Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [111]
JAMES LOVELOCK: All Lovelock quotes in this chapter can be found in The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, 2006). Lovelock is a scientist perhaps best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, which argues that the earth is essentially a living organism much like (but in many ways superior to) a human being. He has written several books on the subject, including the foundational Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (Gaia Books, 1991).
COWS ARE WICKED POLLUTERS: The potency of methane as a greenhouse gas as compared with carbon dioxide was calculated by the climate scientist Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, based on the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Ruminants produce more greenhouse gas than transportation sector: see “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 2006; and Shigeki Kobayashi, “Transport and Its Infrastructure,” chapter 5 from IPCC Third Assessment Report, September 25, 2007.
WELL-MEANING LOCAVORES: See Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science and Technology 42, no. 10 (April 2008); see also James McWilliams, “On Locavorism,” Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, August 26, 2008; and McWilliams’s forthcoming book, Just Food (Little, Brown, 2009).
EAT MORE KANGAROO: See “Eco-friendly Kangaroo Farts Could Help Global Warming: Scientists,” Agence France-Press, December 5, 2007.
GLOBAL WARMING AS A “UNIQUELY THORNY PROBLEM”: For the “terrible-case scenario,” see Martin L. Weitzman, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 91, no. 1 (February 2009). / 169 A Stern warning: see Nicholas Herbert Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge University Press, 2007). / 169 There is much to be read about the influence of uncertainty, especially as it compares with its cousin risk. The Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose work is generally credited with giving ultimate birth to behavioral economics, conducted pioneering research on how people make decisions under pressure and found that uncertainty leads to “severe and systematic errors” in judgment. (See “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” from Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky [Cambridge University Press, 1982].) We wrote about the difference between risk and uncertainty in a New York Times Magazine column (“The Jane Fonda Effect,” September 16, 2007) about the fear over nuclear power: “[The economist Frank Knight] made a distinction between two key factors in decision making: risk and uncertainty. The cardinal difference, Knight declared, is that risk—however great—can be measured, whereas uncertainty cannot. How do people weigh risk versus uncertainty? Consider a famous experiment that illustrates what is known as the Ellsberg Paradox. There are two urns. The first urn, you are told, contains 50 red balls and 50 black balls. The second one also contains 100 red and black balls, but the number of each color is unknown. If your task is to pick a red ball out of either urn, which urn do you choose? Most people pick the first urn, which suggests that they prefer a measurable risk to an immeasurable uncertainty. (This condition is known to economists as ambiguity aversion.) Could it be that nuclear energy, risks and all, is now seen as preferable to the uncertainties of global warming?” / 170 Al Gore’s “We” campaign: see www. climateprotect.org and Andrew C. Revkin, “Gore Group Plans Ad Blitz on Global Warming,” The New York Times, April 1, 2008. / 170 The heretic