A Friday night undermybed.dk

I’ve read that there is a new pop-econ book out from economist Levitt and journalist Dubner called “SuperFreakonomics”. Levitt and Dubner are the pair who wrote the “Freakonomics”-book that explains why drug-dealers live at home with their mum and why U.S. the crime-rate fell sharply during the 1990’s. The new book proposes quick and easy solutions to the climate problems, and their point of departure is the late 19th century pollution problem in New York, where horses were used for transport of people and goods, but the animals production of manure was extreme and impossible to handle:

“By 1880, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand horses living in New York, and probably a great many more. Each one relieved itself of, on average, twenty-two pounds of manure a day, meaning that the city’s production of horse droppings ran to at least forty-five thousand tons a month. George Waring, Jr., who served as the city’s Street Cleaning Commissioner, described Manhattan as stinking “with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.” Another observer wrote that the streets were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting . . . smelling to heaven.”“ 

The ‘Freaks’ note that the manure-problem in New York solved itself after some years with the invention of the combustion engine. They suggest that some sort of laissez-faire politics combined with a few innovations, will solve the current climate problem; no need for a meeting here in Copenhagen next month… Their suggestion solutions include

• fibreglass boats equipped with machines that will increase the cloud cover over the oceans
• a network of tubes that will suck cold water from the depths of the sea to the surface
• a 35 km long hose that will mimic a volcanic eruption and shoot sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere (where it will act like tiny mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into space)

The reviewer at the New Yorker has the following closing comment (which seems appropriate):

“To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.”