subject, actually. The garden hose to the sky is probably the most frightening to the average person. Any of us would think, “You want to intentionally pollute?” Even though it is replicating a volcano.

But there are other solutions within that portfolio, some of which are as green as you could possibly hope to be — which is essentially creating higher reflectivity oceanic clouds by creating more cloud condensation nuclei. So, clouds cool the earth. They do a great job. They’re nature’s way of cooling the earth. Over the oceans there often aren’t as many because there aren’t enough nuclei.

So, one of Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures’ plans is to create an incredibly low-friction boats. They don’t even have an engine. And they just go around kicking up sea spray, salt spray that wafts into the air and forms more densely reflective clouds. That too is geo-engineering.

So the idea is this. That would cost — the three of us could chip in and buy one of those boats. I don’t know what you’re worth, more than us but it wouldn’t be that hard to do. But the point is that, like Levitt said, to get a seat at the table for these kind of ideas as opposed to this one route which we’re barrelling down as carbon mitigation as the only route doesn’t seem to be — seems we should be entertaining other possibilities.

. . .

DUBNER: Can I give one more example of the law of unintended consequences? The efforts to clean up the air in general and get heavy particulate pollution out of the air. All the sulfur, all the acid rain from coal plants and so on, in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

It’s now thought — there are new studies, NASA, a bunch of scientists have been doing this — it’s now thought that removing the particles from the atmosphere is what’s led to the warming, in large part.

In other words, carbon dioxide may not be remotely as large a villain as many people fear, because what’s happened is that by being good environmental stewards and trying to clear up the air — we did clear up the air a lot, but all that junk in the air was blocking a degree of sun. And now with the removal of it, we’ve seen more warming. And so that will be a line of research we’ll be hearing of a lot more.

ROSE: The idea is you can take the junk back but you have to put something else back up there that will block the sun.

DUBNER: It’s a big may, it’s a big may — I mean look, Myhrvold, I think, describes it very well in the book. The idea of the garden hose to the sky and sulfur dioxide in the air and geoengineering. It’s like this. When you build a house you do everything you can to not have a fire in the house. You don’t give your kids matches, you don’t run around with a lighter and doing like this. But, if you have it, do you want a sprinkler system? Yeah. So the idea is: If the problem gets to be that bad, do you want to have something that could work beyond this kind of long-term, expensive, uncertain carbon mitigation idea?

Source: Center for American Progress Action Fund, from Federal Election Commission data compiled by the LittleSis project of the Public Accountability Initiative.

The top beneficiary of this outpouring of conservative cash is the Republican National Committee, which has received over ten times as much money from the Chamber’s board as the Democratic National Committee — $1,257,201 versus $102,950. Contributions went 4.5 to 1 for John McCain ($373,150) versus Barack Obama ($82,150).

Source: Center for American Progress Action Fund, from Federal Election Commission data compiled by the LittleSis project of the Public Accountability Initiative.

Of the board’s 116 members, 96 have made major political contributions. Sixty-eight directly contributed to the campaigns of George W. Bush or John McCain. In contrast, only 27 gave to the campaigns of Al Gore, John Kerry, or Barack Obama. Forty-seven board members, including Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue, have contributed more than 90 percent to Republicans, averaging $74,634 in GOP contributions. Only seven members have contributed more than 90 percent to Democrats, averaging $3,529 to Democrats.

The political giving is dominated by leading Republican billionaire George Argyros, the Bush pioneer who served a disastrous term as the U.S. ambassador to Spain. Argyros is also one of the top backers of Newt Gingrich’s right-wing American Solutions for Winning the Future. The following visualization of Chamber of Commerce board member contributions is a sea of red surrounding a few small islands of blue. The size of each box is proportional to amount of total contributions per person, with the shading indicating percentage of Republican versus Democratic contributions:

The Chamber’s Board: A Right-Wing Money Machine

Source: Center for American Progress Action Fund, from Federal Election Commission data compiled by the LittleSis project of the Public Accountability Initiative.

Cross-posted at ThinkProgress.

