Climate

It is possible that the global warming alarmists are entirely correct, but at this point nobody knows. Meanwhile, the premature consensus that is being enforced has to be treated with skepticism. Theoretical models of economic growth are not very good at predicting the behavior of man-made economic systems even 2 or 3 years into the future. The idea that accurate predictions about poorly-specified and uncontrolled natural systems of infinitely greater complexity can be made for long future time periods seems to me ridiculous on its face. Yet, we have claims being taken seriously that introducing this or that policy change, or failing to, will have effects of x tenths of a degree in average global temperatures 50 or 100 years out. Sorry, I find that not just implausible, but absurdly so.

(Here's a cautionary note: Many experiments in social psychology have demonstrated that in situations of ambiguity, people's opinions will tend to converge on a common, consensus judgment. The reason seems to be that people generally find a situation of uncertainty and ambiguity to be aversive, and we will take the steps available to us to reduce or eliminate the ambiguity. If there is good objective evidence at hand, judgments will converge appropriately. But the absence of objective evidence is no barrier to consensus; in that case, the agreement of others becomes a kind of "evidence," and people will escape uncomfortable ambiguity by, in effect, pooling their ignorance to arrive at a consensus judgment. The consensus, in that case, is based on nothing objective, and it bears no necessary relation to reality whatsoever. But, once arrived at, the consensus opinion may be very strongly held, nevertheless, and vigorously enforced within the group. This is sometimes referred to as "Groupthink." With respect to climate change, the issue is time-pressured, with claims of imminent disaster; it is potentially of great important for people pursuing various environmental, economic, and political agendas; and the data are weak and ambiguous. That the pressure for a social consensus would be correspondingly intense is completely predicable. It's a classic case, tailor-made to generate a whole series of scientific and public policy missteps, starting with a serious over-estimation of the state of objective scientific knowledge, especially the accuracy of climate prediction models.)

All that said, some of the policy steps being advocated are good ideas regardless of the true facts about climate change. Others are wrong-headed no matter what. Lowering the amount of CO2 emitted and reducing dependence on oil, especially Mid-East oil, are worth doing, even if they have no significant effect on global temperatures. Sacrificing economic growth on a large scale and investing huge amounts of money to chase tiny theoretical reductions in the rate of temperature rise are bad ideas no matter what the facts about global warming.

Byron