Freakonomics got super freaky. And super wrong.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are to blame for the global financial crisis.

See, back in 2005, they wrote “Freakonomics,” a wildly successful book brimming with interesting stories about why incentives matter and how actions have unintended consequences. Indeed, incentives do matter, and actions (or publications) do have unintended consequences: Their book made economists around the world more inclined to come up with cute little analyses of the business of being a drug dealer or the impact of a first name on a child’s success. And that distracted them, so they didn’t notice the giant housing and credit bubbles that in hindsight were plain to see. A global collapse ensued.

That’s all nonsense, of course. The forces that led to the current economic troubles were far too big for any one book, or even one current of economic thought, to have caused them. The argument that the Freakonomics guys are to blame for the crisis is provocative and clever and sounds vaguely plausible. It may even contain a kernel of truth. But it fundamentally defies any clear-headed look at reality.

In other words, it’s just like many of the anecdotes that fill “Superfreakonomics,” the sequel to the original bestseller.

This is the Washington Post book review by Neil Irwin.  I think this review just edges out Elizabeth Kolbert’s, but it’s close.  In particular, Irwin covers the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve for the paper, not climate, so he hits some other parts of the book, like “Patriotic Prostitutes” and drunk walking:

Take the chapter that covers prostitution, for example. It spins a nice yarn about Allie, a clever, vivacious woman who went into the world’s oldest profession in Chicago for fully rational — and lucrative — reasons. Good for her, but this doesn’t have much of anything to do with the fundamental reality of most prostitution, in which coercion, violence and desperate addiction to drugs frequently play larger roles than does cost-benefit analysis.

In another section, the authors theorize that it is more dangerous for a tipsy person to walk any given distance than it is for that person to drive. That would be interesting, if true, and certainly useful information for anyone who has ever stumbled out of a downtown Washington bar a few blocks from home.

The problem is that Levitt and Dubner don’t actually have the foggiest idea whether it’s safer to drive drunk than walk drunk, as they claim. As my colleague Ezra Klein has pointed out, they don’t have data on how many miles are walked under the influence, and so they just assume that people walk drunk in the same proportion that people drive drunk. In calculating the rate of deaths from walking drunk, then, they have the numerator (the number of drunk pedestrians killed each year) but not the denominator (the number of miles walked drunk).

And then he does take on the “Global Cooling” chapter:

Both of those problems are mild compared with the ones in the penultimate chapter, in which the authors bring their oh-so-clever approach to the climate debate. The standard strategy for preventing potentially catastrophic global warming, one advanced by an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists and environmental economists, is to put in place policies to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide humankind emits. That’s apparently too conventional for Levitt and Dubner, who spend the vast majority of their chapter (with time taken out for potshots at Al Gore) examining the work of scientist/entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvhold’s crew, a group that is exploring the idea of pumping sulfur into the upper atmosphere and other neat tricks that just may be cheaper, easier ways to combat global warming.

It would be great if one of those schemes turned out to work. Fantastic, even. But Levitt and Dubner seem to simply presume that because one of them might work, Gore et al. are foolish to push to reduce emissions. It is like a family declining to save for college because their 10-year-old Little Leaguer with a decent arm may end up getting a full baseball scholarship.

Snap!

“Superfreakonomics” doesn’t really have a broader argument. The authors acknowledge in the opening pages that their book has no unifying theme, beyond the banality that “people respond to incentives.”So instead of offering up a bunch of quirky stories of questionable reliability to make an argument that feels coherent, they offer up contrarianism for its own sake.

Just what you’d expect from two guys who caused the financial crisis.

While the authors of Superfreakonomics, which is riddled with basic scientific errors, have started to issue some retractions, they continue to embrace self-contradictory denial of the basic science.

In mid-October, economist Steven Levitt wrote a blog post titled, “The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated,” which asserted:

Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve.  Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem.

Then in another red-herring-filled post from last month, “The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz,” Levitt asserted that “we believe” it is “TRUE” that “The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years.”  And he writes of that statement — that “fact” — (and 5 others), “It is our impression that none of the six scientific statements above is at all controversial among climate scientists.”

Duh.  In fact, the most recent survey of the scientific literature signed off on by every major government in the world, including the Bush Administration, concluded “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

Unfortunately for the Superfreaks, their book is once again searchable on Amazon, so everyone can confirm it contains the following sentence — the very first one I criticize them for in my original debunking when I broke the story of their error-riddled book:

Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That is a staggeringly anti-scientific statement.  It should be retracted.  It should certainly not be repeated, as Levitt is now doing on his blog!

Note that they didn’t say something like “belief in climate solutions” is a religion.”  And they didn’t even say, “the theory of human-caused global warming is a religion” — which, in any case, they presumably don’t believe given that they say they believe rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon.

No, to Levitt and Dubner, “global warming” itself is a religion.  Except, of course, it isn’t.  Again, actual observations show that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

The only reason I am bringing this up again is that Levitt has doubled down on this piece of anti-scientific nonsense.  As a eagle-eyed reader pointed out, Levitt blogged last week:

Is Climate-Change Belief a Religion?

By Steven D. Levitt

Actually, yes, at least if you live in the United Kingdom.

So what is it, Levitt?

You can’t simultaneously claim you understand that warming of the climate system is an uncontroversial statement of scientific fact — and then keep repeating the claim that global warming and belief in climate change is a religion.

As University of Chicago Geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has charged, Levitt is guilty of “academic malpractice in your book.”

And for the record, climate change belief is not a religion even in the UK.  It remains a scientific understanding there and everywhere else.

The particular case and the ruling are convoluted — no doubt in part because the judge was the same one who issued that confused ruling on Al Gore’s movie (see here).  I would welcome any experts on British law posting here — and would certainly recommend reading the Guardian piece and an excellent dissection on Salon by Andrew Leonard.  As the Guardian notes:

In today’s ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton decided that: “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.”

… The written ruling, which looked at whether philosophy could be underpinned by a scientific belief, quoted from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and ultimately concluded that a belief in climate change, while a political view about science, can also be a philosophical one.

At least in Britain, science can apparently drive moral imperatives that are protected by the law.  As the winner of the lawsuit put it:

I’m delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision … It’s a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that’s the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world’s religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it’s the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.

Levitt, of course, is beyond such nuanced understanding.

He made an anti-scientific statement in the book, and notwithstanding certain half-hearted walk backs, he clearly stands by the statement.

Is calling global warming a religion the same thing as denying global warming science?  You be the judge.

UPDATE:  Noting that the Superfreaks discuss New York’s turn-of-the-century horse manure problem, what she calls, “the Parable of Horseshit,” the New Yorker’s eloquent climate reporter ends her joint review of their book and Al Gore’s “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis”:

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.

Yesterday, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) rebuked the authors of SuperFreakonomics for participating in a “continuing effort to deceive the American public” on the science of climate change. During an investigative hearing on forged letters sent by the coal industry to oppose climate action, Inslee condemned the industry’s effort to “hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment” of global warming pollution. Inslee then turned to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, criticizing them for “absolute deception” in their work on global warming:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

Levitt and Dubner’s promotion of geoengineering as a “cheap and simple” alternative to carbon mitigation is in direct opposition to the views of Dr. Ken Caldeira, Paul Crutzen, and the world’s scientific community. Although Caldeira objected to the chapter and has since repeatedly said he was misrepresented in multiple ways, the SuperFreakonomics authors have continued their deception, joining the billion-dollar effort by fossil-fuel companies and the radical right to thwart action on climate change.

