Keeping Our Cool

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Posting here will continue to be light as Kerry and I make our way to the Hawkeye State, but please turn your attention to the new issue of Cato Unbound, “Keeping Our Cool: What to Do About Global Warming,” featuring a lead essay by the estimable Jim Manzi. Commenters include: Joseph Romm, climate wonk at the Center for American Progress; Indur Goklany, author of The Improving State of the World; and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of Breakthrough.

Here’s a taste of Manzi:

The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative. If it turns out that even the outer edge of the probability distribution of our predictions for global-warming impacts is enormously conservative, and disaster looms if we don’t change our ways radically and this instant, then we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning. We have no good evidence that such a disaster scenario is imminent, but nobody can conceivably prove it to be impossible. Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.

But to force massive change in the economy based on such a fear is to get lost in the hothouse world of single-issue advocates, and become myopic about risk. We face lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity. A regional nuclear war in Central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of HIV, or a rogue state weaponizing genetic engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.

In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options. The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate literally all theorized climate change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime. The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.

We have ideas about what a real, rigorous, intellectually honest debate about climate policy should look like. We hope this will be it.

11 thoughts on “Keeping Our Cool”

  1. Will,

    I know you're a thoroughgoing Hayekian so I thought I would point you to a very interesting essay I read recently. Though, you may have already read it. The essay is taken from a 1990 issue of The Review of Austrian Economics and was written by Joseph Salerno. Salerno introduces many Hayekian ideas, like those of “spontaneous” or “undesigned” order and the price system as “the use of knowledge in society”, and then proceeds to contrast them with the views of Ludwig von Mises. Although the differences seem fairly subtle, I think the potential implications are great. Again, I read it and figured I would point Hayekians to it as the essay presents an interesting critique to some of Hayek's ideas. It's titled Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist. Linked below.

    http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/R4_2.pdf

    ps. I hope all goes well with the move and that you both have a safe trip!

  2. The issue is obviously not how we can “eliminate literally all theorized climate change risk.” No one worth listening to is talking about “all” risk, and the rhetorical use of 'theorized' here, as in the case of its use by evolution doubters, is designed to make global warming sound like a wild-ass guess.

    I wouldn't go too hard on Manzi about this such easy polemicism (it's not like I've never worked out on a wooden dummy), but it's really a bit much holding this piece out as a model of “real, rigorous, intellectually honest debate.”

  3. Michael Drake:

    I don't think that is an entirely fair critique. I went through in some detail in that article, in decending order: the expected costs, the probability distriobution of projected costs and then the inherently unquantifiable uncertainty (as opposed to quantifiable risk) of costs. Sonce neither the expected costs nor the risk-adjusted costs justify (by my lights, at least) the costs of the proposed remedies, one is left with no non-arbitrary stopping position on acceptable costs for abatement. This is not just a theoretical issue. I reviewed in the article various proposals by serious people (presumably people you would consider “worth talking to”), like Stern and Al Gore that would create expected costs net of benefits of $17 trillion and $23 trillion respectively. James Hansen (whom I assume is also “worth talking to”) has yet-more-severe proposals that are almost impossible to cost because they would be so draconian.

    Best regards,
    Jim Manzi

  6. Michael Drake said (in part): [...] is designed to make global warming sound like a wild-ass guess.

    Yeah, that sounds about right.

    Because, you see, it is a wild-ass guess.

    The models are, in plain Anglo-Saxon terms, shit. They don't predict anything (accurately, and that's what matters – I could make up a model that didn't predict, myself – and it wouldn't be worth using!).

    They don't predict what we have now from past data – in part because the data is also, to again use the plain Anglo-Saxon term, shit. Extrapolations and proxy data, none of which seem to ever stand up to the test of time or critique.

    It's a house of cards.

    (Unlike evolutionary theory, which has both mountains of strong paleontological and laboratory results to support it, not to mention the DNA evidence, and, well, the entire case. Which is, while hard to quantify, multiple orders of magnitude stronger than that for anthropogenic* global warming.

    Thus the specious comparison between climate change skepticism and creationism will not stand un-refuted in my presence.

    * I specify anthropogenic because it's the only kind we can sensibly take action against; if, as is increasingly suspected by various scientists [see recent American Physical Union announcement], what climate change we have, in either direction, is almost entirely unrelated to human activity, no amount of Gore-like changes to society and industry will do diddly, and thus they're pointless to contemplate, as their benefit cannot possibly approach their cost.)

  7. Sigivald, I'm happy to grant that evolution is a much more secure scientific theory than AGM; nonetheless, I'd say the consensus on the latter is strong enough that any attempt to cast it merely as a wild-ass guess betrays a lack of seriousness.

    Jim Manzi, Will provided an excerpt from your paper that he felt was exemplary. For the reasons I stated, I found it overheated (pardon the pun). But I wouldn't infer from a bit of polemics in an excerpt of a paper that the paper as a whole isn't serious, or even that its conclusion is wrong. That would depend on whether the excerpt is representative of the whole; from your comments, it seems not to be.

  10. It would be handy if there were a single pdf that collected all the contributions to the debate, now that it is done.

  11. It would be handy if there were a single pdf that collected all the contributions to the debate, now that it is done.