According to Levitt and Dubner, the story’s message is a simple one: if, at any particular moment, things look bleak, it’s because people are seeing them the wrong way. “When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists,” they write. “But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted.
First, the globalwarming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.”
Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined."
Levitt and Dubner, reports the New Yorker, have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” One scheme that Levitt and Dubner endorse features a fleet of fibreglass boats equipped with machines that would increase the cloud cover over the oceans. Another calls for constructing a vast network of tubes for sucking cold water from the depths of the sea to the surface. Far and away their favorite plan involves mimicking volcanoes.
To which New Yorker journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert responds:
To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.
If you want to read more, go here: The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, Nov. 15, 2009.
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