Economists, like engineers, have the annoying habit of assuming that the mastery of their particular subject makes them ideally suited to comment on other fields, using the assumptions they brought along with them from their own. In engineers this delusion often leads to engineer’s disease, where the common wisdom of entire fields of science is rejected in favour of whatever homebrew explenation the engineer in question has thought up. With economists, it leads to attempts to re-examine other disciplines through purely econometric methods to discover what they’re “really” about. This is bad enough already, but gets worse when applied to the realm of politics, where economists eternally promise that using their “science” will lead to rational policy decisions. A case in point is Steve Levitt’s new book Superfreakonomics, a sequel to his earlier quirky economics book Freakonomics. Where in the earlier book he was just annoying with his relentless contrarianism, this book he could do more harm, as it’s all about global warming and climate change and how worry about it as the experts say.
This of course mightly pisses off said experts, leading to the following evisceration by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago (and hence a colleague of Levitt’s), where he takes apart the silly claim that solar panels contribute more to global warming through waste heat than they save by replacing coalpower:
As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.
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A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells, but that is not the matter at hand here. The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.