Did you miss the post where I linked to the papers from the American Meteorological Society, the IPCC and the American Geophysical Union that do exactly what you say you want to see? As I said, it only takes a little time with a search engine to show that professional associations of scientists in the field do have a consensus on the issue.

“Re 207: Tim, your answers are standard and correct the misapprehension I received from #195, which appeared to believe in the delimitation of cost/benefit analyses to the things to which economists restrict themselves.”

I know what you mean but I was referring to economics and economists, not to accountants and accountantcy, which would be closer to the narrower view you rightly disaprove of.

you seem to me to be either confused about the distinction I am making or you deny the difference between language and what language describes.
Second I cannot see any gain ( philosophically speaking )from postmodern spin i.e. no light is shed on any of the issues in the debate, if anything the spin muddies the water because :

1) no proper distinction between discovery and invention
2) no room for correspondence theory of truth
3) no room for proper concept of confirmation
4) cannot make sense of metaphysical or methodological naturalism.

Such an approach cannot make sense of science all you can do is try to discredit its position as a unique method for getting at truth but I will concede that it makes moderate sense when applied to texts and it might work in that narrow area ( but even here it is becomming pase ) as literary criticism.

Until then, to me this is just warmed over cataastrophism.

“studying animal husbandry by looking at a can of processed meat” has to be one of the greatest and funniest lines ever written. I hope its destined to become a classic. Too bad more of the climate change/global warming arguments aren’t of that quality. It surpasses my previous favorite, “nothing but a fart in a windstorm”. Keep up the good work.

When considering reengineering human society the ability to check the calculations and access the raw data is somewhat more than a simple curtesy and with a century’s observed change being at the bound of measurement error we are talking about very subtle effect. And at present we are basically left looking at the can of spam.

Part of the problem is that scientists don’t want to admit that general complex systems are part of the philosphy and methodology of science, while anti-science contrarians are ignorant or scornful of the entire issue. Why? Because it’s hard to come to analytic predictions. Scientists should explicitly grab the issue of general systems by the horns, and stop being argued into a rhetorical trap.

We are dealing with a complex system which can only be conceived of, more or less, as a reticulated (i.e. weblike, with circular and multiple linkages) multi-compartment model. These don’t seem to allow exact determinations in any field of science, (although often for very different reasons, including: definition, modelability, fine and coarse graining, variable measurability and verification, nonlinear computation and the n-body problem, experimental repeatability, and model verification.)

“Uncertainty” in complex, adaptive, open systems is usually characterized by inductive generalization from observations of the dynamics of a WIDE RANGE of such systems: ecosystems, social systems, computer systems, immune systems, economic systems… It is curious that the following things are never admitted as “facts about the world,” but here goes: there is a set of general patterns which are inferred from many different types of systems, such as: regular oscillation; multiple chreods; return to regime after perturbation; unpredictable catastrophic change (i.e., move to new regime;) and increase in probability of catastrophic change with additional forcing or exotic introductions.

The observer would note of all of these systems that they undergo oscillations within apparent parameters and occasionally flip into new regimes; they often demonstrate novel emergence; and that increased forcing, whether of native elements or exotic ones, increases the rates of oscillation and catastrophic shifts, sometimes after a quieter period of sub-threshold build-up.

This general sense of complex systems is what spurred very early fears decades ago, about the effects of forced CO2 build-up on the climate.

The observer would also see that these general events are not tractable to analytic prediction beforehand, due to any or several of various regular functions: including definition, modeling, measurement, calculation, experiment control, and repeated verification.

Yet it will remain a fact that, even though you can’t predict any exact occurrence or its timing, all complex systems will show these general dynamics. We can say true things about complex systems, in an inductive manner: 1) If left alone, systems tend to stay in their pre-existing oscillative regimes. 2) Add an exotic species, or an overdose of a native species, and a system will oscillate into new regimes, often violently—even though we can’t say precisely how or when, sometimes not even exactly why. And it is PRECISELY TRUE that you don’t know exactly what, how or when things are going to happen, before they happen.

So there are two completely different levels of falsifiable science in the same phenomenon:

(1) The deductive predictions about the events inside a single system, e.g. the climate, which are ideally precise spacetime events, calculated mathematically—but because they are reticulated models, are rarely, perhaps never, definitive.

(2) Inductive observations about the general patterns which all, or almost all, reticulated systems go through—although the exact characters of the events, and their timing, are not predictable. (Indeed, even AFTER they happen, the exact causes may still be in dispute.)

To anyone who thinks the second category is not “science,” let me suggest to you that it is just a different level of it, and such learning is precisely how most people get through the day, and cross the street, and regard their immune systems, and watch their diet. It is by abduction, metaphor, and analogy—and far from being non-science, it is just the complementary division, covering systems, information, and pattern. It appears to be the “logic” by which both evolutionary change, and embryological development, proceed.

