The Global Warming Debate Heats Up

The topic of global warming is, at once, scientific, economic, technological and political. And it is always a topic that creates plenty of its own heat. The folks on the political right won't even use the term. For them, the topic is climate change. Yes, the planet is getting warmer, but it is also getting cooler. The earth's climate is unpredictable, so pack a sweater and flip flops. No worries.

The folks on the political left take a decidedly different stance. They are all henny penny, the sky is falling, so let's explore alternative energy and slap industry with a whopping carbon emissions tax.

Up until now, global warming was a clear-cut us-versus-them topic. You either saw it as the end of the world as we know it or an urban myth. But with the publication of the new book, Super Freakanomics, the topic just got less clear cut. And, the book's co-authors, Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner, are taking plenty of heat from both sides of the debate.

A new debate

In this new book, a sequel to their best-seller Freakeconomics, the writing team challenges the conclusions of the global warming crowd by saying they may have correctly spotted the problem, but they are not exploring the right solutions. For instance, they note, if cooling the Earth is our primary objective, then reducing carbon emissions is a lousy way to cool off the planet. Their reasoning goes like this:

Even if we cut carbon emissions today, the Earth will continue warming for decades because carbon hangs in the atmosphere for decades. Economically, cutting emissions is expensive. Pragmatically, it requires worldwide cooperation. Like that is going to happen. We need a better solution.

A better way

Authors Levitt and Dubner posit that a better approach to cooling the Earth is geo-engineering. They argue that the scientific evidence suggest that a stratoshield or seeding clouds over the oceans would have a significant and immediate impact on cooling the globe, unlike carbon-emission reductions. The cost of these solutions, they insist, is trivial compared to the cost of lowering carbon emissions. We're talking thousands of times cheaper. Perhaps best of all, they state, if something goes wrong and we decide we don't like the results of the stratoshield or the oceanic clouds, we can stop the programs immediately and any effects will quickly disappear. On top of that, these two geo-engineering solutions are totally reversible. Given the huge costs of global cataclysm and how cheap the solutions are, we would be crazy not to move forward with geo-engineering research in order to have these solutions ready to go in case we decide we need to cool the Earth.

The book discusses a half dozen other ideas on better ways to skin this global cat. The result? Nobody is happy.

The right wing status-quoers are angry that the book affirms global warming as a scientific fact. The left-leaning environmentalists are equally distraught. Super Freakeconomics endorses the cataclysmic fallout from global warming, but it says the solutions being espoused by the environmental movement are wrong-headed and pricey, throwing fuel on their opponents' fire.

Why the disagreement?

Recently, in the New York Times [link to http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/the-superfreakonomics-global-warming-fact-quiz/], Steven Levitt wrote a column to explain this untimely riff within the ranks of the global warming advocates. He says this new dispute on the answer to global warming comes from the fact that his book and the environmentalist rank-and-file are answering two very different questions. Al Gore and company are asking what is the responsible amount of carbon for the planet to emit. Basically, a moral question. Economists like Martin Weitzman and others are asking an economical question­--what is the cheapest, quickest way to cool down the planet?

At the end of the day, Levitt and Dubner are all for reducing carbon in the atmosphere. They just don't think it is the only way, or even the best way, to approach the problem. They see carbon emission reduction as a noble pursuit. Here, here. Two thumbs way up. However, the question their team is asking is this: if we are really serious about making a change in the climate of the globe, why aren't more action groups pursuing the benefits of geo-engineering? After all, we only get one planet.­­ Let's not screw it up.


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