I love that he slipped in some climate denialism in there. Definitely Milton Friedman's son. Anything that might require government intervention is probably bogus in libertarian world.
Basically he doesn’t deny that there is warming, he just says we shouldn’t be so confident it’s bad in net. I don’t personally agree with that but it’s hard unscientific.
I have no idea why economists are so guilty of thinking that their layman knowledge of various topics is somehow better than real experts.
> This would be a serious problem if we were facing rapid change, but we are not.
My understanding is that, geologically speaking, climate change is happening extremely quickly. But he goes on to say,
> Other species can [adapt] by evolution or by changing their range, but that could be a problem for species such as trees that evolve slowly and shift their range slowly
So he incorrectly claims that climate change is “slow” because it is happening over a period of decades or even centuries, and he does not seem to understand evolution at all, which I understand happens on a timescale several orders of magnitude longer.
What a pile of easily refutable nonsense, spewed out as fact. It’s just the usual blather, someone influential who thinks they understand everything, failing to accept even the basic, provable tenets of something inconvenient for their personal world view.
If that’s the quality of the “arguments” he had with his parents, little wonder we’re all fucked.
Current climate change is slow by human experience, but rapid by geologic terms. There is almost no precedent in the geological record for climate change happening at the current rate outside of mass extinction events.
When you are dealing with risk management for something that can affect billions of lives and manny trillions of dollars in assets the tolerance for risk must be very low. Policy makers are currently exposing us to far too much risk for very little upside. There has been a lot of collaboration between climate scientists and economists to map this out the last decade or so.
Really what is happening now is an unplanned, out of control experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of our atmosphere and oceans. The burden of proof lies with those who wish to continue the mad scientist experiment that is greenhouse gas emissions to prove it's safe. Not on the rest of us to prove it's unsafe. Despite the fact that it has been pretty well proven to be unsafe.
So it's not so much a question of ideology, as a question of where the money is coming from ("Cui bono?").