I have to admit, I was already very impressed with the smattering of mainstream media pieces I’ve seen that treated the superfreaks, a.k.a. Levitt and Dubner, the authors of the (apparently) spectacularly bad Superfreakonimics, like the truth abusers they are.
The best example I had seen until the other day was Eric Pooley’s Bloomburg piece, Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change. If you haven’t read it, please do.
But now someone in the very much maligned (and deservedly so) media has so thoroughly blown up the superfreaks that I think it could well be the long-desired turning point in how the media perceives climate change deniers in general.
The capital-J Journalist in question is Seth Borenstein, and his article is Statisticians reject global cooling. Please go read it all. The thumbnail summary is that Borenstein asked experts to assess the temperature record, you know, the one that the deniers say endlessly is showing the end of global warming, without knowing what the data was. In other words, he conducted a “blind test” with experts and asked them about trends in the data. The conclusion, to no one’s surprise, was that there is no cooling trend.
Borenstein then brings our favorite book into the discussion:
A line in the book says: “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.”
That led to a sharp rebuke from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which said the book mischaracterizes climate science with “distorted statistics.”
Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, said he does not believe there is a cooling trend. He said the line was just an attempt to note the irony of a cool couple of years at a time of intense discussion of global warming. Levitt said he did not do any statistical analysis of temperatures, but “eyeballed” the numbers and noticed 2005 was hotter than the last couple of years. Levitt said the “cooling” reference in the book title refers more to ideas about trying to cool the Earth artificially.
This whiplash inducing passage and the entire article leave me with three conclusions:
- We need more Journalism like this article. We need news organizations to act as if (gasp!) science and expertise still matter, and remember that there are cases where we can say X is true, and anyone who says X is not true is simply wrong and does not deserve to be given equal weight as the “other side” of a discussion that, in fact, has only one side.
- I have now changed my view of the superfreaks. Until now, I had tried very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t want to ascribe to evil intent that which could be explained by stupidity, as the saying goes. (In my decades of technical writing and computer programming and consulting, I’ve seen some truly breathtaking examples of innocent stupidity, a few in my own work, so I’m always hesitant to say that every attention-getting error was an intentional grab for publicity and more money.) But things like the quote from Levitt above, and the bizarre, quantity-free comparison of CO2 and methane emissions Dubner makes in Simple Solutions to Fix Hurricanes, Global Warming, Malaria, have changed my mind. I’m now convinced that they really do know better, but were intentionally creating as much controversy as possible simply to sell more books and themselves.
- Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic yet again, but it feels to me like we are finally, at long last, have approached the tipping point in modern society where we treat the climate change deniers (and science deniers in general) the way we treat the “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” camp, the “President Obama isn’t a US citizen” crew, the “we never landed man on the moon” cabal, etc. In other words, we talk about them only to debunk them, and most of the time we simply ignore them.
Oh, and one more thing: Thank you, Seth Borenstein.