Transcript:

We have seen this movie before, and it was the exercise by the tobacco industry to try to hoodwink and cover up the science of the devastating toxicity that they were involved in for decades. And it actually worked for decades. And we have seen a similar effort to hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment, and ultimately to our own health, of carbon dioxide and other climate change gases. They have used every trick in the book including the ones we will investigate today But I just want to note that they are now failing. The tobacco industry got its comeuppance, if you will, and justice triumphed ultimately.

And that’s what’s going on right now in the climate change debate. You see in the U.S. Senate, members of the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan basis finally coming out to move based on the science, which is now becoming dominant in the discussion.

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public.

I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

Update 1: The House Committee on Science and Technology will be holding a hearing on geoengineering next Thursday, with witnesses including Dr. Ken Caldeira.

Update 2:  Inslee, beware! Steven Levitt has licked ocean acidification, too:

Of course, ocean acidification is an important issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it’s actually, that’s actually, we know exactly how to un-acidify the oceans: it’s to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that.

Listen here:

Update 3:  At Deltoid, Tim Lambert notes when Dubner claimed “we routinely address the concerns that critics accuse us of ignoring (the problem of ocean acidification, e.g.),” he was lying.

Related Posts:

He and coauthor Stephen Dubner also continued their national media disinformation tour on public radio’s Diane Rehm Show.  I couldn’t stomach listening to their efforts to either walk back or obfuscate key errors and misrepresentations in their book error-riddled book.  Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has a stronger digestive system than I do, so he listened to the show and I’ll repost his response.

Levitt and Dubner dismissed the widespread criticism of their book by Nobel Prize-winning economists and climate scientists as the “work of an activist,” evidently referring to physicist and former Department of Energy official Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Levitt and Dubner even tried to laugh off the on-air criticism of Dr. Peter Frumhoff, a global change ecologist who is the director of Science and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The authors represent their book as merely a quizzical look at interesting issues, without “a moral or policy perspective“:

Just in case you’re happening upon this conversation in the middle and haven’t grasped the kind of perspective that we’re coming from — we don’t write about prostitution, or terrorism, or global warming or any of these things, really, from a moral or policy perspective. We just try to lay out what’s going on and from that let people proceed how they want to think about it or how they want to draw conclusions. So this is not meant to be an endorsement or a condemnation of any of these things. We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.

[JR:  In short, readers can safely ignore all of their conclusions.]

Listen here:

This depiction, like most of the SuperFreaks’ defense of their work, bears little resemblance to the actual text. The authors discuss global warming explicitly through a “policy perspective”:

It is this specter of catastrophe, no matter how remote, that has propelled global warming to the forefront of public policy. . . . So how should we place a value on this relatively small chance of worldwide catastrophe? . . . One good reason for waiting is that we might have options in the future to avert the problem that cost far less than today’s options.

The authors condemn a broad array existing policy efforts: to limit carbon dioxide emissions (”not the right villain”), to establish carbon pricing (”all we can say is good luck”), expand renewable energy (”cute”), limit deforestation (trees are an “environmental scourge”), clean up transportation (”not that big of a sector”), or reduce coal use (”economic suicide”).

They also discuss global warming explicitly through a “moral perspective,” condemning “the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion,” with a “high priest,” “patron saint,” and “doomsayers” responsible for a “drumbeat of doom.” The authors quote Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, who accuses advocates of policies other than geo-engineering of being “global-warming activists” who want to “do a set of things that could have enormous impact — and we think probably negative impact — on human life.”

On the other hand, the SuperFreaks provide a strong endorsement for pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere forever as a “cheap and simple solution” that is “practically free” with a “proof of harmlessness.” Its biggest problem, they claim, is that it is “too simple and too cheap.” They claim climate scientist Ken Caldeira has endorsed this policy “solution,” but policymakers only listen to “people like Al Gore,” who think “it’s nuts.” Somehow Levitt and Dubner fail to mention that Caldeira himself has actually said the SuperFreaks’ policy perspective is ridiculous:

As a long-term strategy, it’s nuts.

Bizarrely, Levitt and Dubner never once mention the one policy area that is universally recognized as being “cheap and simple” by economists and scientists alike — boring energy efficiency. Guess they were too busy chatting with call girls and mosquito-laser billionaires.

… let’s be clear that, first, for the most part, the allocation of allowances affects neither the environmental performance of the cap-and-trade system nor its aggregate social cost….

Third, we should be honest that the legislation, for all its flaws, is by no means the “massive corporate give-away” that it has been labeled.  On the contrary, more than 80% of the value of allowances accrue to consumers and public purposes, and less than 20% accrue to covered, private industry.  This split is roughly consistent with the recommendations of independent economic research.

The above quote is from a May analysis of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill by Harvard University’s Robert Stavins — who is certainly not anyone’s idea of a progressive economist (see here and here), although he is obviously one of the country’s leading economic experts on cap-and-trade.

Some commenters here and elsewhere have described the allocation distribution in the climate bill as a big giveaway to polluters.  The most credible progressive experts I know on energy economics dispute that description (see “Preventing windfalls for polluters but preserving prices — Waxman-Markey gets it right“).

Today, Stavins posted “Confusion in the Senate Regarding Allowance Allocation,” which notes:

According to an October 22nd  story in Environment & Energy Daily (“Climate:  GOP Fence Sitters Voice Concerns Over Allocations” by Darren Samuelson), several key swing-vote Senate Republicans — including Senator Lisa Murkowski, ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee — are voicing skepticism about the Senate’s Boxer-Kerry climate bill’s cap-and-trade system because of the free allocation of some of the allowances to various recipients in the private (and public) sector.

There may be sound reasons for concern about the developing Senate bill, but the so-called “free allocation” should not be one of them.  Indeed, this debate is unfortunately repeating the confusion which was prevalent in the press and the blogosphere about the allowance allocation in the Waxman-Markey legislation in the House of Representatives (H.R. 2454).

Rather than being a “massive corporate give-away” of 80% of the allowances to private industry — as it was frequently characterized — the H.R. 2454 allowance allocation would result in precisely the opposite, namely, about 80% of the value of allowances accruing to consumers, small business, and public purposes, and some 20% accruing to covered, private industry (a split which is roughly consistent with the recommendations from independent economic research).

And directly to Senator Murkowski’s and others’ concern, the nature of the free allocation of allowances does not — with some relatively minor exceptions — affect either the environmental performance or the overall social cost of the system.

The deal-making that took place in the House and will take place in the Senate for shares of the allowances for various purposes is a good example of the useful, important, and fundamentally benign mechanism through which a cap-and-trade system provides the means for a political constituency of support and action to be assembled (without reducing the policy’s effectiveness or driving up its cost).

I have explained all of this carefully in a previous post, and so rather than repeat it here, I offer this link to my post from May 27th on “The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade:  A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey.”

Unlike Stavins, I think it’s worth excerpting most of (rather than just linking to) what he wrote back then:

Despite all the hand-wringing in the press and the blogosphere about a political “give-away” of allowances for the cap-and-trade system in the Waxman-Markey bill voted out of committee last week, the politics of cap-and-trade systems are truly quite wonderful, which is why these systems have been used, and used successfully.The Waxman-Markey allocation of allowances has its problems, which I will get to, but before noting those problems it is exceptionally important to keep in mind what is probably the key attribute of cap-and-trade systems:  the allocation of allowances — whether the allowances are auctioned or given out freely, and how they are freely allocated — has no impact on the equilibrium distribution of allowances (after trading), and therefore no impact on the allocation of emissions (or emissions abatement), the total magnitude of emissions, or the aggregate social costs.  (Well, there are some relatively minor, but significant caveats – those “problems” I mentioned — about which more below.)  By the way, this independence of a cap-and-trade system’s performance from the initial allowance allocation was established as far back as 1972 by David Montgomery in a path-breaking article in the Journal of Economic Theory (based upon his 1971 Harvard economics Ph.D. dissertation). It has been validated with empirical evidence repeatedly over the years.

