Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [73]
The most expensive float Nathan envisions would cost $100,000. Even at that price, allocating 10,000 of them around the world would cost just $1 billion—or one-tenth the amount of hurricane property damage incurred in a single year in the United States alone. As Ignatz Semmelweis learned about hand-washing and as millions of heart patients learned about cheap pills like aspirin and statins, an ounce of prevention can be worth a few tons of cure.
Nathan isn’t yet sure the float will work. For months it has been undergoing intense computer modeling; soon it will be tried out in real water. But all indications are that he and his friends have invented a hurricane killer.
Even if it were capable of eliminating tropical storms entirely, that wouldn’t be wise, since storms are part of the natural climate cycle and deliver much-needed rainfall to land. The real value comes from cooling down a Category 5 storm into a less destructive one. “You might be able to manipulate the monsoon rain cycle in tropical areas,” Nathan enthuses, “and smooth out the boom-or-bust nature of rainfall in the Sahel in Africa, aiming to prevent starvation.”
The float might also improve the ocean’s ecology. As surface water heats up each summer, it becomes depleted of oxygen and nutrients, creating a dead zone. Flushing the warm water downward would bring rich, oxygenated cold water to the surface, which ought to substantially enhance sea life. (The same effect can be seen today around offshore oil platforms.) The float might also help sink some of the excess carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the ocean’s surface in recent decades.
There remains, of course, the question of how, and by whom, these floats would be deployed. The Department of Homeland Security recently solicited hurricane-mitigation ideas from various scientists, including Nathan and his friends. Although such agencies rarely opt for cheap and simple solutions—it simply isn’t in their DNA—perhaps an exception will be made in this case, for the potential upside is large and the harm in trying seems minimal.
As dangerous as hurricanes are, there looms within the realm of nature a far larger problem, one that threatens to end civilization as we know it: global warming. If only Nathan and his friends, such smart and creative thinkers who aren’t afraid of simple solutions, could do something about that…
SuperFreakonomics
SuperFreakonomics
CHAPTER 5
WHAT DO AL GORE AND MOUNT PINATUBO HAVE IN COMMON?
The headlines have been harrowing, to say the least.
“Some experts believe that mankind is on the threshold of a new pattern of adverse global climate for which it is ill-prepared,” one New York Times article declared. It quoted climate researchers who argued that “this climatic change poses a threat to the people of the world.”
A Newsweek article, citing a National Academy of Sciences report, warned that climate change “would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale.” Worse yet, “climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change or even to allay its effects.”
Who in his or her right mind wouldn’t be scared of global warming?
But that’s not what these scientists were talking about. These articles, published in the mid-1970s, were predicting the effects of global cooling.
Alarm bells had rung because the average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by .5 degrees Fahrenheit (.28 degrees Celsius) from 1945 to 1968. Furthermore, there had been a large increase in snow cover and, between 1964 and 1972, a decrease of 1.3 percent in the amount of sunshine hitting the United States. Newsweek reported that the temperature decline, while relatively small in absolute terms, “has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice