Sahil Kapur '09 has written a purely inflammatory blog post for Campus Progress attacking Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics fame for their chapter on global warming in their newest book, Super Freakonomics.
Along the way, he's compared them to creationists and said that they are climate change deniers. (Both Levitt and Dubner believe in global warming, they just disagree with some of the utterly costly attempts to "solve" it.)
I met him when he was fawning over a photo of Obama in The New York Times for a good ten minutes. (He worked at Keck; I work at Salvatori.)
For someone who says very critical and oftentimes downright nasty things about religion, Sahil is sure one to talk.
But maybe, then, again, Sahil's projecting?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
And If You Want to Read What A Nut Thinks About Super Freakonomics...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Way to not sink down to the level of your critics and name call, really admirable.
i love how everything he writes sends your panties up in a knot charles.. it's amusing
My panties are well ironed, thank you.
But no, I think Sahil shows himself to be a fool. I just delight in reminding people.
Though you said so in stronger language than I would have typically used, I agree that Sahil's article is somewhat over-the-top. Having just finished the global warming chapter of the book myself, I can understand better where both Levitt and Dubner, and their critics, are coming from.
Some of the critics' charges are overblown -- Levitt and Dubner explicitly say they acknowledge the phenomenon of global warming, and that humans probably have played some role in it, although perhaps not as much as we think. But nowhere does Sahil compare them to creationists; the only thing I see that you could get that from was to his comparison of the consensus among scientists on the global warming to their consensus on the theory of evolution. (I wouldn't say it's a 1:1 correlation, but it's undoubtedly close.)
But it seems that Levitt and Dubner have indeed left themselves open to some of the criticisms that have been put forward. Their line about Ken Caldeira's "research tell[ing] him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight" is especially curious, given that his own professional website says the exact opposite. Additionally, Levitt and Dubner's assertion that climate change models don't take into account the effects of water vapor seems to be incorrect, as well -- though scientists acknowledge their current models of water vapor effects on warming may not be sufficiently sophisticated, they are certainly making progress.
Overall, I think they would have attracted less and much more muted criticism if they hadn't come off in the chapter as advocating so strongly for geoengineering and disparaging the current climate-change zeitgeist in the manner they did. I agree with what Levitt said in response to my question at the Ath: there's no reason we shouldn't be funding R&D into promising geoengineering concepts. But ultimately I think Levitt and Dubner gloss over its potential drawbacks. After all, they first criticize the current models used for predicting climate change, but then appear to implicitly rely on those same models (or their own) to assert that any SO2 that we emit as part of a geoengineering won't take long to dissipate if it has ill effects! (And in fact, Caldeira himself has some reservations about geoengineering schemes, which you can see here from the abstracts of papers he's authored.) Levitt was much more measured in responding to my question at the Ath than he was in the book. I wish that had carried over. (But then, that probably wouldn't have sold the book as well.)
Why would you delight in it? Is your goal to humiliate other people?
Post a Comment