Eric Gisin
2010-01-06 18:56:04 UTC
No wonder SuperFreakonomics was denounced by the Church of Climatology.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/06/steven-d-levitt-and-stephen-j-dubner-paging-doctor-who.aspx
January 6, 2010, 06:00:00 | NP Editor
In a nondescript section of Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, lies a particularly
nondescript series of buildings. There's a heating-and-air-conditioning company, a boat maker, a
shop that fabricates marble tiles and another building that used to be a Harley-Davidson repair
shop. This last one is a windowless, charmless structure of about 20,000 square feet whose occupant
is identified only by a sheet of paper taped to the glass door. It reads "Intellectual Ventures."
Inside is one of the most unusual laboratories in the world. There are lathes and mould-makers and
3D printers and many powerful computers. But there is also an insectary where mosquitoes are bred
so they can be placed in an empty fish tank and, from more than a hundred feet away, assassinated
by a laser. This experiment is designed to thwart malaria. The disease is spread only by certain
species of female mosquito, so the laser's tracking system identifies the females by wing-beat
frequency and zaps them.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) is an invention company. The lab, in addition to all the gear, is
stocked with an elite assemblage of brainpower, scientists and puzzle-solvers of every variety.
They dream up processes and products and then file patent applications, more than 500 a year. The
company also acquires patents from outside inventors, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to solo
geniuses toiling in basements.
IV operates much like a private-equity firm, raising investment capital and paying returns when its
patents are licensed. The company currently controls more than 20,000 patents, more than all but a
few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a "patent troll,"
accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But
there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created
the first mass market for intellectual property.
Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at
Microsoft. He co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, a biophysicist who was Microsoft's chief
software architect. Myhrvold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder
of its research lab and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. "I don't know anyone I would say is
smarter than Nathan," Gates once observed.
Myhrvold, 50, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school
at 14 and by the time he was 23 had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor's degree
(mathematics), two master's degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics) and a PhD
(mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with
Stephen Hawking.
Myhrvold recalls watching the British science-fiction TV show Dr. Who when he was young: "The
Doctor introduces himself to someone, who says, 'Doctor? Are you some kind of scientist?' And he
says, 'Sir, I am every kind of scientist.' And I was, like, Yes! Yes! That is what I want to be:
every kind of scientist!"
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his
scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber and a
collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments and, especially, dinosaur
bones: He is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the
world.
He is also very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the 400
richest Americans.
At the same time, he is famously cheap. As he walks through the IV lab pointing out his favourite
tools and gadgets, his greatest pride is reserved for the items he bought on eBay or at bankruptcy
sales. Though Myhrvold understands complexity as well as anyone, he is a firm believer that
solutions should be cheap and simple whenever possible.
He and his compatriots are currently working on, among other projects: a better internal combustion
engine; a way to reduce an airplane's "skin drag" and thus increase its fuel efficiency; and a new
kind of nuclear power plant that would radically improve the future of worldwide electricity
production. Although many of their ideas are just that - ideas - some have already started saving
lives. The company has invented a process whereby a neurosurgeon who is attempting to repair an
aneurysm can send IV the patient's brain-scan data, which are fed into a 3D printer that produces a
life-size plastic model of the aneurysm. The model is shipped overnight to the surgeon, who can
make a detailed plan to attack the aneurysm before cutting through the patient's skull.
It takes a healthy dose of collective arrogance for a small group of scientists and engineers to
think they could simultaneously tackle many of the world's toughest problems. Fortunately, these
folks have the requisite amount. They have already sent satellites to the moon, helped defend the
United States against missile attack and, via computing advances, changed the way the world works.
They have also conducted definitive scientific research in many fields, including climate science.
So it was only a matter of time before they began thinking about global warming.
On the day we visited IV, Myhrvold convened roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about the
problem and possible solutions. They sat around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one
end.
They are a roomful of wizards, and yet without doubt Myhrvold is their Harry Potter. For the next
10 or so hours, he prodded and amplified, interjected and challenged.
Everyone in the room agrees that the earth has been getting warmer and they generally suspect that
human activity has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global-warming
rhetoric in the media and political circles is oversimplified and exaggerated.
Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from "people who get on their high horse and say that our
species will be exterminated."
Does he believe this?
"Probably not."
When An Inconvenient Truth is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film's purpose,
Myhrvold believes, was "to scare the crap out of people." Although Al Gore "isn't technically
lying," he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes - the state of Florida disappearing
under rising seas, for instance - "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time
frame. No climate model shows them happening."
