So, if I got this right, Ken Caldeira didn't proofread enough and Joseph Romm wanted to do a hit piece on the book and fed Ken Caldeira a quote he was going to attribute to him.
I think that's all true. The part that's important is that Caldiera was OK with the fed quote. Caldiera even updated his website to make it clear that he's OK with the fed quote: http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/
If you've ever spent substantial time with the press, you'll learn that this happens all the time. If someone feeds you a quote, it's totally OK to say "sounds good" and have them run it. If they feed you a quote and you don't like it, you can say "wait up, that's not right. I'd say [x] instead." Then, sure, you can you say you were misquoted. (You can also decline to OK the fed quote without giving a more accurate one, and it'd be wrong for the journo to run it.)
The reason reporters/bloggers/press use fed quotes is that they're short. People who are experts are fucking terrible at being pithy. Reporters have learned to feed quotes as a coping method when dealing with verbal diarrhea.
Just to clarify about the fed quote: if I'm reading this right, the quote Romm wanted was: "The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work". Caldeira did not give him this quote. Caldeira did write, unprompted: "The only 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."
Caldiera updated his website to correct that carbon dioxide villain issue, but that's not the quote that was fed to him.
An honest question: in this era of blogs and online content, what is the advantage of being pithy and not getting the full explanation (since this was a blog not a printed article in this case)?
But it would serve the reader better then changing the meaning of the answer.
The last election cycle had one too many edits to video that made people look better / worse on both sides. Lord only knows how many quotes in print articles got the same treatment.
Most of the time the raw unedited videos and/or transcripts where available somewhere on the web, so the problem isn't the the information is unavailable, it's that most people don't have the time or energy to go through it all. Removing all summaries, good and bad, will hardly change that. People who really care will find the relevant information.
It's the far left's equivalent of the far right's tired line; if you criticize the war strategy, you don't "support the troops". It's ironic that both ends of the spectrum pull the same stunts on their pet issues. It all boils down to fear, the simplest of political power tools. If you can make people sufficiently "afraid" of something you can get them to unquestioningly support things that would be otherwise unthinkable.
1) What changes will occur in the global environment in the future and 2) how we should react to it are separate issues. You will note that (1) is a completely scientific issue, whereas (2) is not. Science can inform the choices we make in response to global warming, but there is no correct scientific answer to how we choose to make the tradeoffs between carbon abatement, economic growth, and etc.
What the authors of the book were primarily guilty of was not questioning the scientific orthodoxy about the effects of global warming, but suggesting that carbon abatement was a costly way of addressing global warming compared to alternative remedies. In short, they arrived at the "wrong" political/economic conclusions, where wrong == unpopular.
Right. In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere entirely. Otherwise we're just slowing global warming, not stopping it. And that's not going to happen. Aside from that, it's completely unrealistic that we'll even be able to slow it, given that it needs to be done in all nations,and that's just not going to happen.
What we need are large scale technological solutions.
> In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere entirely.
There are processes that remove CO_2 from the atmosphere. Take photosynthesis as an example. Animals have exhaled CO_2 as long as they existed. We do not need to stop it.
(There may be a point that restricting the output to sensible levels is worthwhile. But the sensible level can be above zero.)
Yes, there are processes that remove CO_2 from the atmosphere. And these only have enough power to compensate for natural outputs of CO_2, like that produced from respiration.
When we burn fossilized fuels, we're taking fossilized carbon and putting it into the atmosphere- billions of years worth of the natural process of fossilization reversed nearly instantaneously. In order for that to be compensated for naturally, we'd have to increase fossilization rates. This is impossible. Only a comparative technological solution to increasing fossilization rate (i.e. figuring out how to bury all that atmospheric carbon) will work.
They wrote a chapter on global warming despite knowing nothing about the subject. Their writing contains gross factual errors including the claims that the earth has been cooling for the past few years and that increased levels of atmospheric carbon do not necessarily warm the planet ceteris paribus. Brad Delong's post on the matter is pretty objective, and pretty damning.
"the cultural, economic, diplomatic, and ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. "
He's not talking about military power alone. His argument is that consensus among the four major world powers would be able to accomplish carbon reductions. It's a reasonable point.
Interpreting what someone says by dropping 4/5 of their argument isn't really grappling with it in good faith. Try, "I disagree that anything short of military force can accomplish meaningful international action on emission reductions."
In which case, assuming you actually believe this, you would be contradicting yourself and agreeing with DeLong that it isn't totally futile to expect concerted action to achieve significant emissions reductions.
All that being said, there are many cases of international efforts reducing the emissions of environmentally damaging substances (i.e. acid rain, ozone depletion) without resort to armed conflict. So I don't think your position holds up to the scrutiny of the real world. It feels more like an ideological reaction to the existence of global warming (which no-one seriously disputes these days) than an attempt to think through the underlying issues.
The first critique of Delong's blog is:
pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.
But the first reply from the author's in the NYTimes article makes it clear:
The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)
That being said can anyone provide the text of the "brief mention"?
The term "global cooling" has a dominant usage in public discourse. So does the term "global warming".
These guys are trying to weasel out of having written what they've written by claiming the words they use don't mean what everyone else uses them to mean. Which is funny, because not knowing the language of your field is arguably a sign of worse ignorance than getting facts wrong in good faith after doing serious research.
These guys are pandering to the market for global denialism because that market buys books. Nothing wrong with that, but people who know their stuff are dead right to eviscerate them in the NYTimes because it's a bad faith pollution of the public discourse. So bring on the down-modding guys, I've got plenty to burn.
The chain begins with Joseph Romm telling Caldeira that he had read SuperFreakonomics and “I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance.” Romm adds that “my blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media” and tells Caldeira that “I’d like a quote like ‘The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,’ plus whatever else you want to say.”
Did you read the same post that I did? How can this possibly be characterized as mere "joining" in the debate by "intelligent readers". Isn't having pre-formed views completely disregarding opposing viewpoints (versus an honest attempt at addressing them) the antithesis of intelligent?
Let's not allow all this character assassination, and/or accusations of same, to distract from other intelligent readers who are, in fact, joining in the debate:
