(Global Warming Eco-Freaks) Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics

Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose.

Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.

Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they're a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful "SuperFreakonomics"—the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller "Freakonomics"—gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.

Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is "nuts." Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of "[pushing] global cooling myths" and "sheer illogic." The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its "faulty statistics." Never to be outdone, ...

The reason Gore and the political Left don't like the idea is that it doesn't transfer any control to them over our lives and daily actions....it's too simple.

Not to mention it it is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist - the earth is entering a big cooling cycle for at least the next 11 years, and perhaps for the next 11,500 years [magnetic reversal!].

You get invited by an actual employee/worker of IntVen, the screened to see if you would be an inventor to track. If accepted, you can send in patent-worthy ideas, and if the idea is accepted, you get a cash payment. If it’s patented, you get another cash payment. Then you get a share of the royalties if the patent is licensed.

Note that they get rights only to ideas I send to them, and they have those rights for only 90 days unless they decide to accept the idea. Then they own it and the rest goes forward.

I retain the rights to ideas I don’t submit, or which they would reject or take no action on for 90 days.

So it’s not a “regular job” per se, but a group that will suck up IP from their network of inventors. And usually in pretty high-tech/big-picture areas. They don’t like small patents, they want patents that can return tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

And they do have actual staff researchers and engineers and scientists whose job is to confirm/deny the plausibility of your invention, push back on your idea to learn/flesh it out more, and to help sculpt the science and disclosure of any patent application. But we inventors are just wild men with crazy ideas feeding into the beast...;)

Right now, I’m batting 1000 - every idea I’ve submitted has been accepted and is going forward with patenting. They thin the herd of inventors quite regularly to eliminate those who have a low conversion rate, so I only submit those ideas I know are sure-fire winners for their criteria, and that I simply do not have the contacts or resources or energy to develop on my own. Go for quality over quantity, so to speak!

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