We urge you to ensure that emission allowances allocated to the electricity sector – and thus, electricity consumers — be fully based on emissions as the appropriate and equitable way to provide transition assistance in a greenhouse gas-regulated economy.

The signatories on the letter defending coal-heavy polluters are Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), Al Franken (D-MN), Roland Burris (D-IL), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Russell Feingold (D-WI), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Udall (D-CO), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Carl Levin (D-MI), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

Their demand is a basic violation of a core principle of environmental economics — that companies should pay based on their pollution. The transition-period formula in the House bill, Waxman-Markey, and the current Senate legislation, Kerry-Boxer, at least distributes the free permits based 50 percent on electricity production. This formula was negotiated with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and has received the endorsement of the Edison Electric Institute, the largest lobbying organization for the nation’s utilities. In contrast, President Barack Obama called for a full auction of pollution permits to avoid rewarding polluters at the taxpayers’ expense, instead dedicating the revenues to creating jobs, lowering taxes on the middle class, and building a clean energy economy.

The argument that the most “fair and effective,” “appropriate and equitable” way to help the constituents of their states is to increase subsidies to coal-powered utilities is frankly absurd.

Read the letter:

November 12, 2009

Dear Senators Reid, Boxer, Baucus and Kerry,

As the Senate formulates and debates energy and climate change legislation, it is clear that revamping our energy systems with alternative energy resources and technologies will be fundamental to our strategy for achieving energy security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A transition of this magnitude will take years to accomplish and will incorporate major changes to the way we produce and use energy. Both the House-passed “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (H.R. 2454) and the recently introduced “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act” (S. 1733) recognize the importance of helping individuals and firms by alleviating potential financial impacts as this transition takes place. This assistance, in the form of the allocation of greenhouse gas emission allowances, is an important tool for protecting consumers and businesses as we move to adopt new energy systems and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. To be fair and effective, any legislation must equitably allocate these allowances to individuals and across states and regions and economic sectors.

The House bill falls short of that equitable distribution goal with its formula for allocating allowances to local distribution companies based 50 percent on emissions and 50 percent on sales. Unfortunately, the Senate bill currently under consideration includes the same 50/50 allocation provision. Under the proposed 50/50 formula, utilities that are more coal dependent will need to purchase even more allowances than they would have if all allowances were allocated based on emissions, and those higher costs will be passed on to their customers. Meanwhile, many utilities with relatively lesser emissions will receive sufficient allowances to completely cover their initial requirements. Thus, their customers will experience no price increases resulting from the legislation.

We believe it is essential that we strive to formulate legislation that equitably distributes transition assistance across individuals, as well as states and regions and economic sectors. We urge you to ensure that emission allowances allocated to the electricity sector – and thus, electricity consumers — be fully based on emissions as the appropriate and equitable way to provide transition assistance in a greenhouse gas-regulated economy.

We thank you for your efforts to build consensus on the critical issue of energy and climate legislation. The change we recommend would contribute to a more balanced and equitable bill for the Senate’s consideration, and a better strategy for America.

Sincerely,

Senator Tom Harkin Senator Al Franken Senator Roland Burris Senator Byron Dorgan Senator Herb Kohl Senator Russell Feingold Senator Kent Conrad Senator Michael Bennet Senator Amy Klobuchar Senator Mark Udall Senator Robert Byrd Senator Cark Levin Senator Debbie Stabenow Senator Sherrod Brown

Tomorrow, Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-MT) Finance Committee will look at the effect of clean energy legislation on the “future of jobs.” Appearing before the committee are four industry or conservative lobbyists and one coal-industry union lobbyist, Abraham Breehey. The only economist to testify will be Margo Thorning, a lobbyist for the anti-tax American Council on Capital Formation. Also testifying is Carol Berrigan, a nuclear industry representative, Van Ton-Quinlivan of Pacific Gas & Electric, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Kenneth Green.

One could point out that Breehey’s union, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, supports the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act in large part because it provides so much support for the coal industry.

One could point out that Berrigan’s organization, the Nuclear Energy Institute, is not satisfied that clean energy legislation will spur nuclear energy through free-market competition, but is demanding massive subsidies and tax breaks as well.