At that point, we opt for the Precautionary Principle, as your grandma already knew.

But since systems TEND to remain in their old ways unless so perturbed, the “precautionary principle,” suitably leavened, is therefore the MOST SCIENTIFIC policy stance.

It should be pointed out, that work may be a “cost” to econometricians but is a benefit to anyone who is looking for work. The income from work is part of GDP, and so economic growth (the great fear of the contrarians) may continue even if the rate of growth were slowed,—although this presumed slowing isn’t written in stone, either. The monies being “saved” by avoiding climate mitigation at this time are NOT being applied to benefitting the world’s poor, except by the standard (and ordinal) syllogism from welfare economics, which maintains the conceit that “more productive” endeavors will serve to benefit everybody. Of course this ignores the widening gap in the size distribution of income, as well as a more expansive view of “wealth,” such as one which might include, among other things, the value of polar bears, beyond anyone’s misguided need to put a dollar value on them. To put it another way, there are ways in which a slower rate of GDP growth could benefit more people and things, depending on the delimitations of your cost/benefit analyses. Cost/benefit analyses in general take a very restricted subset of transactions among the circular and more complex chains of causation which make up the world. Why? Because even if you could monetize it all, it’s so complicated you probably couldn’t compute anything conclusively. Again, climate models are likely to become more valid than economic ones, in the long run. Perhaps we should train the world’s poor, and put them to work retrofitting power stations.

“But note the “over geological time”. As Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead, true, but if so, why get arsed about the”

Damn, that was a page-long comment, including some detailed comments on the engineering & economics of mitigating global warming for Tim Worstall, and it’s gone.

RG wrote:

“The most amazing and fun thing about all these postings is how absurdly easy it is to make a comment that throws the “true believers” into such an intense state of righteous indignation. Lighten up kids. It must not be much fun to live your lives constantly pissed off at everyone who doesn’t agree 100% with your views of what the future will bring.”

I think that’s as close to an admission of “I’m a troll” as one could see.

With all due respect, I don’t think I am confused over ‘consensus’. All I was saying is that ‘consensus’, in itself, is not an ultimate, legitimizing factor.

Secondly, I think you are wrong about both Lyotard and Latour (such kneejerk responses are so defensive). Latour, for example, is most certainly not a postmodernist. Indeed, he critiques postmodernism. Moreover, it is vital to recognise Lyotard’s distinction between legitimation within the language game of science, sensu stricto, and legitimation within the language games of society, sensu lato. Because ‘global warming’, as distinct from climate change, is so clearly a Latourian ‘hybrid’, the debate is bound to fall within the wider games of society (as witness on this Comment page).

Indeed, many eminent scientists accept openly that the debate cannot be settled by science as such both because what we are really discussing are people’s attitudes to risk and to change, whatever its cause, and because climate-change science itself is ‘soft’.

For example, read this from the famous meteorologist, Hendrik Tennekes, a specialist in turbulence, just published:

“In my view, [the] conceptual mistake is that the physics of complex systems does not provide opportunities for settling the climate debate that way. In 1987, I gave a speech in London entitled ‘Illusions of Security, Tales of Imperfection’. I dealt with the shortcomings of numerical weather forecasting there, but similar arguments apply to climate forecasting. The climate orthodoxy perpetrates the misconceptions involved by speaking, as IPCC does, about the Scientific Basis of Climate Change. Since then, I have responded to that ideology by stating that there is no chance at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific basis for policy measures concerning climate change. In my column in the magazine ‘Weather’ in February of 1990, I wrote:

‘The constraints imposed by the planetary ecosystem require continuous adjustment and permanent adaptation. Predictive skills are of secondary importance.’”

I’m afraid the failure of many scientists to engage with the language and legitimation processes of the postmodern world is now one of the problems. All science courses should include a 101 on ‘Science communication in the postmodern world’ (I’m glad to say that, in the UK, this now appears to be starting to happen at our better Universities).

Cheers, Philip.

lee a. arnold (#200): You make an interesting point, that I have not seen before put in that way. I am not knowledgeable enough to say much about it, but it does seem inevitable that humans will continue to increase their influence over the ecosystem even aside from any climate effects—and those other influences seem more important to me. If there is any one key, I think it is human population. Reducing human poulation would reduce all sorts of pressures, but that’s not something that can be done quickly (without some sort of catastrophe, that is).

Global warming is not happening, but even if it was happening, it’s happening at very slow rates. And, even if it’s not happening at slow rates, it’s not the result of human actions. Besides, even if it was the result of human activity, it’s not such a bad thing, actually. And even if it was a bad thing, there isn’t much to do about it. However, even if there was something that could be done about it, that’s not the way to do it, ‘cause the market knows best…