But the scientific community is also at fault. The current generation of climate-prediction models
are, as Lowell Wood puts it, "enormously crude." Wood is a heavyset and spectacularly talkative
astrophysicist in his 60s. Long ago, Wood was Myhrvold's academic mentor. Myhrvold thinks Wood is
one the smartest men in the universe. Off the top of his head, Wood seems to know quite a bit about
practically anything: the melt rate of the Greenland ice core (80 cubic kilometres per year); the
percentage of unsanctioned Chinese power plants that went online in the previous year (about 20%);
the number of times that metastatic cancer cells travel through the bloodstream before they land
("as many as a million").
Wood has achieved a great deal in science, on behalf of universities, private firms and the U.S.
government. It was Wood who dreamed up IV's mosquito laser assassination system - which, if it
seems vaguely familiar, is because Wood also worked on the Reagan-era "Star Wars" missile-defence
system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Today, at the IV think session, Wood is wearing a rainbow tie-dyed short-sleeve dress shirt with a
matching necktie.
"The climate models are crude in space and they're crude in time," he continues. "So there's an
enormous amount of natural phenomena they can't model. They can't do even giant storms like
hurricanes."
There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today's models use a grid of cells to map
the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and
more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing
power. "We're trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now," he says, "but it will take
us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do
the job."
That said, most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to
reasonably conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future.
Not so, says Wood.
"Everybody turns their knobs" - that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their
models - "so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty
getting funded." In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a
disinterested and unco-ordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one
another. It isn't that current climate models should be ignored, Wood says - but, when considering
the fate of the planet, one should properly appreciate their limited nature.
As Wood, Myhrvold and the other scientists discuss the various conventional wisdoms surrounding
global warming, few, if any, survive unscathed.
The emphasis on carbon dioxide? "Misplaced," says Wood.
Why?
"Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapour."
But current climate models "do not know how to handle water vapour and various types of clouds.
That is the elephant in the corner of this room. I hope we'll have good numbers on water vapour by
2020 or thereabouts."
Myhrvold cites a recent paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent
warming. Instead, all the heavy-particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have
cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun. That was the global cooling that caught scientists'
attention in the 1970s.
The trend began to reverse when we started cleaning up our air. "So most of the warming seen over
the past few decades," Myhrvold says, "might actually be due to good environmental stewardship!"
From SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Copyright © 2009 by Steven D.
Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Published with arrangement by HaperCollinsCanada.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/06/steven-d-levitt-and-stephen-j-dubner-paging-doctor-who.aspx
January 6, 2010, 06:00:00 | NP Editor
In a nondescript section of Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, lies a particularly
nondescript series of buildings. There's a heating-and-air-conditioning company, a boat maker, a
shop that fabricates marble tiles and another building that used to be a Harley-Davidson repair
shop. This last one is a windowless, charmless structure of about 20,000 square feet whose occupant
is identified only by a sheet of paper taped to the glass door. It reads "Intellectual Ventures."
Inside is one of the most unusual laboratories in the world. There are lathes and mould-makers and
3D printers and many powerful computers. But there is also an insectary where mosquitoes are bred
so they can be placed in an empty fish tank and, from more than a hundred feet away, assassinated
by a laser. This experiment is designed to thwart malaria. The disease is spread only by certain
species of female mosquito, so the laser's tracking system identifies the females by wing-beat
frequency and zaps them.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) is an invention company. The lab, in addition to all the gear, is
stocked with an elite assemblage of brainpower, scientists and puzzle-solvers of every variety.
They dream up processes and products and then file patent applications, more than 500 a year. The
company also acquires patents from outside inventors, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to solo
geniuses toiling in basements.
IV operates much like a private-equity firm, raising investment capital and paying returns when its
patents are licensed. The company currently controls more than 20,000 patents, more than all but a
few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a "patent troll,"
accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But
there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created
the first mass market for intellectual property.
Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at
Microsoft. He co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, a biophysicist who was Microsoft's chief
software architect. Myhrvold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder
of its research lab and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. "I don't know anyone I would say is
smarter than Nathan," Gates once observed.
Myhrvold, 50, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school
at 14 and by the time he was 23 had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor's degree
(mathematics), two master's degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics) and a PhD
(mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with
Stephen Hawking.
Myhrvold recalls watching the British science-fiction TV show Dr. Who when he was young: "The
Doctor introduces himself to someone, who says, 'Doctor? Are you some kind of scientist?' And he
says, 'Sir, I am every kind of scientist.' And I was, like, Yes! Yes! That is what I want to be:
every kind of scientist!"
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his
scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber and a
collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments and, especially, dinosaur
bones: He is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the
world.