One could point out that ACCF and AEI have received millions of dollars in funding from Exxon Mobil alone, or that Thorning refuses to reveal her methodology and Green has tried to buy climate scientists for $10,000 a pop.

Instead, let’s just note that tomorrow’s testimony will likely rehash the talking points that these witnesses have delivered time and again for the past ten years. Other than Ton-Quinlivan, who is appearing for the first time before Congress, the witnesses are regulars on the Hill, testifying a combined 20 times on climate and energy policy since 2002. Thorning has been the most frequent guest over the years, and this will be Green’s fifth time testifying since June.

Margo Thorning:

• 3/26/09 House Ways & Means
• 3/18/09 House Energy and Commerce
• 9/18/08 House Global Warming
• 11/8/07 Senate Environment and Public Works
• 7/24/07 Senate Environment and Public Works
• 7/11/07 House Foreign Affairs
• 4/5/06 Senate Commerce & Senate Judiciary
• 4/3/06 Senate Energy and Natural Resources
• 10/5/05 Senate EPW
• 6/5/03 Senate Environment and Public Works

Kenneth P. Green

• 10/28/09 Senate Environment and Public Works
• 10/22/09 House Global Warming
• 10/15/09 Senate Foreign Relations
• 6/9/09 Senate Environment and Public Works
• 9/25/07 Senate Environment and Public Works
• 3/13/02 Senate Governmental Affairs

Carol Berrigan:

• 11/6/07 Senate Energy and Natural Resources
• 9/27/07 Senate Environment and Public Works

Abraham Breehey

• 2/14/08 Senate Finance
• 2/2/05 Senate Environment and Public Works

If the Finance Committee is really trying to learn something new about whether reforming our pollution-based energy infrastructure would create new jobs, one would think they could have put a little more effort in witness selection.

We had on a guy on the show, Steve Levitt — Freakonomics — whose science was, according to actual people who know climate science, not good, but it seemed like the tone of the book was, “Why don’t we just think about these other things?” People came at him hard.

Watch it (Stewart mentions SuperFreakonomics at 4:20):

Levitt and Dubner have now admitted, begrudgingly, that they misportrayed climate scientist Ken Caldeira’s own views about his research. To be more precise, they have announced they will change the sentence that claimed Caldeira believes carbon dioxide “is not the right villain in this fight” to omit Caldeira’s name. Despite this one welcome change, the book continues to be a farrago of errors, personal attacks, and unfounded conclusions.

Stewart, however, continues to not understand why the book came under such withering criticism. In his interviews that touch upon global warming — with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, global warming denier Chris Horner, journalist Bob Woodruff — Stewart has consistently acted bemused, which is often a good interview technique. But it also seems that Stewart’s bafflement is genuine, failing to understand that billions of dollars have been spent by polluters and their political allies for decades to distort the clear need for decisive action. He does not seem to know that greenhouse gases are already reshaping the world we live in, destroying ecosystems and economies.

At least Stewart is just a comic. Our nation’s journalists have no such excuse.

The green economy is coming. We can either follow or lead. And those countries who follow will pay a price. Those nations who lead in creating the new green economy for the world will make money.

Watch it:

Graham’s words recall the testimony of former Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and White House official Van Jones, who told Congress in January, “We can build a green economy Dr. King would be proud of.” Van Jones, the founder of Green for All, left the White House after talk show host Glenn Beck targeted him as an “avowed communist and radical activist.” Beck has warned that efforts to build a green economy are “socialism,” “black nationalism,” and “fascism.”

Sen. Kerry announced that the three senators would work in a “dual track” to the committee process now underway to craft clean energy legislation in concert with the White House, which they hope to present directly to the Senate leadership. The senators conducted the press conference in between meetings with Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and White House climate advisor Carol Browner.

Graham also discussed how Americans of any party “really feel uncomfortable with the fact that our nation sends a billion dollars a day overseas to buy foreign oil from some countries who don’t like us very much,” saying that part of “this initiative is to create a vision for energy independence and marry it up with a responsible climate control carbon pollution controls and create a new economy.”