Generally speaking, the choice between auctioning and freely allocating allowances does not influence firms’ production and emission reduction decisions.  Firms face the same emissions cost regardless of the allocation method.  When using an allowance, whether it was received for free or purchased, a firm loses the opportunity to sell that allowance, and thereby recognizes this “opportunity cost” in deciding whether to use the allowance.  Consequently, the allocation choice will not influence a cap’s overall costs.

Manifest political pressures lead to different initial allocations of allowances, which affect distribution, but not environmental effectiveness, and not cost-effectiveness.  This means that ordinary political pressures need not get in the way of developing and implementing a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic policy.  Contrast this with what would happen when political pressures are brought to bear on a carbon tax proposal, for example.  Here the result will most likely be exemptions of sectors and firms, which reduces environmental effectiveness and drives up costs (as some low-cost emission reduction opportunities are left off the table).  Furthermore, the hypothetical carbon tax example is the norm, not the exception.  Across the board, political pressures often reduce the effectiveness and increase the cost of well-intentioned public policies.  Cap-and-trade provides natural protection from this.  Distributional battles over the allowance allocation in a cap-and-trade system do not raise the overall cost of the program nor affect its environmental impacts.

In fact, the political process of states, districts, sectors, firms, and interest groups fighting for their share of the pie (free allowance allocations) serves as the mechanism whereby a political constituency in support of the system is developed, but without detrimental effects to the system’s environmental or economic performance.  That’s the good news, and it should never be forgotten.

But, depending upon the specific allocation mechanisms employed, there are several ways that the choice to freely distribute allowances can affect a system’s cost.  Here’s where the “caveats” and “problems” come in.

First, auction revenue may be used in ways that reduce the costs of the existing tax system or fund other socially beneficial policies.  Free allocations to the private sector forego such opportunities.  Below I will estimate the actual share of allowance value that accrues to the private sector.

Second, some proposals to freely allocate allowances to electric utilities may affect electricity prices, and thereby affect the extent to which reduced electricity demand contributes to limiting emissions cost-effectively.  Waxman-Markey allocates allowances to local distribution companies, which are subject to cost-of-service regulation even in regions with restructured wholesale electricity markets.  So, electricity prices would likely be affected by these allocations under existing state regulatory regimes.  The Waxman-Markey legislation seeks to address this problem by specifying that the economic value of the allowances given to electricity and natural gas local distribution companies should be passed on to consumers through lump-sum rebates, not through a reduction in electricity rates, thereby compensating consumers for increases in electricity prices, but without reducing incentives for energy conservation.

Third, and of most concern in the context of the Waxman-Markey legislation, “output-based updating allocations” provide perverse incentives and drive up costs of achieving a cap.  This merits some explanation.  If allowances are freely allocated, the allocation should be on the basis of some historical measures, such as output or emissions in a (previous) base year, not on the basis of measures which firms can affect, such as output or emissions in the current year.  Updating allocations, which involve periodically adjusting allocations over time to reflect changes in firms’ operations, contrast with this.

An output-based updating allocation ties the quantity of allowances that a firm receives to its output (production).  Such an allocation is essentially a production subsidy.  This distorts firms’ pricing and production decisions in ways that can introduce unintended consequences and may significantly increase the cost of meeting an emissions target.  Updating therefore has the potential to create perverse, undesirable incentives.

In Waxman-Markey, updating allocations are used for specific sectors with high CO₂ emissions intensity and unusual sensitivity to international competition, in an effort to preserve international competitiveness and reduce emissions leakage.  It’s an open question whether this approach is superior to an import allowance requirement, whereby imports of a small set of specific commodities must carry with them CO₂ allowances.  The problem with import allowance requirements is that they can damage international trade relations.  The only real solution to the competitiveness issue is to bring non-participating countries within an international climate regime in meaningful ways.  (On this, please see the work of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.)

Also, output-based allocations are used in Waxman-Markey for merchant coal generators, thereby discouraging reductions in coal-fired electricity generation, another significant and costly distortion.

Now, let’s go back to the hand-wringing in the press and blogosphere about the so-called massive political “give-away” of allowances.  Perhaps unintentionally, there has been some misleading press coverage, suggesting that up to 75% or 80% of the allowances are given away to private industry as a windfall over the life of the program, 2012-2050 (in contrast with the 100% auction originally favored by President Obama).

Given the nature of the allowance allocation in the Waxman-Markey legislation, the best way to assess its implications is not as “free allocation” versus “auction,” but rather in terms of who is the ultimate beneficiary of each element of the allocation and auction, that is, how the value of the allowances is allocated.  On closer inspection, it turns out that many of the elements of the apparently free allocation accrue to consumers and public purposes, not private industry.

First of all, let’s looks at the elements which will accrue to consumers and public purposes.  Next to each allocation element is the respective share of allowances over the period 2012-2050 (measured as share of the cap, after the removal – sale — of allowances to private industry from a “strategic reserve,” which functions as a cost-containment measure.):

a.  Electricity and natural gas local distribution companies, 22.2%

b.  Home heating oil/propane, 0.9%

c.  Protection for low- and moderate-income households, 15.0%

d.  Worker assistance and job training, 0.8%

e.  States for renewable energy, efficiency, and building codes, 5.8%

f.   Clean energy innovation centers, 1.0%

g.  International deforestation, clean technology, and adaptation, 8.7%

h.  Domestic adaptation, 5.0%

The following elements will accrue to private industry, again with average (2012-2050) shares of allowances:

i.   Merchant coal generators, 3.0%

j.   Energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, 8.0%

k.  Carbon-capture and storage incentives, 4.1%

l.   Clean vehicle technology standards, 1.0%

m. Oil refiners, 1.0%

The split over the entire period from 2012 to 2050 is 59.4% for consumers and public purposes, and 17.1% for private industry.  This 17% is drastically different from the suggestions that 70%, 80%, or more of the allowances will be given freely to private industry in a “massive corporate give-away.”

All categories – (a) through (m), above – sum to 76.5% of the total quantity of allowances over the period 2012-2050.  The unallocated allowances — 23.5% over 2012 to 2050 — are scheduled in Waxman-Markey to be used almost entirely for consumer rebates, with the share of available allowances for this purpose rising from approximately 10% in 2025 to more than 50% by 2050.  Thus, the totals become 82.9% for consumers and public purposes versus 17.1% for private industry, or approximately 80% versus 20% — the opposite of the “80% free allowance corporate give-away” featured in many press and blogosphere accounts.  Moreover, because some of the allocations to private industry are – for better or for worse – conditional on recipients undertaking specific costly investments, such as investments in carbon capture and storage, part of the 17.1% free allocation to private industry should not be viewed as a windfall.

Speaking of the conditional allocations, I should also note that some observers (who are skeptical about government programs) may reasonably question some of the dedicated public purposes of the allowance distribution, but such questioning is equivalent to questioning dedicated uses of auction revenues.  The fundamental reality remains:  the appropriate characterization of the Waxman-Markey allocation is that more than 80% of the value of allowances go to consumers and public purposes, and less than 20% to private industry.

