Superfreakonomics Controversy

The chapter on Global Cooling and Geoengineering set off a firestorm of controversy.  Now that you've read the chapter, you can read a few of the responses:

Real Climate says the Global Cooling research was not the way Levitt and Dubner describe it; that a few articles in the popular press said the opposite of what thousands of papers in academia were saying at the time.

Economist Paul Krugman puts economist Martin Weitzman's paper in context, saying that the estimate of a 5% chance of a catastrophe convinced we need to act immediately.

The Economist, which gave the first Freakonomics a glowing review, argues that Levitt and Dubner tried to be overly clever and simplistic with the end result being that they wrote a bad chapter that had little to do with economics.

With “Freakonomics”, the authors made pop economists of everyone, to the general good. To give the sequel’s readers this distorted lens through which to view climate change and its solution is to do readers a grave disservice.

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker, reaches a similar conclusion.

And, on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner mounts a full-throated defense of the chapter, saying the he and Levitt are not climate skeptics and didn't do most of the things they were accued of