Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [91]
That said, Myhrvold fears that even IV’s gentlest proposals will find little favor within certain environmentalist circles. To him, this doesn’t compute.
“If you believe that the scary stories could be true, or even possible, then you should also admit that relying only on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is not a very good answer,” he says. In other words: it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions. “The scary scenarios could occur even if we make herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, in which case the only real answer is geoengineering.”
Al Gore, meanwhile, counters with his own logic. “If we don’t know enough to stop putting 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day,” he says, “how in God’s name can we know enough to precisely counteract that?”
But if you think like a cold-blooded economist instead of a warmhearted humanist, Gore’s reasoning doesn’t track. It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don’t want to stop, or aren’t willing to pay the price.
Most pollution, remember, is a negative externality of our consumption. As hard as engineering or physics may be, getting human beings to change their behavior is probably harder. At present, the rewards for limiting consumption are weak, as are the penalties for overconsuming. Gore and other environmentalists are pleading for humankind to consume less and therefore pollute less, and that is a noble invitation. But as incentives go, it’s not a very strong one.
And collective behavior change, as beguiling as that may sound, can be maddeningly elusive. Just ask Ignatz Semmelweis.
Back in 1847, when he solved the mystery of puerperal fever, Semmelweis was hailed as a hero—wasn’t he?
Quite the opposite. Yes, the death rate in Vienna General’s maternity ward plummeted when he ordered doctors to wash their hands after performing autopsies. Elsewhere, however, doctors ignored Semmelweis’s findings. They even ridiculed him. Surely, they reasoned, such a ravaging illness could not be prevented simply by washing one’s hands! Moreover, doctors of that era—not the humblest lot—couldn’t accept the idea that they were the root of the trouble.
Semmelweis grew frustrated, and in time his frustration curdled into vitriol. He cast himself as a scorned messiah, labeling every critic of his theory a murderer of women and babies. His arguments were often nonsensical; his personal behavior became odd, marked by lewdness and sexual impropriety. In retrospect, it’s safe to say that Ignatz Semmelweis was going mad. At the age of forty-seven, he was tricked into entering a sanitarium. He tried to escape, was forcibly restrained, and died within two weeks, his reputation shattered.
But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. Semmelweis was posthumously vindicated by Louis Pasteur’s research in germ theory, after which it became standard practice for doctors to scrupulously clean their hands before treating patients.
So do contemporary doctors follow Semmelweis’s orders?
A raft of recent studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.
This failure seems puzzling. In the modern world, we tend to believe that dangerous behaviors are best solved by education.