Word: contrarian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Yade, the junior Minister of Sports, is under fire for breaking ranks and criticizing a government decision to roll back tax breaks for professional athletes. Though heartfelt, Yade's contrarian stand made for bad politics - something her peers have made painfully clear. Junior Minister for Family Affairs Nadine Morano told a newspaper that if Yade didn't "agree with government policies, [she] should shut [her] trap or resign." (See pictures of Paris expanding...
...could go on - and readers who want to immerse themselves in the remarkably detailed pissing match can follow it on Climate Progress or the Freakonomics blog. But if you want my moderately informed take on SuperFreakonomics' climate-change chapter, I think Levitt and Dubner went into it with a contrarian mind-set, which saturated their interpretation of existing climate-change science. In doing so, they vastly underplayed the real risks posed by global warming...
Still, Levitt and Dubner do tackle one legitimately controversial topic, one that I think could benefit from a somewhat contrarian perspective: geoengineering, or using technology to directly cool the earth to compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth...
Ultimately, that is the right way to use geoengineering and to approach climate change. While geoengineering shouldn't be ignored, Levitt and Dubner's biggest mistake in their examination of the topic lay in being seduced by a clever-sounding, cheap and contrarian shortcut. Climate change, however, is one issue for which the conventional wisdom still works, even though it's costly - and even though conventional wisdom won't sell 3 million books...
...Ahmadinejad Won': A Contrarian View, June...