Graham emphasized that his vision is to “help this planet” that “is in peril, create millions of new jobs for Americans that need them, and to become energy independent to make us safer,” because he believes that “controlling carbon pollution is good business.” Although he hoped for participation from his fellow Republicans, he said, “If you believe carbon pollution is not a problem, then you wouldn’t want to work with me, because I do.”

Transcript:

GRAHAM: The reason I’ve gotten involved in this issue is I see kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity politically to solve two real problems that I think the country and the world faces. One, carbon pollution. I am no scientist, but I’ve traveled throughout the world with Sen. McCain and others and seen the effects of a warming planet. And I do believe all of the cars we have on the roads, and the trucks, and all the energy we use that produces carbon daily is not a good thing for the planet.

But if environmental policy is not good business policy, you’ll never get 60 votes. So my goal is to try to make sure that we fashion environmental policy that will create millions of new jobs for Americans who are desiring to have new jobs. Virginia and New Jersey are going to benefit from what we do. South Carolina, Connecticut, and Massachusetts will benefit.

The green economy is coming. We can either follow or lead. And those countries who follow will pay a price. Those nations who lead in creating the new green economy for the world will make money. The business community senses an opportunity they’ve not had before. That’s why they’re at least exploring the possibility of a new pathway forward.

I’ve been told by a lot of business leaders in South Carolina, “Senator Graham, once you price carbon in a reasonable way, this green economy that we’re hoping for really will begin to flourish.”

The other aspect of why I’m involved is energy independence. Remember “Drill here, drill now”? Where did that go? Four dollar a gallon gas is not in our face but it could be soon. I think most Americans — Republicans, independents or Democrats — really feel uncomfortable with the fact that our nation sends a billion dollars a day overseas to buy foreign oil from some countries who don’t like us very much. Part of this initiative is to create a vision for energy independence and marry it up with a responsible climate control carbon pollution controls and create a new economy.

Finally, our country doesn’t have a vision on carbon. We need one. And we need to lead the world rather than follow the world on carbon pollution. Our country doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to build a green economy and never will until we price carbon.

And our country doesn’t have a vision for energy independence. We need one. Our goal is to create that vision that not only will help this planet — that I think is in peril — but create millions of new jobs for Americans that need them, and to become energy independent to make us safer.

. . .

What I’ve got to do is convince people in South Carolina and our colleagues up here as a whole that environmental policy will be good business policy. And if Congress doesn’t act, the EPA will.

Every member of Congress, Republicans included, has to answer to themselves and their constituents. Is carbon pollution a problem? If it is, what are you going to do about it? Some Republicans want a carbon tax. In many ways, that is a fairer system but I don’t think there are the votes for it. If you believe carbon pollution is not a problem, then you wouldn’t want to work with me, because I do. Now, if you … a cap-and-trade bill has to be well-crafted not to put us at competitive disadvantage to China and India.

I am convinced with my colleagues that controlling carbon pollution is good business. If you do it right, people can make money and you’ll have a cleaner planet and the world will follow. So I hope my Republican colleagues will at least listen, come to the table as the Chamber has, see where we’re going, give us input and if at the end of the day, you can’t support it, that’s okay.

But last thought. Doing nothing has a consequence. The EPA will do something. Doing nothing has a consequence to our business opportunity in leading the green economy revolution that’s coming and controlling carbon emissions.

So I think most people are upset with the Congress because we’re not doing anything that matters. And the things that we do do we’re overdoing. So we’re trying to get that sweet spot of a bill that will be good for the environment, good for business and make us energy independent.

So my hope is that participation is seen as a positive, not a negative. If you can’t participate in solving a hard problem, why are you up here?

Notwithstanding any provision of this title or title III, no stationary source shall be required to apply for, or operate pursuant to, a permit under this title solely because the stationary source, including an agricultural source, emits less than 25,000 tons per year of any greenhouse gas or combination of greenhouse gases that are regulated solely because of the effect of those gases on climate change.