Finally, it should be noted that this 80-20 split is roughly consistent with empirical economic analyses of the share that would be required – on average — to fully compensate (but no more) private industry for equity losses due to the policy’s implementation.  In a series of analyses that considered the share of allowances that would be required in perpetuity for full compensation, Bovenberg and Goulder (2003) found that 13 percent would be sufficient for compensation of the fossil fuel extraction sectors, and Smith, Ross, and Montgomery (2002) found that 21 percent would be needed to compensate primary energy producers and electricity generators.

In my work for the Hamilton Project in 2007, I recommended beginning with a 50-50 auction-free-allocation split, moving to 100% auction over 25 years, because that time-path of numerical division between the share of allowances that is freely allocated to regulated firms and the share that is auctioned is equivalent (in terms of present discounted value) to perpetual allocations of 15 percent, 19 percent, and 22 percent, at real interest rates of 3, 4, and 5 percent, respectively.  My recommended allocation was designed to be consistent with the principal of targeting free allocations to burdened sectors in proportion to their relative burdens, while being politically pragmatic with more generous allocations in the early years of the program.

So, the Waxman-Markey 80/20 allowance split turns out to be consistent  — on average, i.e. economy-wide — with independent economic analysis of the share that would be required to fully compensate (but no more) the private sector for equity losses due to the imposition of the cap, and consistent with my Hamilton Project recommendation of a 50/50 split phased out to 100% auction over 25 years.

Going forward, many observers and participants in the policy process may continue to question the wisdom of some elements of the Waxman-Markey allowance allocation.  There’s nothing wrong with that.

But let’s be clear that, first, for the most part, the allocation of allowances affects neither the environmental performance of the cap-and-trade system nor its aggregate social cost.

Second, questioning should continue about the output-based allocation elements, because of the perverse incentives they put in place.

Third, we should be honest that the legislation, for all its flaws, is by no means the “massive corporate give-away” that it has been labeled.  On the contrary, more than 80% of the value of allowances accrue to consumers and public purposes, and less than 20% accrue to covered, private industry.  This split is roughly consistent with the recommendations of independent economic research.

Fourth and finally, it should not be forgotten that the much-lamented deal-making that took place in the House committee last week for shares of the allowances for various purposes was a good example of the useful, important, and fundamentally benign mechanism through which a cap-and-trade system provides the means for a political constituency of support and action to be assembled (without reducing the policy’s effectiveness or driving up its cost).

Although there has surely been some insightful press coverage and intelligent public debate (including in the blogosphere) about the pros and cons of cap-and-trade, the Waxman-Markey legislation, and many of its design elements, it is remarkable (and unfortunate) how misleading so much of the coverage has been of the issues and the numbers surrounding the proposed allowance allocation.

Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change.

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had objected to the “wrong villain” line but Dubner and Levitt didn’t correct it; instead, they added the “incredibly foolish” quote, a half step in the right direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.

Levitt and Dubner do say that the book “overstates” Caldeira’s position. That’s a weasel word: The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes. Caldeira told me the book contains “many errors” in addition to the “major error” of misstating his scientific opinion on carbon dioxide’s role….

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

That’s award-winning journalist Eric Pooley in his terrific Bloomberg story today, “Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change.” Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time’s chief political correspondent, and Time’s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting.  His story vindicates my original reporting in 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.

For me, the “villain” quote was not actually the main issue.  The main issue for me was the misrepresentation of Caldeira’s core belief that you have to cut emissions dramatically for geoengineering to even have a chance of making any sense.

That misrepresented view is the one that actually represents a real threat to humanity — should enough people come to believe it.  That’s why I am still writing about this — that, and the fact that the Superfreaks are going to be spreading their confused misrepresentations for weeks to come.  Their amazing press schedule is here — they’re getting a full hour on 20/20 on Friday, plus Good Morning America (twice!) and The Daily Show.

Who can really be opposed to geo-engineering research — as long as humanity is NOT foolish enough to come to believe that pursuing geo-engineering research is a substitute for aggressively reducing emissions starting now?  Secondarily, it would be a mistake to believe with any certainty that such research will in fact ever lead to a viable and practical “cooling” strategy.  But, of course, calling for “research” into geo-engineering as Caldeira does would hardly form the basis of a particularly provocative chapter in a contrarian book seeking publicity and best-sellerhood.

When I first saw the PDF of the Superfreakonomics chapter, I knew that it had utterly misrepresented Caldeira’s view.  How did I know that?  First, I can read.

In September, Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post had a story about Bjorn Lomborg who had proposed the exact same geoengineering-only approach, which noted:

Several scientists questioned whether focusing on geoengineered solutions at the expense of major carbon reductions would adequately address the effects of climate change. Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering expert, said such a strategy “misses the point.”

“Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions,” he said. “If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it’s pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly.”

Pretty clear, no?

Second, in an email interview, I sent Caldeira an email titled, “Can you elaborate on Washington Post quote.”  The full contents of that email were a reprinting of the quote followed by “Can you explain this for my readers?  Have you or someone else written about this?”

I reprinted his full reply here on September 5 — Exclusive: Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” Here is an excerpt (the ellipsis is his):

Nobody has written about this that I know of, but ….

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

So that’s how I knew when I was sent the Superfreakonomics chapter on October 9th (by someone familiar with my reporting on Caldeira and geoengineering) that it had misrepresented his views utterly.  And that’s why I sent him this email (sorry for the repetition here, but this is for completeness’ sake):

Ken

You need to read this and see how your words have been taken out of context and give me a reply (by Sunday, if possible)….

Lines about you like (page 184) “Yet his research tells him carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight” seriously abuse your reputation and your extensive publications and warnings about the threat of ocean acidification….

I’d like to do a major reply.  I have attached the entire chapter for you to read (and you can confirm it is genuine by going to Amazon and searching for your name).

I’d like a quote like, “The authors of Superfreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work.” plus whatever else you want to say.

I assume you stand by the Post quote:

“Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions,” he said. “If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it’s pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly.”

and your email to me, including “dystopic world out of a science fiction story” that I can requote.

http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 09/ 05/ caldeira-delayer-lomborg-copenhagen-climate-consensus-geoengineering/

Was it wrong for me to ask him for a quote like that?  Again, from my perspective I was in an extended interview with him on this precise subject, so I knew exactly where he stood.

I respect Pooley a great deal, and I asked him for his answer to that question, which I reprint at the end.  But first, I’m going to reprint his entire story because it’s just that good — and the context is important:

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are so good at tweaking conventional wisdom that their first book, “Freakonomics,” sold 4 million copies. So when Dubner, an old friend, told me their new book would take on climate change, I was rooting for a breakthrough idea.

No such luck. In “SuperFreakonomics,” their brave new climate thinking turns out to be the same pile of misinformation the skeptic crowd has been peddling for years.

“Obviously, provocation is not last on the list of things we’re trying to do,” Dubner told me the other day. This time, the urge to provoke has driven him and Levitt off the rails and into a contrarian ditch.

Their breezy take on global warming unleashed a barrage of highly detailed criticism from economists and climate experts, including a scientist who is misrepresented in the book.

Dubner wonders why everyone is so angry. In part, it’s because the book’s blithe remedies — “We could end this debate and be done with it, and move on to problems that are harder to solve,” Levitt told the U.K. Guardian newspaper — are an insult to the thousands of scientists who have devoted their careers to this crisis.

One of the injured parties is Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University who is quoted (accurately) as saying that “we are being incredibly foolish emitting carbon dioxide.” Then Dubner and Levitt add this astonishing claim: “His research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.”

Provocative, Untrue

That’s provocative, but alas, it isn’t true. Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change.

