Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [113]
engaged in various other sports or activities.”…For some interesting further reading on their father, see: Ken Auletta, “The Microsoft Provocateur,” The New Yorker, May 12, 1997; “Patent Quality and Improvement,” Myhrvold’s testimony before the Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Congress of the United States, April 28, 2005; Jonathan Reynolds, “Kitchen Voyeur,” The New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2005; Nicholas Varchaver, “Who’s Afraid of Nathan Myhrvold,” Fortune, July 10, 2006; Malcolm Gladwell, “In the Air; Annals of Innovation,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2008; Amol Sharma and Don Clark, “Tech Guru Riles the Industry by Seeking Huge Patent Fees,” The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2008; Mike Ullman, “The Problem Solver,” Washington CEO, December 2008…. Myhrvold is himself famous for writing—in particular, many long, provocative, extravagantly detailed memos that are intended primarily for internal use. See Auletta, above, for a good discussion of some of Myhrvold’s Microsoft memos. Perhaps his greatest memo to date is one he wrote for his current company, back in 2003. It is called “What Makes a Great Invention?” We hope it will someday be made available for public consumption. / 177 Mosquito laser assassination: for more fascinating detail, see Robert A. Guth, “Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes with Lasers,” The Wall Street Journal, March 14–15, 2009. / 178 “I don’t know anyone [who] is smarter than Nathan”: see Auletta, above. / 179 More T. rex skeletons: see Gladwell, above; based also on correspondence with the paleontologist Jack Horner, with whom Myhrvold collaborates in hunting for dinosaur bones. / 180 Definitive research…including climate science: see, e.g., Edward Teller, Lowell Wood, and Roderick Hyde, “Global Warming and Ice Ages: I. Prospects for Physics-Based Modulation of Global Change,” 22nd International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies, Erice (Sicily), Italy, August 20–23, 1997; Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood, “Global and Arctic Climate Engineering: Numerical Model Studies,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, November 13, 2008. / 180 For the next ten hours or so: During a break, if you were to casually ask Myhrvold a question of interest—his take on, say, whether an asteroid strike was indeed responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs—he is apt to regale you with a long narrative history of the various competing theories, the logic (and caveats) behind the ultimate winning theory, and the fallacies (and lesser truths) behind the losers. On this particular question, Myhrvold’s short answer is: yes. / 181 Wood himself was a protégé: for an excellent exploration of geoengineering that is also a dual profile of Lowell Wood and Ken Caldeira, see Chris Mooney, “Can a Million Tons of Sulfur Dioxide Combat Climate Change?” Wired, June 23, 2008. / 181 “As many as a million”: see Gladwell, above. / 182–183 Myhrvold cites a recent paper: see Robert Vautard, Pascal Yiou, and Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, “Decline of Fog, Mist and Haze in Europe Over the Past 30 Years,” Nature Geoscience 2, no. 115 (2009); and Rolf Philipona, Klaus Behrens, and Christian Ruckstuhl, “How Declining Aerosols and Rising Greenhouse Gases Forced Rapid Warming in Europe Since the 1980s,” Geophysical Research Letters 36 (2009). / 183 The carbon dioxide you breathe in a new office building: derived from guidelines of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers. / 183 Carbon dioxide is not poison: for a trenchant overview of the current state of thinking about atmospheric carbon dioxide, see William Happer, “Climate Change,” Statement before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, February 25, 2009; data also gleaned from the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. / 183 Carbon dioxide levels rise after a rise in temperature: see Jeff Severinghaus, “What Does the Lag of CO2 Behind Temperature in Ice Cores Tell Us About Global Warming,” RealClimate, December