I’ve mostly stayed away from the slowly-erupting mess over the publication of Superfreakonomics and its “global cooling” chapter, largely because I thought it would quickly blow over and turn into just another pointless annoyance. Obviously I committed a pretty substantial Bushian misunderestimation with that conclusion.
As is often the case with a brouhaha involving those seeking to take a, shall we say, “pointedly contrarian” view of climate change, the trail starts with Joe Romm and his carpet bombing of the Superfreakonomics authors, which has now swelled to five installments (with more to come, I would guess):
- Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” – and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.
- Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: Who else have Nathan Myhrvold and the Groupthinkers at Intellectual Ventures duped and confused? Would you believe Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
- Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 3: It takes a village to debunk their anti-scientific nonsense, but why did they stop Amazon from allowing text searches?
- Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 4: They get the economics dead wrong, too, and their response to critics is full of misrepresentations, just like their book
- Part 5: Error-riddled Superfreakonomics claims Caldeira’s “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Caldeira updates his website to read “Carbon dioxide is the right villain.”
Recently, the RealClimate site has jumped into the fray with, Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering and why they are wrong:
Many commentators have already pointed out dozens of misquotes, misrepresentations and mistakes in the ‘Global Cooling’ chapter of the new book SuperFreakonomics by Ste[ph|v]ens Levitt and Dubner (see Joe Romm (parts I, II, III, IV, Stoat, Deltoid, UCS and Paul Krugman for details. Michael Tobis has a good piece on the difference between adaptation and geo-engineering). Unfortunately, Amazon has now turned off the ‘search inside’ function for this book, but you can read the relevant chapter for yourself here (via Brad DeLong). However, instead of simply listing errors already found by others, I’ll focus on why this chapter was possibly written in the first place. (For some background on geo-engineering, read our previous pieces: Climate Change methadone? and Geo-engineering in vogue, Also the Atlantic Monthly “Re-Engineering the Earth” article had a lot of quotes from our own Raypierre).
Paul Krugman probably has the main issue right:
…it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous.
and
Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms – but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counter-intuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.
This is another highly recommended RC post. (See the post itself for the version of their text with live links to the sources mentioned above. Also, please note that the link to the chapter does seem to work, but it appears to be one of those rare ones that reports a damaged file when trying load the document into FireFox, but you can right-click download it just fine.)
An excellent page, one well worth book marking as we wait for our popcorn to emerge from the microwave, is FAIL: Superfreakonomics, from the blog Left as an Exercise. This is an already long, but still growing, list of responses to and analyses of the Superfreakonomics chapter.
One piece of commentary worth highlighting is from Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics. You might surmise from the title that Ezra is not exactly impressed with the Superfreaks’ stats skills.
Levitt and Dubner (a.k.a the Superfreaks) seem to be quite unamused by all this attention, and they are protesting quite loudly that they’re being misquoted, misunderstood, cast as evil climate change deniers when they’re no such thing, and so on. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re being properly or improperly beaten and dragged through the blogosphere’s public square.
In giving my take on the situation, let me try something a little different here, something that the Superfreaks would probably appreciate.
Let us assume that you’re going to write a book about our area of expertise, which will make it a non-fiction title. Further, it’s not our first book, but a follow-on to a highly successful book you and your co-author published recently. Being a rational person who sees a lot of work going into this project, you want to maximize your income from the book, so obviously the optimal path is to be sure the book is squeaky clean in its facts and analysis, and then present it in an accessible and reader-friendly manner that doesn’t alienate people. (Why turn away potential customers with an abrasive style, after all?)
Sounds pretty conventional, bordering on being quaint, doesn’t it? Another approach would be to take the contrarian tack Krugman alludes to in the text I quoted above, but in not nearly as benign a way: Don’t merely fall into that trap, but willingly swan dive into it. Push hard for ways to mine the “everything you know is wrong!” notion, and write the book in a pointed and sarcastic way, more akin to how a blogger might do it. In looking for ways to be contrarian, don’t be overly fussy about statistical interpretation or whether you’re reaching absurd conclusions based on bad research and/or data. The gut reaction from the reader is more important than facts. If you stir the pot a little, that’s just great! It means more attention for you and your co-author, in the form of oodles of hits on your blog, lots of media interviews and speaking engagements in which you can cast yourself as the Poor, Innocent Victim who never said what everyone thinks you said and instantly become the coddled darlings of the contrarian crowd, and best of all, you’ll sell more books! After all, that was your number one priority–maximizing your income–wasn’t it?
Of course, such “perfect plans” sometimes fizzle or even backfire. Maybe you do the writing equivalent of climbing up on a table, screaming like a howler monkey, and throwing food around the dinner party, and no one notices. You get a couple of smirks and raised eyebrows, and the polite discussion meanders on with nary a mention of your antics. OK, it’s not a big deal, since you’re writing a follow-on to a very successful book, so you’ll still sell a few barge loads of copies. And there’s always the third book in the series where you can revert to a more civilized approach.
Another possibility is that people definitely notice, and at least one chapter in the book ignites a firestorm. You get pummeled endlessly by the bloggers and the print and broadcast media (except for those contrarians who have hugged you to their ideological bosom), you get to play the Poor Victim Card, and sales go up, up, UP! Success! (And the irony of using the very technique you talk about in the book as a way to write the book itself and make more money, with almost no one noticing your little parlor trick, is simply a bonus.) You’ll be getting a call from your agent with an offer for the next book in the series any minute now, unless it’s one of the morning news shows wanting you for an interview on their couch.
There’s also a third possibility: Things start out as in the above example–strong reaction, your plucky defense, gobs of attention–but then their opinion sours. Not only do people object to your dinner party antics, but they point out that in throwing things you’re actually hurting people, and all that screaming is inducing people to act in ways that harm themselves and others. In other words, your cherished and carefully crafted reputation for being a fiercely independent thinker and teller of nasty truths quickly transmogrifies into an image of a callous, greedy, narcissist who was and is willing to do damn near anything to push more copies of a book and build your personal brand.
Am I saying this is what the Superfreaks did, that it was all a calculated, money-driven exercise? Of course not; that would be incredibly irresponsible of me, as I have no way of knowing what’s going on in their heads and what kind of discussions they had between themselves and with their publisher and confidants. And I doubt there’s any way for those of us who aren’t in that very small inner circle to ever know the truth.
But ask yourself which possibility you think would be worse, that they wrote this chapter with good intentions but sloppy execution and fell into this particular mess accidentally, or they did it intentionally and are compounding the lie about important public policy matters, all for money? Honestly, I don’t know how I would answer that one, but I find either possibility quite depressing.
