“Moderator: “I was trying to get you to talk about the controversy a little bit…. …You know, Steve Levitt has been known to make mistakes, …this has been shown in your academic papers, and I think people have been talking about the content of your books as well. Does it mean we can’t trust anything you guys say… in Superfreakonomics?

(Levitt coyly pretends not to understand that this question is about the climate chapter in his latest book) “abortion?…crime?…have I made other mistakes? I don’t remember making other mis….”

Moderator mentions “police hiring”.

Steve Levitt: “Oh yeah, that was actually the worst mistake – that was worse than – that actually WAS a mistake…. As a graduate student I did actually make a mistake….” (after a long explanation he sums up by saying “I don’t think I’m uncareful relative to other economists…”)

[drops the coy tone] “With reference to the climate…. Let’s be completely clear. There have been allegations in the blogosphere by environmentalists that we have completely missed the boat on climate science – we got the science wrong, the scientists we are writing about have said that we misquoted them, that we misrepresented them… Anyways, it is simply not true. Every fact that we have in the chapter on climate science, virtually, is cited in the end notes, there is almost no one at this point, I think, who is claiming we have got the facts wrong. People don’t like the tone of the chapter, people don’t like our conclusions, but I do not think it is fair to say we have got the science wrong. There are some incredibly minor points. One sentence, that one of the scientists Ken Caldera didn’t like, which we’re changing in the revised version to add the word “may” (crowd laughs) – at his request. We gave him a copy of the chapter and said “we’ll change anything you want”, and he asked us to take out his name, so instead of saying “Caldera’s research”, [we're now going to say] “research suggests that carbon is not the right villain”.”

Stephen Dubner: “it should also be said that… the one phrase that the one scientist who has been largely written about as having his work misrepresented in the chapter, he was a participant in these long interviews that we did with a group of scientists and, beyond that, we did what is not always done with book writing, which is ask him and all the other scientists to actually read the entire chapter and offer any and all comments, which we incorporated. So you know it became this game of very strange case of going down a rabbit hole once some climate bloggers decided to attack on the grounds that he had been misrepresented, and it turns out that his version was really quite different – that he claimed responsibility for having read passages not well enough not thoroughly enough and so I… just for the record I agree entirely with Levitt. We’re waiting, and if there is anything factual or even in the spirit of what we write, that would prove to be wrong or wrong minded I think we’d gladly step up and address it and change it. That said, we should back up and… state what the argument is. I have a feeling that these conversations often travel in silos, they are very noisy within the silo and they often don’t radiate out. The point we were trying to make in the chapter was this: [sums up his argument that their main point in the book was to say that geoengineering solutions such as those they put forward in their book are worth considering]….When you get into a topic like global warming, about which there is huge emotion, and also huge political and financial and you know, almost a kind of activist core group where people feel very very strongly about it, it shouldn’t be so surprising that there’s been a lot of reaction, what’s been surprising to us is the level of reaction”.

Steve Levitt: “What’s interesting when you read the climate science, and then look at the conclusions people come to, is that really, the scientific, uh, [by the way] we’re taking the science as given, just as the climate scientists… and what climate scientists often then do is embed that science with a sense of moralism about what we owe to future generations. And that’s really a dose of climate science with a dose of ethics and morality that lead to a conclusion. What we do is take the climate science and we put together the economics which is to try to answer what we think is the easier question, which is, if you had to cool the earth down in a real hurry what would be the cheapest way to do it. And that’s not the question that the climate scientists are talking about. That’s not what the public debate has been about. And yet it really is something that you’d want to know. Because if we come to the point because of the incredibly difficult problem of trying to get global cooperation, I mean we’re going to need the Chinese, and the Indians to all get together and say we’re going to radically reduce carbon dioxide – the fact that nothing has happened since Kyoto in a decade suggests that this is a hard problem, and that even if we stop now we could have trouble, and there’s tremendous cost. Left out of the climate debate is the fact that we’re talking about, to reduce carbon the estimates are we’re talking about 1 to 2% of GDP every year from now and on into the future. That’s a lot of money. And if there’s cheaper ways to do it. Not even to solve the problem. Because the geoengineering solutions we’re talking about are not fixes. They’re kind of like bandaids. They are ways to bide your time so that as technology progresses, until we can pull carbon out of the air more effectively, we end up keeping the Earth cool in the meantime until we can come up with some better solutions. … if you take away the emotion from it, its hard to argue with investments in this kind of knowledge. Whether or not we ever use them… the R&D costs are so low in relation to the potential benefits. Its really strange to me how one can be demonized for proposing these kinds of solutions when it seems to an economist – and almost every economist who has looked at the problem comes to the same exact solution, that we should be investing heavily in these kinds of solutions…”

Yup. I agree. The “AGW is a religion” is part and parcel of the denier dogma – and Levitt using the meme is performing what is called a ‘dog-whistle’ in political circles. Levitt is letting everyone know that while he can sort of discuss the possibility of AGW on the one hand, he will do whatever he can to destroy any effort to deal with it on the other.

That’s why Pielke, Jr, isn’t commenting on the book. He falls into the same category. Admit AGW exists on the one hand; do whatever he can to derail efforts to address it on the other.

I could easily worship the circulation of blood in the body – anything can be the object of a religion. The question is whether the object itself was constructed out of religious premises. This shouldn’t be difficult. I’ve actually heard that Levitt went to college, so he must vaguely remember the course about science.

In today’s ruling, Mr. Justice Michael Burton decided that “A belief in man-made climate change, and the alledged resulting moral imperative, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.
Under those regulations it is unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their religious or philosophical beliefs.
The written ruling, which looked at whether philosophy could be underpinned by a scientific belief…ultimately concluded that a belief in climate change, while a political view about science, can also be a philosophical one.
Guardian 3 Nov, from above link

The legal discussion revolves around philosophical beliefs, not religious belefs.

Of course I’m wrong if the philosophical list consists of just Atheists, Humanists, and Unitarians. And I acknowledge the contradicting leanings of the reporters: “akin to religion” and “religious discrimination”, and the choice of, “Why should it only be religions which are protected?”

Perhaps Burton means “following the evidence” is just faith, which is pretty ridiculous – as if every individual needs to be an expert scientist in a field, else general “beliefs” in gravity, medical science, etc. are each a religion.

I think the best thing for science-based followers of the debate would be for the ruling to be knocked down in appeal.

Also, the UK case, handled by Justice Burton, states:

“A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”

yet this ruling appears to violate:

“It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.”

at least for:

“A belief in man-made climate change” (but not so much the “moral imperatives”)

Present state of information available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

So you’d have a much better argument that global warming deniers hold their beliefs religiously, since their fervent belief goes against the present state of information available. One could say the same about Levitt and his total faith in geoengineering.