[p2p-research] An open letter to Steve Levitt

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: An open letter to Steve Levitt
via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza on 10/30/09

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical
Sciences, The University of Chicago, in Real Climate:

Dear Mr. Levitt,

The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require
creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to
contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of
how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter
human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book,
Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought
to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and
benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the
Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped
someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in
disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor
because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from
media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for
the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the
William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to
boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think
clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is
wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has
been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it
would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily
that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The
problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed
to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying)
in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to
have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means
think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the
more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar
cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.

As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was
pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells,
because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them,
but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as
heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s
brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for
themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it
comes out. It’s not hard.

More here. [Thanks to Carl Zimmer.]



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