What do Al Gore and Mt. Pinatubo have in common? This baffling question is the title of the final chapter of Superfreakonomics, a sequel to Freakonomics, by the tandem of University of Chicago Professor Stephen Levitt and former New York Times Magazine editor Stephen Dubner.
On June 15, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, an erstwhile inactive volcano located in Zambales (after whom the ill-fated plane of President Ramon Magsaysay, a native of Zambales, was named) made global headlines when it made a massive eruption for nearly nine hours. And what is the common ground between Mt. Pinatubo and former US Vice President Al Gore who became a Nobel Peace laureate on account of his environmental advocacy? Let’s hear it from Prof. Levitt and Mr. Dubner:
“Mount Pinatubo was the most powerful volcanic eruption in nearly one hundred years. Within two hours of the main blast, sulfuric ash had reached 22 miles into the sky. By the time it was done, Pinatubo had discharged more than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. What effect did that have on the environment?
“As it turned out, the stratospheric haze of sulfur dioxide acted like a layer of sunscreen, reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. For the next two years, as the haze was settling out, the earth cooled out by an average of nearly one degree Fahrenheit, or. .5 degrees Celsius. A single volcanic eruption practically reversed, albeit temporarily, the cumulative global warming of the previous hundred years.”
Learning from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption experience, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner went to Intellectual Ventures (IV), “one of the most unusual laboratories in the world”, in Bellevue, Washington (a suburb of Seattle) where they met with the team of Nathan Myrvhold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft. Mr. Myrvhold co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, who was Microsoft’s chief software architect and a biophysicist.
By the way, Nathan Myrvhold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: “futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates”, who is also an investor and occasional inventor at IV.
One of the findings of Nathan Myrvhold’s IV team is that most of the global warming seen over the past few decades “might actually be due to good environmental stewardship” because ‘all the heavy-particulate pollution generated seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun.”
Against conventional wisdom, they have realized that carbon dioxide is not poisonous and not the culprit in global warming. Their essential finding is that the current menu of proposed global warming solutions are “too little, too late and too optimistic.” That’s what got them to focus on replicating Mt. Pinatubo’s extraordinary feat.
They came up with an idea: why not create a “garden hose to the sky” or, to put it more technically, build “a stratospheric shield for climate stabilization?” How will this work?
First, there needs to be a base from which sulfur dioxide can be liquefied. The IV team has found a suitable site: the Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta, Canada. There are big yellow mountains of stockpiled sulfur that have been separated from other waste components of oil, measuring a hundred meters high by a thousand meters wide each. “So you could put up one little pumping facility up there, and with one corner of those sulfur mountains, you could solve the global warming problem for the northern hemisphere,” point out Nathan Myrvhold.
A similar solution may be found for the southern hemisphere “because stratospheric air naturally spirals toward the poles, and because the arctic regions are more vulnerable to global warming.” The estimated total cost of this endeavor is $250 million which is $50 million less than what al Gore’s foundation is spending on public awareness efforts alone.
So there, fellow Filipinos: Mt. Pinatubo may have caused our people tremendous suffering and it may have set back progress and development in Central Luzon by two decades --- but its eruption has already brought about an unintended benefit. A competent think tank has come up with a potentially viable solution to global warming that is cost-effective and doable.
And where does Santa Claus come into the picture?
Well, the first chapter of the book has an even more catchy title: How Is a Street Prostitute Like a Department-Store Santa?
This is about an empirical study on conducted by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist from Columbia University, on the actual day-to-day activities of prostitutes in Chicago. A capsule summary of his findings: A typical street prostitute works an average of 13 hours a week, performing 10 sexual acts, and earns an hourly wage of $27 an hour or $350 a week.”
And the answer to the question posed by our featured authors: A street prostitute, like a department-store Santa “both take advantage of short-term job opportunities brought about by holiday spikes in demand.”
Let’s focus on replicating Mt. Pinatubo’s tremendous feat and do our bit in addressing the problem of global warming.
