I have been wondering when you are going to get around to sharing your thoughts on Superfreakonomics, which you should surely have read by now…

Fair enough, and to your last point (final graph), which is a good one, I’d like to mull that over and take it up again real soon.

Why should any one expect everyone who opposes Dubner & Leavitt to behave responsibly? Are there other controversial topics where all participants on one side are impeccably polite? On any topic of consequence there will be voices that any particular person doesn’t like. So my response is that Pielke’s question is just silly. I’m not responsible for every D & L critic, nor is anyone else who criticizes them.

In this case, though, you raise Joe Romm in particular. On the whole I’d agree that Romm’s tone tends to backfire, but if he saved his ammunition for comparably egregious cases as this one, I would not have a problem with it. These people deserve the Romm treatment, not for the position they have taken, but for the shabby way in which they have chosen to take it.

More generally, the fact that people in the media and the policy sector read more Romm and less Connolley is something that I find quite unfortunate. I can’t be held responsible for their tastes in reading material, nor for the fact that a choice for polarizing material tends to be polarizing. I’d like to know why people seek out the dogmatic and then complain about it when there are plenty of alternatives available.

I suspect that Jon Stewart’s puzzled response to the book’s reception has more to do with with the Romm factor and not Connelly’s. It’s also obvious in the interview that Stewart read the book and he does not believe that Dubner & Levitt are denialists.

So given your reaction, it’s pertinent to ask your response to this question that Roger Pielke Jr. asks over at his blog:
“What is more harmful to the cause of action, the views of the Freaks or the response to them? Easy question.”

The conclusion in favor of this type of geoengineering is debatable, (I am not alone in thinking it is unworkable) but that’s not the issue here.

The issue the evidence brought to bear is grossly incorrect. Some things just aren’t true, and responsible writers just don’t go around repeating demonstrable untruths in support of their positions. There’s nothing dogmatic about saying something is wrong when it’s wrong as a matter of fact.