Jedimaster
I have shown three reasons why the arguments for policy action on global warming are irrational.

Please answer these questions.
a) It’s true isn’t it, that facts do not of themselves, supply value judgments and therefore that positive science does not, of itself, justify policy action?
b) How is government to know whether all the costs of a given policy action exceed the benefits? (By ‘all costs’ I mean those which can, and those which cannot be calculated in terms of money.)
c) How is government 1.to know, to 2. weigh up and 3.to reconcile the inconsistent value claims of all people, both now and in the future, affected by any proposed policy?

The argument on the warmist side now seems to have degenerated into merely asserting that those who don’t agree that policy action is justified are ‘denialists’, ‘cynics’ etc. This involves two fallacies: assuming what is in issue ie that the warmists have already established the justification of policy action; and name-calling.

However not only you, but *everyone* will be rationally unable to distinguish skeptics from mere denialists while ever the advocates of policy action have not been able to make their case.

From where we stand in this thread at least, the problem is actually the reverse: it is the advocates of policy action who cannot be brought to reason, and who seem to regard ignoring disproofs and repeating fallacies as providing all the justification they need.

Peter Hume,

There has been no science released that categorically disproves the climate change theory. Sure, there are plenty of examples of reputable scientists questioning the science, questioning the projections etc, which is necessary for rigorous scientific debate.

So it's true, the actual threats posed by global warming, and the actual involvement of human activity is not 100% known.

But there IS enough evidence to suggest it is very possible, and no reputable scientist is out there saying it is impossible.

So, with the possibility of global warming having a significant impact on the livelihoods of future generations, and with the possibility that the extent of aforementioned global warming can be reduced by changing human activity, there is an obligation to take action.

Your arguments about not knowing the exact costs etc are irrelevant to the fact that the obligation is there in light of what IS known.
It is the government's job to do their best to make the decision based on what IS known, not to avoid action because of limited available information. If this was to be the case, no decision could ever be made by government.

We invaded Iraq and participated in the complete destruction of their society and the deaths of thousands of innocents based on a much poorer understanding of the facts, after all...

The problem that the advocates of policy action do not realise they are facing is this.

Robinson Crusoe might perhaps directly compare the productivity of catching a rabbit with catching a fish.

But modern civilisation uses much more complex methods of production. For example just to produce a pencil, someone has to make the steel to make the truck to go into the forest to cut the timber; and someone has to make the wheat to make the bread for the sandwich of the timber-getter. Then it has to go to the mill, the factories, the trucks, and shops, and so on. And this just to make a pencil.

With a population of six billion, and millions of goods and services, you have to multiply the population and goods *factorially* to figure out how many simultaneous equations the central planning authority would have to solve to even begin to equal the status quo at its efficiency in allocating resources to their least wasteful uses. (And remember, that’s only at any given time. But the data are changing every second – rain falls, people die, others are born, innovations appear, people’s relative values change.)

The advocates of global warming policy action do not realise that they are blithely assuming that there is an entity that is capable of seeing through all this vast complexity, variability, uncertainty and motion, and distilling out of it the parts of the economy they do think justified, from those they don’t; and then in practice distinguishing them by rules and regulations.

The reasoning is false when followed to either end. If we go downward into the production possibilities, the astronomical number involved is not and cannot ever be within the knowledge of the central planning authority, no matter how clever he or his delegates are. The knowledge of any such authority, compared to the currently operative knowledge of six billion, is as a pin to a galaxy.

And if we go upward to the supposed source of the authority’s knowledge, we come out at democracy – the knowledge set which he is explicitly charged to override!

Peter Hume
I'll ignore the small lapse into derisive comment and focus on your substantive questions:
a)Your first question is actually two questions. I agree with the first on the basis of simple definition. Facts are not values. The second is almost a tautology, but the gist of it is that science (or publically shared facts) informs policy action.
b) Governments have to make this call all the time- that's what they are there for! In my time I wrote scores of Cabinet submissions which included cost-benefit analyses. Some were "back of the envelope", others included months of careful research. Of course not all of them turned out the way we predicted, but, in most cases "doing nothing was not an option". That's life- or civilisation as we know it.

c)See b). But further, you reasoning is somewhere between "straw man" and "absurd limits". Management is sometimes defined as decision making to maximise policy outcomes in the face of incomplete information. We never (or rarely) know everything about a situation where we need to make a decision. Given that we only have one world, we can't do "out of town (or planet) trials" to test our theories.

Global warming is not the first situation where we have had to rely on the available science. AIDS comes to mind- there were actually relatively few cases in Australia when the $100 million "grim reaper" campaign was launched in the mid-'80s.

In the absence of a detailed net energy analysis (NEA) of everything we do, I am inclined to agree with Garnaut and Turnbull (and I think the Fed Labor Government) that an ETS is a simple and efficient way of getting many people to take the right action and avoiding your concerns. Tony Abbott's "direct action" sounds good, but absent an NEA, we don't really know if we are actually using more energy than we are trying to save if we follow his detailed and prescriptive program.

..and Loxton- thank you for your kind comment.

To err is human...

I meant to thank GlenC for his kind comments about my contributions.

Some of Loxton's comments are unkind (about others), but I cannot prove that they are untrue.

Jedimaster
All I can say is, you are assuming what is in issue, and have not established a case for policy action in the first place.