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The Forum > Article Comments > Global warming. It's not worth the risk > Comments

Global warming. It's not worth the risk : Comments

By David Young, published 5/1/2009

The world weather system is chaotic and transitive, and could flip to a completely different pattern that would make human life on this planet impossible.

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david, thank you for your reply. I now realise you wrote a similar post to which I responded recently. I agree we know little and chaos holds that tiny unknowns can lead to wildly divergent results over time, which makes me all the more baffled by the extent of your risk analysis. Does it not make it all the more vital to examine the costs and risks of taking certain actions, that will have consequences on wellbeing independent of climate, relative to the proposal of 'whatever it costs' on a big and poorly evidenced 'maybe'. I would rather allocate resources to areas where benefits can be readily measured and weighed against competing goals, over unlimited spending on a self-acknowledged unknown, bearing in mind the known unknowns and unknown unknowns of the future, that may demand those resources we waste. Jai is spot on with his post above on the illogical basis of such survivialist irrationality and obsession. Call me immoral for wishing to see money going to cure blindness and illness and hardship over Messianic delusions of saving the planet while costing humanity, bearing in mind again that you say we don't know.
Posted by fungochumley, Monday, 5 January 2009 7:41:27 PM
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“If we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the weather could flip to another set of rules.” Or not; the probability might be infinitesimally small, perhaps smaller than the probability of increased carbon dioxide ameliorating a global cooling episode. Ditto “The weather system may not flip over to another system, but we need to make certain it doesn’t.” What if it flipped to a system more favourable to human well-being? There is no basis for action in your article.

Similarly, Daviy posts “There is a current line of economic thinking that says that by going green in the present economic climate is a perfect way of stimulating the economy and creating jobs.” Such thinking probably doesn’t involve economists. At present going green appears to use more inputs to produce lower output; i.e., productivity and standards of living fall. We can create any amount of jobs if we don’t care if they are wealth-destroying rather than wealth-creating; but what’s the point?
Posted by Faustino, Monday, 5 January 2009 9:22:06 PM
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The trouble with arguments based on unpredictability (aka 'The Precautionary Principle') is that they can be used to justify doing (or not doing) ANYTHING.

"Eating that hamburger could cause a hurricane in China in six months, so why do it?"

"Turning the Sydney Harbour Bridge upside down could break the drought in the Sudan, so why not try it?"

Well, there are lots of reasons...

Ignorance is ignorance. All that chaos theory can do is to explain how and why some subjects are more difficult to provide explanations and predictions in than others. It cannot provide any way to predict events that are essentially unpredictable. Our best hope for predicting the future of climate or anything else is to rely on the standard model of cause and effect, with the onus of proof resting heavily on anyone who claims that tomorrow will be very different from today.

"Things could go haywire!"

Sure they could. Tell us how, and when, and why, and we'll be in a position to do something about it. But until then this claim is nothing but hysteria thinly disguised as science.
Posted by Jon J, Monday, 5 January 2009 9:32:15 PM
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Jon
Von Neuman tried standard cause and effect to predict/influence the weather for over 20 years spending billion upon billions of dollars, and he failed miserably. All science is probability. Testing a hypothesis against a null hypothesis to determine the degree of probability. Looking at the degree of probabilities involved with GW it is time to do something.
Posted by Daviy, Monday, 5 January 2009 10:46:24 PM
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The human population has greatly increased because of the use of fossil fuels to make food, medicines, and shelter, on which hundreds of millions of lives now rely.

The article simply assumes that governmental action to significantly reduce the use of these resources is not going to cause people to die as a result. But this assumption is not tenable. We need to get real. Plug into your assumptions that the lives of people may have to be sacrificed, as resources, technology and the proposed policies now stand. Now run the program and tell us what the read-out says.

The problem with applying these kinds of positivist models to human affairs is that it risks serious errors, and serious abuses.

Ultimately the question in issue is the balance of human values in the status quo, versus the balance of human values in the detriments or benefits of governmental action.

The first error is that these values don’t occur in aggregate or balance, they occur in individual human beings, with different values, with different time preferences, and many yet unborn. The relevant data sets are entirely missing from the calculations, namely, the values and time preferences of each individual one way versus the other.

But how could such a data set ever be known? The answer is, it can’t. The critical data are subjective intensive evaluations, not objective extensive quantities. The critical data cannot be measured or reduced to a common standard of value. There is no way of knowing, in a general aggregate sense, what would need to be known for the argument to make sense. The premise is a complete fallacy.

The second problem is that the positivist model assumes that the data are objective quantities to be manipulated impartially by authority. But the data are the values and lives of human beings to be forcibly manipulated by others with a vested interest in the outcome. What gives anyone the right to decide whether even one other person should die? Surely you need to establish your assumptions on that score first?
Posted by Diocletian, Monday, 5 January 2009 10:51:52 PM
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Even if only one person were to die as a result of the deliberate decision say to ban the use of a certain resource which now supplies food or medicine, and even if we were to know that more would die without such a decision, still that couldn’t justify the positive decision to deliberately kill someone, if the alternative number of even greater deaths were not to result from a deliberate decision to kill someone.

And that is without even dealing with the physical uncertainties involved, which do not permit even that most favourable assumption to be made for governmental action. The fact is, we don’t know, and have no way of estimating the different possible positive and negative physical and ecological outcomes, which are astronomically complex.

The entire approach is fatally flawed. It presumes to see the task as being to decide what to force everyone else into doing. It assumes that the majority of people are too stupid to make the right decision, but a majority of people acting through government magically comes into superior wisdom. There is not the slightest shred of evidence for this assumption.

The method being applied is not science, it is superstition, it is voodoo.

Our new Established Religion requires human sacrifice, only the economic ignorance of its new puritan adherents does not enable them to recognize the connection between their systematic repression of productive activity in one country on the one hand, and the resulting deaths and sickness in another country and time on the other. ‘Some people are just going to have to die on our quest to engineer the perfect society.’

The arguments in favour of governmental action are a mere display of spoilt ignorant self-opinionated evil hysteria. ‘Other people will have to go without food or medicine for their children so I can enjoy my modern western lifestyle while also having
the luxury good of ostentatious pious concern over an imaginary doomsday scenario at some unknown time in the future.
Posted by Diocletian, Monday, 5 January 2009 10:57:45 PM
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