Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Calling out and discrediting climate change contrarianism

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Several folks have asked me about climate change skeptics/deniers/contrarians.  Why does the media give them air time, and why are they considered legitimate sources of information?

Many have argued recently that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book, SuperFreakonomics, is the most recent version of contrarianism disguised as balanced analysis of climate change.

I almost feel bad for Levitt and Dubner because rather than adding to the serious discourse of climate change as intended, SuperFreakonomics is turning out to be an instruction manual for how to call out and discredit contrarian arguments (I say almost because they are probably raking in a ton of royalties from this controversy):

(1) Eric Pooley, a columnist with Bloomberg, was one of the folks to make the initial call out the day the book hit store shelves.

(2) Next came Paul Krugman’s NY Times blog, further calling out Levitt and Dubner as contrarians with a series of hard-hitting blog posts, including this one.

(3) David Roberts at Grist then added comparisons to the longstanding climate warming skeptic, Freeman Dyson, taking some serious shots at the media (sorry Jon Stewart fans, you may not like what you hear).

(4) In one of his longest posts ever, Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (who was also one of the vocal folks initially calling out Leavitt and Dubner) picked up Roberts’ and Krugman’s analyses yesterday and examined further the two questions above, showing how and why the media often enables these folks (with more bad news for Jon Stewart fans).

(5) In a letter yesterday at RealClimate, scientist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (one of Levitt’s colleagues at the University of Chicago) shows how easy it would have been to get the science right in SuperFreakonomics.

Related post:  SuperFreakonomics ignites a SuperStorm of criticism