SuperFreakonomics causes a climate storm
Updated on 09 November 2009
Author Stephen Dubner tells Samira Ahmed why carbon dioxide is not causing climate change and how prostitutes are similar to shopping centre Santas.
Rogue economists Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner explore many controversial subjects in their latest book, SuperFreakonomics.
It's the second book the pair have written and, like the first, their alternative ideas raised eyebrows.
In fighting terrorism the authors say: "Insurance companies don't pay out if the policyholder commits suicide.
"So a 26-year-old family man who suspects he may one day blow himself up probably isn't going to waste money on life insurance".
And apparently solving climate change is easy too.
"The task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem: how to get 34 gallons per minute of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere? The answer: a very long hose, they say.
Stephen Dubner spoke to Channel 4 News.
Samira Ahmed: Could you summarise how far you have gone in the face of accepted theory about global warming and how seriously you expect your message to be taken?
Stephen Dubner: Sure. Well, we expect, we hope, for it to be taken very seriously.
One charge from the critics is that we deny global warming – which is patently false. In fact, we’ve written an entire chapter about what to do if warming is a big enough problem to really worry about. And we say it is.
The probability of a catastrophic event may be very small. But even a very small probability of the world ending is enough for all of us to worry about.
Our point is this. Carbon mitigation as the prime or only solution to global warming is a problem. And the reason mostly has to do with the fact that it’s too little and too late and too optimistic.
Atmosphere carbon dioxide has a half-life of about 100 years, which means that we could convert to a zero-carbon society tomorrow (which, as we know, could be very difficult, if not impossible), and yet it really wouldn’t stop the warming problem – if indeed the problem is large enough to worry about.
So we propose some alternative solutions which range from the kind of benign-sounding to some that sound like science fiction, and especially to environmentalists might seem repugnant.
On the other hand we argue that desperate measures may require desperate cures.
SA: Well, when you use the phrase "a very long hose", how do you expect people to take that?
SD: Well, I guess it sounds silly if you hear just that. Fortunately, we were able to write an entire chapter on it and explain.
So basically what it’s trying to do, it’s a technological solution to mimic a volcano.
We know that when really big volcanoes explode they send sulphuric ash into the stratosphere, very high up, and what's happened - the most recent one was 1991 at Mt Pinatubo - the sulphur dioxide mixes with water vapour at that altitude and it circles the world and forms a kind of a sunscreen that cooled global ground temperatures by more than one degree for a period of a couple of years.
So the idea would be to recreate that in a much, much, much more controlled way, using much less chemical by running a hose to the sky with a series of pumps.
SA: What you essentially do in both the books you've written is use data that's out there to try and look at complex issues.
So with the terrorism one you looked at the idea of life insurance and you wouldn't take it out if you were thinking about being involved in terrorism. Is there any evidence that this kind of use of data is actually happening?
SD: Yeah, in fact the story we tell in SuperFreakonomics is actually about an effort by my co-author Steve Levitt, who's an economist at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with a British bank who was very keen on trying to identify potential terrorists by using just their banking data.
And the idea came from looking at the 9/11 bombers in the US. If you looked at their banking data... Now, after the fact we know that they were the bad guys. If you looked at it you realised it was very usual and there were patterns that were unusual.
Well, we figured: what if we could reverse-engineer it? Instead of knowing who the bad guys are and looking at their data, what if we could look at their data and try and find the bad guys?
So life insurance is one metric out of many that stacks up - and when you stack all these up in an algorithm it can create a net that can be drawn tighter and tighter."
SA: Did you set out to deliberately upset anyone with some of these ideas?
SD: Certainly not to upset. To provoke conservation? Yes.
Our biggest argument is that conventional wisdom is often the enemy of the greater good, that we get very set to our ideas are unwilling politically or ideologically or financially to entertain other ideas. We try to look at the data primarily to try to make good decisions.