The 25,000 ton standard reflects the EPA’s plan for starting global warming regulation under a “tailoring rule” limited to the few thousand stationary sources of more than that amount of carbon dioxide a year — in large part coal-fired power plants. However, Boxer’s text is poorly written, as many greenhouse gases are thousands of times more powerful global warming pollutants than carbon dioxide.

The new text — like that of the House bill — completely forbids the regulation of greenhouse gases under the criteria pollutant, hazardous air pollutant, and international air pollution sections of the Clean Air Act.

Although several progressive and environmental organizations have made the preservation of existing Clean Air Act authority in the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act a key demand, Democratic members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works — which is now beginning to mark up the legislation — are split on this issue. Committee members Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) are signatories, with Chris Dodd (D-CT), of a dear colleague letter in favor of allowing greenhouse gas regulation as a pollutant circulated by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). However, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) had questioned the provision, and influential member Max Baucus (D-MT), the Finance Committee chair, strongly opposes EPA regulation.

Organizations that have called on the Senate to “save the Clean Air Act” include Friends of the Earth, 1Sky, and MoveOn, supported by youth and other grassroots activists.

Other changes to the original version of the legislation reflect industry-friendly demands from Democrats on the committee. They include: increasing free allowances to major oil refineries, putting the Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the agriculture offset program, and making owners of abandoned mountaintop removal sites (”private or public abandoned mine land”) eligible for “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Incentives.”

The chairman’s mark also adds some provisions which strengthen the bill: Rep. Doris Matsui’s (D-CA) tree-planting program language, incentives for rapid renewable energy deployment, and a program to reduce black carbon emissions from diesel.

Text in chairman’s mark of Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act restricting Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases:

(g) AMENDMENTS CLARIFYING REGULATION OF GREENHOUSE GASES UNDER CLEAN AIR ACT.—
(1) AIR QUALITY CRITERIA AND CONTROL TECHNIQUES.—Section 108(a) of the Clean Air Act
(42 U.S.C. 7408(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following:
(3) PROHIBITION ON LISTING OF GREENHOUSE GASES.—On and after the date of enactment of this paragraph, the Administrator shall not include on the list of pollutants under this subsection any greenhouse gas on the basis of any effect the greenhouse gas may have on climate change.’’.
(2) HAZARDOUS AIR POLLUTANTS.—Section 112 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7412) is amended by adding at the end the following:
(20) GREENHOUSE GAS LIMITATION.—No greenhouse gas may be added to the list of hazardous air pollutants under this section unless the greenhouse gas meets the criteria described in sub
Section (b) independent of the effects of the greenhouse gas on climate change.’’.
(3) INTERNATIONAL AIR POLLUTION.—Section 115(c) of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7415(c)) is amended—
(A) by striking (c) This section’’ and inserting the following:
(3) APPLICABILITY.—
(A) FOREIGN COUNTRIES.—This section’’; and
(B) by adding at the end the following:
(B) GREENHOUSE GASES.—This section does not apply to any greenhouse gas with respect to the effects of the greenhouse gas on climate change.’’.
(4) DEFINITION OF MAJOR EMITTING FACILITY.—Section 169(1) of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7479(1)) is amended—
(A) in the first sentence, by inserting
(other than any greenhouse gas), and 25,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent for any greenhouse gas or combination of greenhouse gases’’ after one hundred tons per year or more of any air pollutant,’’; and
(B) in the second sentence, by inserting
(other than any greenhouse gas), and 25,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent for any greenhouse gas or combination of greenhouse gases’’ after two hundred fifty tons per year or more of any air pollutant’’.
(5) PERMITS.—Title V of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7661 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following:
Sec. 508. EMISSIONS OF GREENHOUSE GASES. Notwithstanding any provision of this title or title III, no stationary source shall be required to apply for, or operate pursuant to, a permit under this title solely because the stationary source, including an agricultural source, emits less than 25,000 tons per year of any greenhouse gas or combination of greenhouse gases that are regulated solely because of the effect of those gases on climate change.’’.

