I just finished reading SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. The authors are Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book is a follow-up to their first book titled Freaknomics which was a NY Times best-seller and led to the creation of blog to continue the dialogue.
There are a number of really fascinating and very insightful stories found in SuperFreakonomics- stories that really make you think about how human beings can respond or alter behaviour based on reasonable economic incentives. At first, their insights and comparisons seem to be completed unrelated, but Dubner and Levitt are very creative and pull together correlations that leave you amazed. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone. It is not about recessions, financial markets or inflation, instead the authors use compelling statistics to illustrate how selfish and irrational we can be and how incentives, pricing and public policy can lead to a more harmonious and healthy society.
Instead of touching on how drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving, or why doctors are so bad at washing their hands or if people are innately altruistic or selfish or how monkeys respond to economic incentives, or what Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common, I will share an example with you which covers a controversial topic known as geo-engineering.
In short, geo-engineering is large scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry.
While I don't have a particular stance on geo-engineering, it is worth some discussion. Let me share one SuperFreakonomics example with you where a geo-physicist has figured out a way to counteract a natural disaster provided by Mother Nature, hurricanes.
Hurricanes are deadly, since 1900, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have been killed by them. Between 2004 and 2005, there were six hurricanes in the U.S. with combined damages of $153 billion dollars. Without going into all of the technical details, hurricanes become more potent (accumulate more thermal energy) when they hover over warm waters. A geo-physicist has proposed a solution that can help prevent the water from getting too warm and thus too destructive.
The trick is as follows: hydraulic head is a force, created by the energy put into the waves by wind. This force would push the warm surface water down into the long plastic cylinder, flushing it out at the bottom far beneath the surface. As long as the waves keep coming in, the hydraulic head's force would keep pushing warm surface water into the cooler depths, which will lower the ocean's surface temperature. A molecule of warm surface water would take about three hours to be flushed out the bottom of the plastic cylinder.
The devices would take the form of rings made from old truck tires filled with foamed concrete and lashed together with steel cable. The cylinder extending six hundred feet deep into the ocean, would push the warm surface water under. The trick is to modify the surface temperature of the water. Bottomline: in large numbers, these devices could possibly make warm water cooler and thus less likely to build a destructive hurricane.
So, would this hurricane killer actually work? These devices would range in price (depending on size) but could be as little as $100,000 - allocating 10,000 of them around the world would cost $1 billion or one tenth the amount of hurricane property damage incurred in a single year in the U.S. alone.
This is just example proposed by imaginative scientists who think that such tricks could help decrease the impact of destructive hurricanes. Levitt and Dubner discuss specific geo-engineering examples here. They are controversial and may never be adopted by governments, but their point is this: changing the behaviour of individuals (to drive less or pollute less for example) is never an easy task, using geo-engineering solutions can cool the temperature of the earth at a cost considerably cheaper than public awareness campaigns or large scale government spending on carbon reducing technology. The ideas may seem far-fetched, but would be worth carrying out in smaller projects.
Take their thoughts and findings with a grain of salt, but understand that such solutions could be cost-effective if they were funded and embraced by governments.
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