Copenhagen Context: Why the Horseshit

The second article I wanted to recall as context for the Copenhagen talks (the first is here) is in the New Yorker, where the formidable Elizabeth Kolbert takes on the currently hot (or is it cool?) Climate Crisis denying book, SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It's not just that she dismantles their pernicious silliness, but she also isolates what I believe is the primary reason people want to hear that the Climate Crisis doesn't exist, probably, and even if it does, it's going to be all right.

She starts with the Parable of Horseshit, a story the book also tells, about how in the 1890s, big cities like New York were being smothered by piles of horseshit from the transport these cities depended on. "One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure."

Doom was predicted, stern and costly measures were planned, and then, suddenly it all went away. Because the horses did, ushered out by the automobile. The SuperFreaks tell it to make the point that simple solutions emerge, and they are usually technological.

Of course they deny there is a Climate Crisis. But if there is, they know how to fix it: with huge new technologies: “Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write. All we need to do is figure out a way to shoot huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere on our own. This could be done, they say, by sending up an eighteen-mile-long hose: “For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better.”

First of all, Kolbert suggests the extent of their ignorance about climate science. "Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong." In one case their conclusion is based on faulty arithmetic. Not sophisticated math: arithmetic.

Kolbert's disdain for the craziness of their main proposal is probably more muted than it deserves, because it is truly crazy. It looks attractive: a big tech fix, aping the action of volcanoes in cooling the earth, while CO2-spewing fuels can continue and even accelerate. But ir ignores just about every aspect of how climate, weather and life on the planet--let alone chemicals-- interact. In the guise of saving the planet we know, it would poison and otherwise fundamentally change life on earth (there goes the sun)--even if it were possible to do. And it is much more drastic than anything Al Gore and others in the mainstream propose. As Kolbert says, some legitimate scientists say such geoengineering should be studied, but only as a last resort.

It's not hard to understand what these guys are doing or why. They have found a marketing niche--by wearing suits and offering contrarian but simple-sounding solutions, they're making a fortune shoveling horseshit, the future be damned. But why are people listening? Actual solutions to the Climate Crisis involve change that will, Kolbert writes, "require a lot from us. It would mean changing the way we eat, shop, manufacture, and get around, and, ultimately, how we see ourselves. It is the difficulty of imagining such changes that makes schemes like Levitt and Dubner’s at once so alluring and so dangerous. Just about every time anyone with any sort of credentials offers a “simple and cheap” solution to global warming, the idea is hailed as bold or innovative, and taken far more seriously than it deserves to be."

It makes human sense that people would rather avoid wrenching change--it could be arduous, even dangerous, and you don't know if you'd be better off, or worse. Better the devil you know.

But the flaw in the argument is this: it's not a choice between change and no change. Things are going to change, big time. Perhaps gradually, perhaps more quickly, but probably in fits and starts over the next half century, the Climate Crisis is going to become a dominant fact of life, and engine of change. And most of it isn't going to be better.

The problem is that unless civilization anticipates and prepares for that change, and unless it works to prevent even greater (and much worse) change in the farther future, things are going to change for the worse, big time. At first for some people (that's happening already, in the far north, in drought-stricken Africa, in heat waves and storms, etc.), then for a lot of people, and then for everyone. Eventually, after generations of increasing hardship and permanent crisis, of accelerating misery, the survival of civilization, which means the survival of most of humanity, is at stake--along with life on this planet as we know it.

So among all the other difficulties, it's the horseshit shoveled by the likes of these guys that is smothering our chances at a future. People may think they're just sticking their head in the sand. But it's not sand.