Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change: Yoram's Last Word, by Bryan Caplan

I offered to give Yoram the last word in our exchange.  Here it is.

P.S. Yoram's non-fiction graphic novel officially releases on June 5.  That week, with his kind permission, I'll be posting a few pages from his book.

Let's focus on the major
issues in my exchange with Bryan, which now cover 4 posts. (Here's post #1,
which was Bryan's review of my Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, and then here's #2
and #3.
And I promise that after this post I'll stick to the comments section on this
thread!)

1. Climate science
basics

Here I'm delighted to
report that Bryan and I agree.

I asked:

Are you comfortable saying
that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? That human emissions of carbon dioxide
are raising atmospheric CO2 concentrations? That global temperatures have been
increasing over the past century? That humans are partly responsible for those
increasing global temperatures? That "it is extremely likely that human
influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the
mid-20th century"?

The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change provides my
answers to these questions (Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and No I'm Not Comfortable
Saying This But I Am Comfortable Saying That The Vast Majority Of Scientists
Are Convinced), so I'd like to hear what you have to say about them, Bryan. Can
you provide answers?

And he did:

My answers on all counts
are the same as your answers, Yoram: Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and No I'm Not
Comfortable Saying This But I Am Comfortable Saying That The Vast Majority Of
Scientists Are Convinced.

This is great;
thank you Bryan.
But it would have been better for Bryan to own up to this years ago, back when
he was lauding
Superfreakonomics and
calling global warming "instrumental-looking"
and asking "What happens if you regress annual global temperature 1880-2011 on
CO2 [and other stuff] like church
attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per capita, etc"?

If more economists like Bryan
were upfront about their agreements with basic climate science then I would
feel better about not having time to respond to people like David Henderson,
who goes
to great linguistic lengths in an effort to argue that global temperatures
have not been increasing over the past century. Plus I wouldn't have to jaw-jaw
with people in the Comments section or spend my time reviewing
the treatment of climate change in economics textbooks. (The books from
Mitt Romney's top economic advisors, Greg
Mankiw and Glenn
Hubbard, both earned a top grade, so Bryan please tell your neighbors Cowen
and Tabarrok that I'm hoping their forthcoming edition can improve on the C+
they earned last time.)

Bottom line: Thanks for
acknowledging your comfort level with basic climate science.

2. Geoengineering

My main response is that we
appear to be having a communications problem. In my cartoon book, I write
that injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere "won't stop ocean acidification." In post #2
of the current back-and-forth that Bryan and I are having, I again bring up ocean acidification and link to a RealClimate
article in which scientists discuss some of their concerns about sulfur
injections, including that it won't stop ocean
acidification. Here's Bryan's response, in post #3:
"One of the reasons I read Yoram's book, by the way, was to search out
additional analysis of geoengineering. By my count, he's now missed two
opportunities - his book and his response to my review - to expand my knowledge
of the topic." I'm flattered that you have such high standards for my cartoon
books, Bryan, but let me try again:
What do you think about ocean acidification?

PS. In addition to our
joint communications problem, I think that geoengineering advocates like Bryan
have a communications problem of their very own, namely that they tend to
oversell their position. This appears in Superfreakonomics,
when Levitt and Dubner claim that "perhaps the single best objection" to their
garden hose idea is that "it's too simple and too cheap." And it happens with
Bryan, who starts
off writing that "all things considered, geoengineering looks far superior
to other policy options on the table" and
that "climate activists sorely need to hear... that leading techno-fixes
really do look vastly cheaper than abatement" but then ends up
writing that "As best as I can gather... [after] I spent a week reading about
geoengineering four years ago... [the complaints of critics] seemed weak." No
wonder the general public has anti-smartest-guy-in-the-room
bias when it comes to, well, just about everything.

PPS. While I'm at it, let
me put a confession on the table. There are many walls that we can bang our
heads against, but each of us only has one head. So we need to pick. Jeff
Miron's got drug legalization, Bryan's got immigration reform, and I've got revenue-neutral carbon taxes. Bryan thinks that
geoengineering is a low-cost solution to climate change, and I think that revenue-neutral
carbon taxes is a low-cost solution to climate change.

Bottom line: I'm going
to continue working on revenue-neutral
carbon taxes, especially if geoengineering folks keep failing to address ocean acidification and all
these other concerns from climate scientists.

3. Cost-benefit
analysis

I think that trying to use
CBA for climate change is like trying to use GPS in a cave: great idea, it just
doesn't work very well.

Bryan thinks we need to
try--perhaps because of a philosophical belief that CBA always passes CBA??--and
he "immediately picture[s] multiple variants on the Wheat and
Chessboard Problem" to convey issues regarding discount rates.

I hate to play the "because
I'm the Mom" card, but look: I've now written three cartoon books, and that's
three more than Bryan has written. (I do like his
animated
videos
though.)
And I feel pretty comfortable saying that the Wheat and Chessboard Problem is a
lousy fit for cartoon books. (Animated video, yes. Cartoon books, no.) And I
feel very comfortable saying that a Cartoon
Climate Change book that tried to tackle CBA in a meaningful way
would not have much room for anything else. (Remember that Cartoon Micro spent a whole chapter
on the basics of discounting, and a whole chapter on the basics of expected
value; the long-time-horizon and fat-tail issues with climate change are
considerably more complicated, so I'd peg that at 4 chapters already, with a
complete treatment taking most if not all of a 16-chapter cartoon book.)

Bottom line: Why does
my book not spend much time on CBA? Because I'm the Mom. You go write a cartoon book,
Bryan--my psychotherapist tells me you really really want to!--and then we can
come back to this.

4. Insurance

Bryan says that "Costco.com
sells a year's
supply of dehydrated food for $1499.99" and ask me if I've bought it. The
answer is No... because it doesn't include Cougar Jim's Freeze Dried
Water!

On a serious note, I'll
admit--I'm not ashamed!--that in the days before Y2K I went out and bought a few
bags of ice and some extra supplies. And even now we try to keep a 3-day
emergency supply of food in the house, per Three
Days Three Ways. (Visit ready.gov and think
about whether you should too.)

Bottom line: Low probability outcomes that are
catastrophic really is a pretty good focal point for insurance. Whether you can get
insurance at a reasonable price is a good second-round question--as are concerns
about whether your dehydrated food would last much more than a week before
somebody with a gun overcame their reverence for private property rights and
came for it--but happily for climate change we've got revenue-neutral
carbon taxes.

5. Comparative
advantage

This is actually a new
addition to our list, but I can't resist because Bryan keeps harping on it. So here's a
question for you, Bryan: In Superfreakonomics,
Nathan Myrvold is introduced as somebody who wants to be "every kind of scientist", as being "so
polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame." Did this set
off alarm bells for you? It did for me, so I wasn't surprised to learn that Myrvold
was wrong in writing that "the problem with solar cells is that they're
black." You, on the other hand, didn't
express any concerns about Myrvold, and neither did Levitt. Perhaps there
some new kind of bias here that's worth examining?

Bottom line: You are
clearly a very kind person, Bryan--for example, you post my rants on your blog,
and I'm grateful for that--but in future you should be less kind to people you
agree with.

(2 COMMENTS)