The Super Freakonomics Dust-Up: Who Cares?

When Joe Romm over at the Indispensable Climate Progress (I capitalize indispensable because the blog should just always be called that) gets going, he really gets going. We’re now up to Part 5 of his take-down of a single chapter of the new book SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4, in case you’re interested), and a number of other scientists, bloggers (or blogger-scientists, in RealClimate’s case) have chimed in as well. Frankly, as interested as I am in this sort of thing, I’m getting bored.

The argument swirls around whether or not Levitt and Dubner committed various climate communications-related crimes, most notably the repetition of the long-debunked 1970s global cooling myth and the apparent support for a geo-engineering fix (injecting monumental amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, like a new 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption every year) that scientists generally pan as completely ridiculous.

Fine, this is stupid. I get it. Levitt and Dubner have started to strike back a bit by denying the deniers labels that have been thrown their way, and on some level I’m sure they’re just happy to get the publicity (the book is currently #15 on Amazon’s best sellers list). The reason I’m bored by the whole thing, though, is that this book doesn’t make a difference. I know that Romm’s goal (or at least one of them) is to improve the flow of climate change-related information to the public, but whether or not a random guy browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble suddenly thinks that geo-engineering would work is completely irrelevant. Scientists and governments, for the most part, understand the issue, and no one is seriously threatening to drop a volcano’s worth of SO2 into the stratosphere every year from now until eternity. I am confident that President Obama will not read this book and suddenly change the negotiating agenda for Copenhagen.

So let it go, Joe. You’re doing yeoman’s work over there, but I prefer to read your explanations of potential sea level rise and ppm goals, or your commentary on the Chamber of Commerce’s Luddite ways and the subsequent exodus (even by oil and gas companies!). And you know what? Whenever George Will sounds off again, feel free. I don’t get bored by those.

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