Website review: Missing answers on climate change |...
laodan discovered this in Environment
•1 reviews since Aug 3, 2007
science
•voxeu.org/index.php
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laodan discovered 10 months ago- Three critical questions need to be answered to get climate change policy right. in VOX by Paul Klemperer Edgeworth Professor of Economics at Oxford University
- The first question: how likely are the catastrophes against which we should be paying an u201cinsurance premiumu201d? We do not know the answer because there is little that serious scientists feel comfortable saying about the likelihood of truly disastrous events, such as feedback effects turning the planet into another Venus, as some distinguished scientists argue is possible. We urgently need research to tell us the likelihood of disastrous outcomes. - The second crucial uncertainty is that we do not know what future generations will regard as disastrous outcomes. Views change: 200 years ago many people thought slavery was reasonable, and 100 years ago women were commonly assumed inferior. Tastes about the environment can change surprisingly fast u2013 it seems hard to believe now that the US government came within an ace of flooding the Grand Canyon to produce hydropower as recently as 1966, before being thwarted by so-called "extremists". - The third critical question is the ethical one: how much should we care about the future? Nick Stern and his allies evaluate costs and benefits using real interest rates that discount the future very little except for the effects of economic growth. Many of his critics use interest rates at least 2 % higher which, compounded over a hundred years, values the welfare of our great-grandchildren less than one-seventh as much as Stern does. Is it morally correct to value our great-grandchildren one-tenth as much as ourselves? Why economists don't know all the answers about climate change This article is typical of the scientific approach. In other words turning around the problem and avoiding a direct answer by throwing some complexity in the debate. Nothing wrong with that is it not? Well I would like to know what you would be thinking personally if your house was burning and the fire-fighters were turning around the house debating about the level of probability that the house will be leveled avoiding thus to extinguish the fire at the image of what Paul Kemperer is doing in his article. But don't understand me wrong. I'm not against more complexity in the search for answers to a problem. I'm just appalled by the blindness of many scientists for all things global. It's as if they did not understand that we are part of a whole. Science is a vertical undertaking towards the micro and the macro but it fails to connect all its partial knowings on the horizontal plane of the whole. That's how we come to assist at all those side effects of modernity.
- Three critical questions need to be answered to get climate change policy right. in VOX by Paul Klemperer Edgeworth Professor of Economics at Oxford University