I haven’t been able to sell that argument to my farmers and I don’t think they’re going to buy it from anybody else. I think at the end of the day, the people who turn the switch on at home are going to be disadvantaged. As you turn on the lights, the lights, the electricity is going to cost more. Store owners, the same thing. Manufacturers, the same thing. I don’t think that the farmers or the ranchers necessarily buy the argument that it’s all going to be offset. And I don’t know why we want to create a system that sustains Wall Street once again .

Watch it:

In reality, the legislation makes multi-billion-dollar investment in clean energy jobs (including Nebraska) and scales back the pollution that threatens American agriculture, all at a cost of a postage stamp a day.

Nelson’s “prairie populism” doesn’t extend to his opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “I don’t see creating a new agency is necessary,” he told Harwood, unless it is “scaled back or put in some other format.” When Harwood noted that Nelson is “with Wall Street on that,” Nelson offered the feeble reply, “Not for the same reason.”

Strangely, Nelson’s opposition to the president’s reform agenda precisely follows the interests of his top corporate donors. This year alone, Nelson has received $553,300 from agribusiness, $164,200 from oil and gas interests, and $140,199 from electric utilities. Nelson has even taken $31,500 from the virulently right-wing Koch Industries, the private pollution giant that has mobilized tea party opposition to climate and health care legislation. Berkshire Hathaway, whose subsidiary MidAmerican Energy is one of the nation’s largest coal-powered utilities, opposes climate legislation and has given Nelson $51,800. Coal-hauling Union Pacific is Nelson’s number-three contributor at $49,750.

When it comes to financial regulation, the story looks the same. Nelson has received $1,343,060 from Wall Street interests, from banks to insurers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In another remarkable coincidence, Nelson’s attacks on climate and financial reform are identical to those being offered by the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber’s head, Tom Donohue, sits on the board of Union Pacific, for which he has received approximately $5 million in compensation.

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?

Ice911 is an engineering approach to reduce the melting of the ice. It is a solution that can be rapidly implemented. It has the potential to slow down the melt, provide interim mammal habitat, and perhaps even rebuild the ice.

The Ice911 is in fact a project to develop a low-tech method to increase the Arctic Ocean’s albedo in order to stop the feedback loop that is causing Arctic ice to melt at catastrophic rates, using millions of small, white floats. Although filling the world’s oceans with yet more plastic trash isn’t the most desirable rapid-cooling strategy, it sure beats options like those promoted in SuperFreakonomics, which have possible side effects like destroying the ozone layer. Ice911 has an impressive advisory board, and is led by Dr. Leslie Field, a world-class technologist.

However, the name Ice911 recalls “ice-nine,” a substance from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic science-fiction novel, Cat’s Cradle, one of the great parables of the “unintended consequences” of finding the “cheap and simple fix” to complex, global problems. As summarized at Technovelgy, “A general had a problem: mud. Marines have slogged their way through it for generations. Is it possible to get rid of mud? Without having to carry anything heavy? Marines already have enough to carry. Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an original thinker, found the ‘outside-the-box’ answer: a single crystal of Ice-Nine would crystallize every bit of water it touched”:

“…suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle…?”
“The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.
“And all the muck around the puddle?”
“It would freeze?”
“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“You bet they would!” he cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”

The book ends with the world’s water turned to ice-nine, the book’s fictional author one of the last remaining survivors of the human race, writing down his story as he prepares for his death. The fictional Felix Hoenikker, a “father of the Atomic Bomb,” recalls Dr. Edward Teller , the Manhattan Project physicist who later championed the Star Wars satellite laser system and in 1998 promoted a “Sunscreen for Planet Earth” — “solving” global warming through the injection of particles into the stratosphere, reviving an idea first proposed in 1979 as a thought experiment by fellow nuclear physicist (and now aging climate skeptic) Freeman Dyson. Teller’s protegé, Lowell Feld, has continued to champion Teller’s ideas and worldview at Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures, now promoted on bookshelves everywhere in SuperFreakonomics.

Schwarzenegger’s press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted Tuesday it was simply a “weird coincidence.” He sent us veto messages the governor sent out in the past with linguistic lineups such as “soap” and “poet,” which he said were also unintended.