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had objected to the “wrong villain” line but Dubner and Levitt didn’t correct it; instead, they added the “incredibly foolish” quote, a half step in the right direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.

Levitt and Dubner do say that the book “overstates” Caldeira’s position. That’s a weasel word: The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes. Caldeira told me the book contains “many errors” in addition to the “major error” of misstating his scientific opinion on carbon dioxide’s role.

Why does this matter? Because there’s a titanic battle going on over whether and how to reduce carbon emissions, and this soon-to-be bestseller tries to convince people that we don’t need to do so. Dubner and Levitt trumpet their “wrong villain” line in their table of contents and promotional material. On National Public Radio the other day, Levitt said, “The real problem isn’t that there’s too much carbon in the air.”

Multiple Villains

“SuperFreakonomics” never identifies the “right villain,” so I called Dubner and asked. “I don’t think anybody knows for sure,” he told me. Then he acknowledged that the chapter’s most newsworthy claim “could have been better phrased, as ‘carbon dioxide is not the only villain.’ ”

Note to self:  Wow!

That’s a huge admission. No climate scientist believes carbon dioxide is the only villain: methane, nitrous oxide and other gases need to be reduced too. But that basic truth wouldn’t have drawn attention. It wouldn’t have given Levitt a bold contrarian line for NPR.

Dubner and Levitt acknowledge that the planet has warmed but pretend that cutting emissions is a hopelessly old-school response. “It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere,” they write. “We don’t want to stop.” They ignore the fact that U.S. emissions have dropped 9 percent since 2007 — not just because of the recession but also thanks to energy efficiency and cleaner fuels.

Chance of Catastrophe

They exaggerate the cost of climate action and underestimate the likelihood of runaway global warming, pretending that the “relatively small chance of worldwide catastrophe” isn’t worth getting bothered about.

They dismiss global warming as a “religion” and rehash the so-called “global cooling” scare of the 1970s, a favorite skeptic myth. (A handful of scientists warned of a coming ice age, a false alarm in no way comparable to today’s scientific consensus on warming.)

They trumpet the “little-discussed fact” that the average global temperature has decreased in recent years. This is accurate according to one set of global data — the other shows an increase — but scientists say it proves nothing. Imagine the Dow climbing to 14,000, with a wobble to 13,950. That’s what global temperatures have done. Even with small fluctuations, this decade is by every measure the hottest in recorded history. The second hottest is the 1990s. The third hottest is the 1980s. Get the picture? Levitt and Dubner don’t.

Shooting Sulfur Dioxide

Having downplayed the problem, they try to solve it with a set of silver-bullet technologies known as geoengineering. One would shoot millions of tons of sulfur dioxide 18 miles into the air to artificially cool the planet. This could work; it also could have dire unintended consequences.

Caldeira, who is researching the idea, argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

(Eric Pooley, a former managing editor of Fortune magazine who is writing a book about the politics of global warming, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

The bottom line is that the story I broke was dead on.

And the Superfreaks still don’t get that the primary climatologist they spoke to completely disagrees with their primary thesis, which they continue to attribute to him.  Consider this October 18 Times online excerpt (whose subhead, actually claims “This time they claim that CO2 may be good”!), which ends:

It is one thing for climate heavyweights such as Crutzen and Caldeira to endorse such a solution. But they are mere scientists. The real heavyweights in this fight are people like Gore.And what does he think of geoengineering?

“In a word,” Gore says, “I think it’s nuts.”

You may be interested to know that Gore spokesperson Kalee Kreider told me they didn’t interview Gore for the book nor was he given a chance to review the chapter prior to publication.

The only remaining question for me is — Was it wrong for me to ask Caldeira for a quote like that?  My parents were award-winning journalists, and I certainly criticize journalists all the time.  So I put it to Pooley, and here is his full reply:

I don’t think journalists should rough out quotes in advance for their sources. Some folks do it; I never have. I think your case is a little different, not because you’re a ‘blogger’ and not a ‘journalist’ (those distinctions are fading fast!) but because you’re an expert who was already having a conversation with Caldeira on this subject and could see that Dubner and Levitt had misrepresented his views.

That said, I think everyone’s rule needs to be, don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Times.  If you had emailed Caldeira and said, “It seems clear to me that they utterly misrepresented your work; if you agree and are willing to say so, I’d like to quote you on it,” then no one could say boo.

Fair enough.  I wasn’t acting exactly as a journalist nor was I just acting as someone who was coming to this story cold.  I knew they had misrepresented Caldeira.  But Pooley’s phrasing is obviously what I should have written in retrospect — even with my dual role as an expert and a blogger.

I am very glad that I did go back and explicitly ask Caldeira if I could use the quote he did give me.  I think that is good journalism, although as I say only about half of the reporters I deal with do that.  Had Dubner done that, he could have avoided some of this, but then he wouldn’t have had the catchphrase he wanted for the book and the Table of Contents and the publicity.

The second bottom line:  This was an extremely special case whose circumstances I doubt will ever be repeated again in my life.  Given the circumstances, I don’t think I did anything wrong.  But in the future I will follow Pooley’s sound advice.

Comments welcome, if you’re still reading!

I wish I didn’t have to waste valuable blogging time writing this post to set the record straight.  If, like most people, you understand that Dubner and Leavitt — and Roger Pielke, Jr and Marc Morano — regularly make misstatements and/or misrepresent what others say and that the latter two regularly smear people based on those misrepresentations, you might skip this post.

On the other hand, Dubner and Leavitt still don’t understand what they got wrong — both in the entire chapter and in how they mis-portray the views of the primary climatologist they rely on.  So this post will be useful to set that record straight.  Also, anyone who wants to know how I do things may also find this interesting.  As you’ll see, I have accurately represented what Caldeira believes, and the Superfreaks have not.

The verdict on the book by leading economists is in.  As Nobelist Krugman writes today:

Legalistic quibbling about who said what in an email isn’t going to help Dubner and Levitt here: in this crucial chapter, there’s an average of one statement per page that’s either flatly untrue or deeply misleading.

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong writes today:

Thus I have a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize.

He then goes through the chapter, offering them suggested page by page edits.

Thus, when I broke the story last Monday, I was accurate in my assessment:  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.

I have mostly explained what happened in Part 5, but since Dubner has spun out a variety of falsehoods with the help of Pielke and Morano, let me tell the story chronologically.  I will note first, however, that Dubner just makes crap up in his attack on me.  Dubner another one of the Superfreaks typical un-fact-checked and false assertions yesterday, “The text was never searchable on Amazon.”

Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate replied directly to Dubner on his NYT website:

With all due respect, the text at Amazon was indeed searchable at the time Romm posted his first post. It is not now.

Ouch.  Gavin’s debunking is here, with links to debunkings by other physical scientists.

Here is Brad DeLong’s entire piece yesterday, “All Right. One More. I Gotta Correct the Record…“:

Steven Dubner writes:

Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com: Much of the outcry was made by people who had read Romm but not our book — which isn’t surprising, since the book isn’t out until October 20. As the noise grew, Romm added on the charge that “the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book” – that is, to read the actual text online. Smells like a conspiracy theory, no?

But nobody stopped anything. The text was never searchable on Amazon for the simple reason that the book wasn’t yet published, which is standard procedure. I don’t know where Romm got this fact – or if perhaps it was just too good a rumor to not be true…

(1) Dubner’s “nobody stopped anything” is simply wrong. Romm posted a .pdf of Freakonomics chapter 5. Somebody–Dubner and Levitt’s publisher–then did require Romm to take it down. That takedown is in sharp contrast to the behavior of some other publishers these days, who are eager to offer sample chapters online.