He is also very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the 400
richest Americans.
At the same time, he is famously cheap. As he walks through the IV lab pointing out his favourite
tools and gadgets, his greatest pride is reserved for the items he bought on eBay or at bankruptcy
sales. Though Myhrvold understands complexity as well as anyone, he is a firm believer that
solutions should be cheap and simple whenever possible.
He and his compatriots are currently working on, among other projects: a better internal combustion
engine; a way to reduce an airplane's "skin drag" and thus increase its fuel efficiency; and a new
kind of nuclear power plant that would radically improve the future of worldwide electricity
production. Although many of their ideas are just that - ideas - some have already started saving
lives. The company has invented a process whereby a neurosurgeon who is attempting to repair an
aneurysm can send IV the patient's brain-scan data, which are fed into a 3D printer that produces a
life-size plastic model of the aneurysm. The model is shipped overnight to the surgeon, who can
make a detailed plan to attack the aneurysm before cutting through the patient's skull.
It takes a healthy dose of collective arrogance for a small group of scientists and engineers to
think they could simultaneously tackle many of the world's toughest problems. Fortunately, these
folks have the requisite amount. They have already sent satellites to the moon, helped defend the
United States against missile attack and, via computing advances, changed the way the world works.
They have also conducted definitive scientific research in many fields, including climate science.
So it was only a matter of time before they began thinking about global warming.
On the day we visited IV, Myhrvold convened roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about the
problem and possible solutions. They sat around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one
end.
They are a roomful of wizards, and yet without doubt Myhrvold is their Harry Potter. For the next
10 or so hours, he prodded and amplified, interjected and challenged.
Everyone in the room agrees that the earth has been getting warmer and they generally suspect that
human activity has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global-warming
rhetoric in the media and political circles is oversimplified and exaggerated.
Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from "people who get on their high horse and say that our
species will be exterminated."
Does he believe this?
"Probably not."
When An Inconvenient Truth is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film's purpose,
Myhrvold believes, was "to scare the crap out of people." Although Al Gore "isn't technically
lying," he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes - the state of Florida disappearing
under rising seas, for instance - "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time
frame. No climate model shows them happening."
But the scientific community is also at fault. The current generation of climate-prediction models
are, as Lowell Wood puts it, "enormously crude." Wood is a heavyset and spectacularly talkative
astrophysicist in his 60s. Long ago, Wood was Myhrvold's academic mentor. Myhrvold thinks Wood is
one the smartest men in the universe. Off the top of his head, Wood seems to know quite a bit about
practically anything: the melt rate of the Greenland ice core (80 cubic kilometres per year); the
percentage of unsanctioned Chinese power plants that went online in the previous year (about 20%);
the number of times that metastatic cancer cells travel through the bloodstream before they land
("as many as a million").
Wood has achieved a great deal in science, on behalf of universities, private firms and the U.S.
government. It was Wood who dreamed up IV's mosquito laser assassination system - which, if it
seems vaguely familiar, is because Wood also worked on the Reagan-era "Star Wars" missile-defence
system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Today, at the IV think session, Wood is wearing a rainbow tie-dyed short-sleeve dress shirt with a
matching necktie.
"The climate models are crude in space and they're crude in time," he continues. "So there's an
enormous amount of natural phenomena they can't model. They can't do even giant storms like
hurricanes."
There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today's models use a grid of cells to map
the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and
more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing
power. "We're trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now," he says, "but it will take
us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do
the job."
That said, most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to
reasonably conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future.
Not so, says Wood.
"Everybody turns their knobs" - that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their
models - "so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty
getting funded." In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a
disinterested and unco-ordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one
another. It isn't that current climate models should be ignored, Wood says - but, when considering
the fate of the planet, one should properly appreciate their limited nature.
As Wood, Myhrvold and the other scientists discuss the various conventional wisdoms surrounding
global warming, few, if any, survive unscathed.
The emphasis on carbon dioxide? "Misplaced," says Wood.
Why?
"Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapour."
But current climate models "do not know how to handle water vapour and various types of clouds.
That is the elephant in the corner of this room. I hope we'll have good numbers on water vapour by
2020 or thereabouts."
Myhrvold cites a recent paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent
warming. Instead, all the heavy-particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have
cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun. That was the global cooling that caught scientists'
attention in the 1970s.
The trend began to reverse when we started cleaning up our air. "So most of the warming seen over
the past few decades," Myhrvold says, "might actually be due to good environmental stewardship!"
From SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Copyright © 2009 by Steven D.
Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Published with arrangement by HaperCollinsCanada.