Freakonomics without the facts

Friday, October 23, 2009 - 05:28 in Psychology & Sociology

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's bogus claims on climate change have riled up scientists. Maybe that was the point I thought I had read enough about Superfreakonomics and its horrifyingly ignorant chapter on climate change to prepare myself for the actual text. But nothing could prepare me for the assault on science, logic and the English language that is this excerpt. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner managed to pull together just over 43 pages on science they clearly don't understand, with contradictory assumptions, clichés and gimmicky analogies. The chapter reads like a student term paper, a compilation of various factoids accumulated over the semester but displaying no real grasp of the subject matter. The logical leaps between sentences and at times bizarre sentence structure make me wonder if they actually farmed this chapter out to an undergraduate. The scientific flaws are numerous, starting with...

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