(2) Moreover, Romm says that as of last week he was able to use Amazon’s “search inside the book” function on Superfreakonomics, and that somebody turned it off. I believe him:

DeLong posted the above screenshot of this cached web-page from last Tuesday, when the book was searchable online.

I myself searched the book repeatedly to check the quotes in the draft I had been sent.  I have before never seen someone stop the search feature of a book on Amazon. Perhaps they were scared that people would see that my debunking was dead on — and that the chapter was in fact much, much worse than I had time to show in the first post.

So it’s time for Dubner to retract and apologize his statement.

UPDATE:  DeLong has now been Pielke’d after DeLong posted an email from someone pointing out that Pielke (Jr) is “dishonest and wrong.”  You just have to read this email exchange where DeLong questions Pielke’s sanity.

THE CHRONOLOGY:

On October 9, I was sent the photocopied “global cooling” chapter by someone who just couldn’t believe all of the errors and misrepresentations in it, including misrepresentations of the work of Ken Caldeira.  I know Ken and have the greatest respect for him, so I wanted to get his attention and wrote him a strong email titled, “URGENT: The Superfreakonomics folks make you look like Bjorn  Lomborg or worse.”

I explained I wanted to strongly debunk them — yes, I use strong language in private emails and yes, Caldeira has already apologized to me for sharing those e-mails with the Superfreaks, naively thinking they would stay private.  Let me excerpt it at length:

Ken

You need to read this and see how your words have been taken out of context and give me a reply (by Sunday, if possible)….

Lines about you like (page 184) “Yet his research tells him carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight” seriously abuse your reputation and your extensive publications and warnings about the threat of ocean acidification….

I’d like to do a major reply.  I have attached the entire chapter for you to read (and you can confirm it is genuine by going to Amazon and searching for your name).

I’d like a quote like, “The authors of Superfreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work.” plus whatever else you want to say.

I assume you stand by the Post quote:

“Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions,” he said. “If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it’s pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly.”

and your email to me, including “dystopic world out of a science fiction story” that I can requote.

http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 09/ 05/ caldeira-delayer-lomborg-copenhagen-climate-consensus-geoengineering/

Other than some inopportune words, kind of basic stuff.

Yes, I did ask him to put in his own words a quote stating that the Superfreaks had misrepresented his views — because I knew very well that they had based on my previous emails with him (and my reading of his work and having heard him talk).  It is exceedingly common in regular journalism to ask people for a quote that makes a very specific point — I’ve been asked many times by reporters to do similar things.  And he gave me that quote:

So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.

And then after he emailed me that I quote, I took the extra step of explicitly asking him if I could use it (see below), so contrary to disinformers, no quote was planted.

I probably should have put that quote in the first post, instead of merely excerpting in the headline.  Lesson learned on that.  Back to the chronology.

Caldeira emailed me back:

I stand by my statements made earlier.

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero….

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoengineering — because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.

In the subsequent emails to me, three things became clear:

1. Caldeira disagreed with the “villain” line and had made that known.
2. Caldeira thought the book had “many” statements that were “misleading.”
3. The authors misrepresented him as someone who believed in their geoengineering only “solution” — as opposed to “research into geoengineering” and as opposed to understanding, as he does, that you need massive mitigation before the “volcano” strategy would make any sense.

As to point 3, on October 9, Caldeira sent me an email containing this point quoting a line from the book and responding to it:

This is a key point.  The Superfreaks continue suggest that the leading “climate heavyweights” they talked to support their geo-engineering-only solution.  Caldeira has said before and stands by his statement to me that geo-engineering without the kind of aggressive mitigation the Superfreaks diss is “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” And, as he made clear here, he just supports research into geo-engineering.

Caldeira did NOT believe that the other quotes by him were erroneous, but had problems with how they were framed.  In an October 9 email, he wrote me:

Joe,

The only real significant error is the line: “carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.”

That is just wrong and I never would have said it.

On the other hand, I f&@?ed up. They sent me the draft and I approved it without reading it carefully and I just missed it..

I try to provide more context below but I do not believe it is my role as somebody mentioned in a book to spend my time getting them to write the book I would want them to write. (That book wouldn’t make any money.)

The other statements attributed to me may be taken out of context and juxtaposed against interpretations of others, but are based on fact.

I think everyone operated in good faith, and this was just a mistake that got by my inadequate editing.

Best,

Ken

To be clear here, he is talking about errors in how he was quoted, not in the chapter.  Yes, he thinks the Superfreaks operated in good faith.  I don’t, for reasons you will see.  You can be the judge of who is right about that.

Crucially that is not the end of the emails, as Dubner and Pielke would have you believe.  Indeed, Caldeira spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what went wrong.  And when he figured out what happened, he explained it to me in later e-mails, which I noted in Part 5:

Ken disagreed with the sentence, communicated it to Nathan.  Amazingly, Dubner did get it, but did not make the change.  If someone had sent back that comment to me on my book, I would have dropped the line.

I emailed Ken back:

Are you telling me that the authors did not send you galleys for comment but you got them third hand from Nathan?

and Ken emailed me back

I think the point is clear.  Ken disagreed with the notion that CO2 is not the villain, they wanted to keep the line and attribute it to him, and they did.  I wrote it part 1:

Levitt and Dubner didn’t run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it.  But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly — it even makes the  SuperFreakonomics Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary “Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?”  It fits their contrarian sensibility, but it makes no actual sense.

That’s why I stand by what I wrote.  If I find out that a book I’m writing contains a line attributing something to a scientist that they don’t believe, I’d change it.  I’d also be in direct communications with them and if I really, really wanted to keep that line, I would explicitly and directly send them back that line and ask them.

Unlike Dubner, I have worked hard to represent what Caldeira believes.

Caldeira did in fact write to me on the 10th:

So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.

And just to be 100% certain, I wrote him back the same day:

If the authors did not ask you directly for corrections, that is inexcusable.

I hope I can quote you:  “yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.”

It also seems to me accurate to say that the authors of the book did not ask you directly for any corrections and when you saw the galleys, you try to explain that the “villain” quote did not accurately represent your views at all.

And he gave me the go-ahead:

I assume when I send you things, you can quote them unless I specifically say otherwise.

After rereading the chapter, I sent him another email on the 11th pointing out other areas where I thought they had misrepresented his views.  He wrote me back, directly quoting a line from the book and commenting on it:

So, yes, Caldeira is accusing them of selective quoting here.  Remember that the next line in the book is:

The gentleman of IV abound with further examples of global warming meme that are all wrong.

The point, of course, is that what Caldeira said is well understood and not a meme that is all wrong.  It is the Superfreaks spin and selective quoting that is all wrong.

In this same email, Caldeira wrote me:

I know my regular readers understand how hard I try to accurately portray what the scientists I talk to mean — and what they mean to say.  But for those others who might be persuaded by the selective quoting and misrepresentations of Dubner, Levitt, and Pielke, I think it is pretty clear that my original, debunking blog post — including the headline — was in fact an accurate representation of what Caldeira wrote to me:

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.

Yes, Caldeira is unhappy that he got caught up in this.  Who can blame him?  He is a leading climatologist and wants to spend his time doing climatology and persuading policymakers of the urgent need for action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

So now you know the whole story of how I came to wrote my accurate debunking of the error-riddled book, Superfreakonomics.  There’s been no smear job — except by Dubner, Pielke and Morano.

Of course, the story was never about me or some emails, but about the “average of one statement per page that’s either flatly untrue or deeply misleading,” in the chapter, as Krugman says, for which, the authors should “abjectly apologize,” as DeLong says.