Ignoring the likelihood of the paragraphs breaking into the correct 4-3 lines necessary for “Fuck You” and the likelihood of the capitalization being inadvertently correct, the probability of that particular phrase is approximately one in a trillion.

This is considerably smaller than the likelihood of the vulgarity appearing if the distribution of first letters were even, which is 1 in 10 billion (26^-7 = 1.25e-10).

If word distribution were based on the frequency of first letters in a common word dictionary [3esl.txt], then the likelihood of randomly spelling out the particular phrase would be one in a trillion (1.19e-12).

However, that ignores the distribution of word frequency in speech — words beginning with “t” (e.g. “the”, “that”) appear much more often than any other. Calculating first-letter frequencies from a 30,000-word concordance of recent speeches by Schwarzenegger (removing instances of “Thank you”), we still find the likelihood of the phrase in question randomly appearing to be one in a trillion (8.8e-13), in line with our less well-designed estimate.

Now, the likelihood that some phrase would be spelled out? Ignoring letter distribution, there’s about a 0.3% chance any four letter string is a common English word, and a 3% chance any three letter string is a common English word. The specific likelihood of the words “soap” and “poet” appearing, for example, given the Schwarzenegger speeches, is one in 100,000 — much greater than the one in 10 million shot of “fuck” appearing.

As letter distribution would make the appearance of common words more likely (e.g. “teas”), the probability of some two-word combination appearing is on the order of two percent. The likelihood of it making any sense, of course, is smaller. A more accurate estimation is left to the reader.

How likely is one in a trillion? To give a sense of scale, one trillion is about 10 to 20 times the number of human beings who have ever lived on the planet. For a person to speak a trillion words, you’d have to live for 400,000 years. About 20 trillion words are spoken every day on the planet. You would need to search through about the number of books in seven Libraries of Congress to find a book that randomly had Schwarzenegger’s phrase going down one of its pages.

Still, that means there’s a chance.

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.

Watch it:

Levitt and Dubner’s promotion of geoengineering as a “cheap and simple” alternative to carbon mitigation is in direct opposition to the views of Dr. Ken Caldeira, Paul Crutzen, and the world’s scientific community. Although Caldeira objected to the chapter and has since repeatedly said he was misrepresented in multiple ways, the SuperFreakonomics authors have continued their deception, joining the billion-dollar effort by fossil-fuel companies and the radical right to thwart action on climate change.

Transcript:

We have seen this movie before, and it was the exercise by the tobacco industry to try to hoodwink and cover up the science of the devastating toxicity that they were involved in for decades. And it actually worked for decades. And we have seen a similar effort to hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment, and ultimately to our own health, of carbon dioxide and other climate change gases. They have used every trick in the book including the ones we will investigate today But I just want to note that they are now failing. The tobacco industry got its comeuppance, if you will, and justice triumphed ultimately.

And that’s what’s going on right now in the climate change debate. You see in the U.S. Senate, members of the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan basis finally coming out to move based on the science, which is now becoming dominant in the discussion.

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.

The record shows otherwise.

ACCCE Called Waxman-Markey A ‘High-Risk Proposition.’ On June 18, a week before the House of Representatives voted on the legislation, ACCCE ran a full-page ad in Politico with the headline, “If a climate bill goes too far, too fast it could keep us from getting where we need to go.” The ad described the greenhouse gas pollution reductions in H.R. 2454 as a “high risk proposition.”

ACCCE Criticized Waxman-Markey For ‘Skyrocketing Energy Costs.’ On June 18, ACCCE published on its website the claim that Waxman-Markey could “have consumers paying higher costs for decades.” “In its current form, H.R. 2454 does not do enough to guarantee that consumers are protected against skyrocketing energy costs.”

ACCCE Said It ‘Cannot Support’ Waxman-Markey. Following the passage of the legislation in a 217-213 House vote on June 26, ACCCE issued a statement in opposition to the legislation: “ACCCE cannot support this bill, as it is written, because the legislation still does not adequately protect consumers and the domestic economy or ensure that the American people can continue to enjoy the benefits of affordable, reliable electricity, which has been so important to our nation.”