If the publisher had not taken down the chapter I posted or if someone hadn’t stopped the book from being searchable, then everyone would have seen from day one that my analysis was dead on, rather than it taking a few days for that to be clear.

I’m glad I broke the story.  I wish Caldeira hadn’t gotten caught up in all this, but we are still on very good terms and in fact last night he sent me a major unpublished analysis he did that readers have asked to see.  I’ll be posting it soon.

If you’re still reading, I welcome comments.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies….  It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

Caldeira, the primary climatologist Superfreakonomics relies on, has himself updated his website (click here) to debunk the book’s characterization of his views.  He puts under his picture the following quote:

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,”  says Caldeira, “insofar as inanimate objects can be villains.”

I noted in Part 1 that Ken Caldeira, wrote me last weekend:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do. The standard way to protect against this, of course, is to give short interviews.

Another thing they said that was misleading (out of many) is that….

Oh, you’ll have to tune in later for that mistake.  For now, I just wanted to make clear that Caldeira does think these guys misrepresented him and made many misleading statements.  He also wrote me:

So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.

The well-known Berkeley economics professor and blogger J. Bradford DeLong has begun his multiple takedowns of SuperFreakonomics. In one headline, he echoes a query from TNR’s Brad Plummer, Does “Superfreakonomics” Need A Do-Over?

DeLong also prints an email from Dubner, which I excerpt:

It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm’s extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value…  He makes it sound as if we somehow twisted and abused Caldeira’s research; nothing could be further from the truth…. This is politics that’s being played now, nothing else. Also: yes, Romm posted a PDF of the chapter on his website, which the publisher, in its routine effort to pull pirated copies of its copyrighted material off the web, asked him to take down. As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there’s been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn’t yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical), but Romm has done a great job of getting people to believe that a book they haven’t read is full of errors.

So if I adopted the Superfreak’s approach to quoting people, then I would say, as I did in the headline of the earlier version of this post, Dubner says “Romm has done a great job” with his critiques.  But you’re not allowed to do that in a blog or a book, are you?

For the record, I don’t support such journalism — I will, however, mock people who regularly and egregiously do.  Indeed, on complex matters I try to run quotes by the person I’m interviewing, which, frankly about half the journalists who quote me also do.  I asked Caldeira if I could quote his emails and he wrote me, “I assume when I send you things, you can quote them unless I specifically say otherwise.”

UPDATE:  Caldeira wrote me what he wrote me.  I did ask him for a quote that the Superfreaks had misrepresented his views — because I knew very well that they had based on my previous emails with him on geo-engineering.  It is exceedingly common in regular journalism to ask people for a quote that makes a very specific point — I’ve been asked many times by reporters to do similar things.

Note, the “villain” quote isn’t only a piece of the biggest misrepresentation the Superfreaks make of Caldeira’s work.  The bigger point is that Caldeira simply doesn’t believe in the geoengineering-only strategy they are pushing.  Over the course of our emails, it became clear he didn’t get the final version from the Superfreaks but from Nathan Myhrvold.  I wrote Caldeira:

Are you telling me that the authors did not send you galleys for comment but you got them third hand from Nathan?

He wrote me back:

That is correct, not the entire chapter, but a section was forwarded to me by Nathan. I searched through it quickly, looking for the parts that discussed me, and did not give the whole process very much attention at the time.  In general I feel no need to read, fact check, or make detailed comments on documents that arrive in my in-box. I have lots of other things to do, like trying to get my science out the door.

He told me he objected to this line, “And yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight” writing a comment directly at the end of their text on this line:

My views differ significantly from Lowell’s and Nathan’s. I do think we are being incredibly foolish emitting CO2 and that avoiding all of this environmental risk is a good way to invest a few percent of our GDP. My pessimism stems from the apparent difficulties of solving the “prisoner’s dilemma”, “tragedy of the commons”, type aspects of this problem.

He didn’t think that got back to Dubner, but it did.  Dubner now claims Caldeira was just making a “qualification.”  He was clearly disputing the line.  Dubner just really, really wanted to leave it in (it’s also in the table of contents) so they did:

The bigger point is that Caldeira does NOT believe in the geo-engineering-only strategy the Superfreaks are pushing, as I discussed in Part 1.  This is what he really believes:

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

This episode is a cautionary tale for all scientists (including me).  By the way, I think the standard of practice should be much higher for a book because the production process is much slower.  I can understand why a blogger or even a print reporter might not always feel he or she has time to check with the original source.  You’re writing at such a fast clip.  But you have weeks if not months to run an entire book chapter by an original source.

Finally, to get to the rest of my headline, you’ll note that Dubner whines that people are criticizing his book without having read it.  Well, let’s see, his publisher made me take down the PDF of the chapter — which is certainly fully within its rights.  And then, yes, the book was searchable on Amazon for a number of days.  I checked many of the pages in the chapter I was sent against the online version and twice told readers they could search the book to check my claim.  So this statement by Dubner is false:

As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there’s been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn’t yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical)

Yes, “As far as I know” is a great Nixonian hedge, like “to the best of my knowledge.”  Thing is, Dubner could have checked this.

If I had ever imagined that Amazon would take down the book’s searchability, I would have done a screen capture.  If any readers searched it last week, let me know.

DeLong replied to Dubner:

Brad DeLong to Stephen

Re: “It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm’s extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value…”

As I said, I can’t read your chapter–by your publisher’s choice.

That’s very bad for you: Romm’s posting your chapter and a link to it is a way for him to establish credibility–”see for yourself”; your publisher’s pulling it down is a way to diminish yours.

Now that DeLong can read parts of it, he ain’t thrilled.

I hope some other journalists interview Caldeira, so he can directly set the record straight, but you wouldn’t blame him if he were a bit gun shy with reporters right now, would you?  I’ll publish more of my so far exclusive interview with him in a day or two.

More on this from Wonk Room.

[Note:  This is a revised earlier version of this post based on the "breaking" news from Caldeira.]

Related Posts:

• 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

No, I don’t know any critics who called them global warming “deniers” — I don’t use the word in my critiques.  The authors are disingenuously trying to take the high ground by misrepresenting their opponents and creating strawmen, which is their modus operandi in the book.  The primary climatologist the book relies on, Ken Caldeira, said in an extended email interview with me “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places. Levitt and Dubner use the far-far-out James Lovelock as the primary scientific foil in their discussion in order to make their nonsensical views seem plausible (see “Lovelock still makes me look like Paula Abdul, warns climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age“).

Still, it’s worth remembering, the book contains these two inane sentences (among many, many others as I’ve shown in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3):

1. “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.”
2. “In other words:  it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.”

The authors aren’t deniers per se, but the book is staggeringly anti-scientific and illogical.

And the economics, what little of it there is in the chapter, is utterly wrong.  Krugman just savaged them this morning on their biggest howler.  The Superfreaks write:

Do the future benefits from cutting emissions outweigh the costs of doing so? Or are we better off waiting to cut emissions later — or even, perhaps, polluting at will and just learning to live in a hotter world?

The economist Martin Weitzman analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario — a rise of more than 10 degrees Celsius.

Amazing.  In one sentence, which they never ran by Weitzman, they get his entire thesis ass backwards (and misquote him, too).  As Krugman explains:

Yikes. I read Weitzman’s paper, and have corresponded with him on the subject — and it’s making exactly the opposite of the point they’re implying it makes. Weitzman’s argument is that uncertainty about the extent of global warming makes the case for drastic action stronger, not weaker. And here’s what he says about the timing of action:

The conventional economic advice of spending modestly on abatement now but gradually ramping up expenditures over time is an extreme lower bound on what is reasonable rather than a best estimate of what is reasonable.

Again, we’re not even getting into substance — just the basic issue of representing correctly what other people said.

I correspond with Weitzman also.  While I don’t agree with him 100%, I am of fan of his work (see Harvard economist: Climate cost-benefit analyses are “unusually misleading,” warns colleagues “we may be deluding ourselves and others”).  And that’s how I know that Weitzman has NOT “analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario — a rise of more than 10 degrees Celsius.” If you read his published paper in Review of Economics and Statistics (February 2009), “On modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change,” you’ll see he writes:

The upper 5% probability level averaged over all 22 climate-sensitivity studies cited in IPCC-AR4 (2007) is 7°C.

Also for Weitzman 10 C isn’t the “terrible-case scenario” — it’s “terra incognita,” a “worldwide catastrophe.”  In a new draft of his analysis, which he just sent me, he suggests two possible damage functions whereby a 10 C warming would lead to a loss of social welfare of 83% to 99%!!!  He writes “A temperature increase of 4C is likely to have some very serious consequences.”  In his published paper he writes:

As a recent Science commentary put it: “Once the world has warmed by 4°C, conditions will be so different from anything we can observe today (and still more different from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say where the warming will stop.”

When I sent the one sentence from Superfreakonomics to Weitzman — writing, “I thought 6C warming was the ‘terrible’ case you consider and that’s what had a 5% chance” — he wrote back:

You are right.  Is their book already out, or is there still a chance to clarify this?

Needless to say, had the Superfreaks run their statement by Weitzman — or had even the slightest clue what he was arguing — they never would have written what they did.  It is an amateurish mistake.

Let me end with some comments on Levitt’s recent blog post, “The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated.”  First, he whines:

SuperFreakonomics isn’t even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway.

A prominent environmental blogger has attacked us. A well-known environmental-advocacy group pressured NPR into reading a statement critical of the book at the end of an interview I had given on Scott Simon’s Weekend Edition show. Even Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong got in on the action before they’d even read the book.

Laughable — and disingenuous.

The book isn’t even on sale yet — and Levitt is already misleading the public on NPR!  I’ll deal with that interview tomorrow.  But if Levitt can spread disinformation on the airwaves before his book is out, then he can hardly complain that people are attacking him.

Second, you’ll see how he characterizes me as an “environmental blogger” and “The Union of Concerned Scientists” as an environmental-advocacy group.  That’s because he’s trying to frame this debate as the scientists he talked to versus environmentalists (like Gore, their other whipping boy in the book).  In fact, the truth is that we have a whole bunch of scientists — including the primary climatologist he talked — versus two non-scientists who don’t know what they are talking about on climate science, climate solutions, or climate economics.

We are working on a thorough response to these critics, which we hope to post on the blog in the next day or two. The bottom line is that the foundation of these attacks is essentially fraudulent, as we’ll spell out in detail. In the meantime, let us just say the following….

The critics are implying that we dismiss any threats from global warming; but the entire point of our chapter is to discuss global-warming solutions, so obviously that’s not the case.The statements being circulated create the false impression that our analysis of the global-warming crisis is ideological and unscientific. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It their analysis that is “essentially fraudulent” as I and many others have shown.  Nobody is saying or “implying” they “dismiss any threats from global warming.”  That’s another strawman.

Their analysis is clearly unscientific, but again I don’t know anyone who has claimed it is “ideological,” except in the sense that they know how to make a lot of money and get a lot of media coverage by pushing a contrarian viewpoint.  Now if contrarianism wholly overwhelms one’s rationality to the point where a person is contrarian despite the facts but merely for the sake of being contrarian, then I suppose that is an ideology.

I’ll blog more on the Superfreaks tomorrow.  Yes, I’m blogging a great deal on this, but besides the obvious interest that my posts have generated — Part 1 is already easily the most widely read post I’ve written this year — I think are having an impact and, as Part 5 will make clear, these guys are about to launch a major media/disinformation blitz.

I’m trying to draw as much attention as possible to the post since the book comes out Tuesday, it has a huge media blitz, and will be heavily reviewed.   My post already been referenced by Nobelist Paul Krugman on his blog (”A counterintuitive train wreck“) and Mother Jones (”The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics“) and Think Progress (”SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Change Super Freaking Wrong,‎” among others.

What’s interesting is that since my original post and various other debunkings around the web, the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book.  It’s fairly common for publishers to allow such searching, though not all do — see Amazon bestseller list here.  But I don’t know of a single instance where searching was allowed and then stopped.  It seems to me the publisher must be concerned that bloggers and others could actually see and quote the myriad errors and sheer illogic and patent nonsense for themselves and not bother buying the book, which at least for now has dropped down to #9 on Amazon (it was 3 or 4 over the weekend).

Obviously, a book that contains the sentence, “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception,” is anti-scientific.  But probably the worst thing about the book from the point of view of spreading anti-scientific disinformation is the use of the phrase “global cooling” in the subtitle, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  Millions of people who never even buy the book will now be subjected to that long-debunked piece of nonsense in book reviews and elsewhere.  The book hits the trifecta of global cooling mistakes:

1. The climate chapter begins with a full page pushing the myth that there was some sort of scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s.  Not — see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus.”  The chapter leads off with a NYT article, but, as we’ve seen, even The NYT’s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.
2. The chapter pushes the “we’re cooling now myth.”  On page 186, Levitt and Dubner write, “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.”  Sadly, it isn’t “little discussed” — the deniers and media have been pushing this for months now, so it doesn’t even qualify as a contrarian view, just utter rubbish, the kind of conventional wisdom these guys used to debunk.  See The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history! and Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid! and NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation.
3. The chapter pushes the dystopic notion that the only “cooling” strategy we need to address global warming is pumping massive amounts of acid rain pollution into the atmostphere, which I (and Caldeira and Robock) debunk in Part 1 and Part 2:

Frankly, it’s not possible for one person to debunk every error and illogical statement in just that one chapter — and I haven’t even gotten to the economics, which has one of the biggest blunders of all, as we’ll see.  Fortunately, lots of other people are joining in.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has a thorough debunking of the science here,  summarized below:

New Book “SuperFreakonomics” Mischaracterizes Climate Science

A follow-up to the bestselling book “Freakonomics” features a chapter that grossly mischaracterizes climate science, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The new book, “SuperFreakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is slated to be officially released on October 20, 2009. Experts at UCS found that the fifth chapter of the book, “Global Cooling,” repeats a large number of easily discredited arguments regarding climate science, energy production, and geoengineering.

The authors appear to have taken a purposefully contrarian position on climate change science and economics. While such a position may help draw attention to their book, their reliance on faulty arguments and distorted statistics does a disservice to their readers.

In chapter five, the authors:

• Repeat tired global cooling myths
• Unfairly trash climate models
• Highlight irrelevant statistics about carbon dioxide without context
• Extol the virtues of excess carbon dioxide while ignoring the downsides
• Ignore a major source of sea level rise
• Cherry-pick short-term climate fluctuations while missing the bigger picture
• Use faulty statistics to trash renewable energy
• Advocate rolling the dice on unproven technology
• Use a silly analogy to attack plans to reduce emissions

Please put links to any other debunkings into the comments section.

And please digg my original debunking of Superfreakonomics by clicking here.  I am in the process of adding back a Digg counter just for these instances when I might have a post of interest to a much wider audience.

UPDATE:  Here’s another great takedown, by Deltoid, see “Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong.”