Skeptical Scientists Urge World To 'Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference - with evidence
epw.senate.gov
epw.senate.gov
"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC"
"carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else"
This is the sort of nonsense that makes me ashamed to call myself a 'climate skeptic'. Then of course, I watch Al Gore's film where he shows Florida sinking under the ocean and that is ridiculous as well. Climate change is a potential-problem about which there are great (truly gigantic!) uncertainties and therefore no easy answers.
People should be informed about the issues in a manner that is as honest and realistic as possible, particularly when the uncertainties are so great.
Why is this being modded down? If you don't consider the worst case scenario in strategic decision making, you're a fool. Especially when the worst case is famine, plague, etc., not "my startup crashes and I move back in with the parents".
No, the worst case scenario is you crash and are alive but trapped... At night, the ice weasels come.
The weight given to an outcome in considering it in decision making would be the probability x magnitude (+ or -). So on your drive home the risk of death might not affect your decision to make the drive, if you had to drive across Johannesburg or Kuala Lumpar, you might consider taking a cab.
So even while the probability that the Country A would survive a nuclear first strike with the capability to retaliate was quite low -- the magnitude of the outcome from its doing so was enough to dissuade Country B from taking that chance.
To the other commenter below -- just google 'prisoner's dilemma' or 'Nash equilibrium' for some sources to get you started on game theory.
Note: I'm not claiming to be an expert on game theory by any means. I'm recounting the Mutually Assured Destruction example from an economics class's subsection on game theory and would be happy if someone wanted to prove me wrong or elaborate on the subject.
This only proves that those models were crap.
some simple logic, however, is more than enough to convince me that doing something is the vastly superior alternative to doing nothing.
if we choose to spend vast resources curbing emissions and such and we are wrong, those resources go to waste. given the current deployment of resources by our western civilization, such waste would need to go a long way to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.
if we listen to the most passionate of skeptics and choose to do nothing and we are wrong, by worst case estimates we're going to lose in a very big, spectacular fashion. we wont be counting beans to see how much money was squandered 'going green', we'll be trying to find a patch of green to grow some food.
On an interesting, and related note, an economist points out that property prices aren't falling (or at least relatively more where all prices are falling) in coastal areas that would be hit by rising sea levels.
The CC was a group of economists who got together and tried to figure out which world-problems were most economical to solve. I.e., if you had a fixed amount of money where would you spend it to do the most good. The list was something like: 1. AIDS prevention in Africa. 2. AIDS treatment in Africa. 3. Generalized healthcare in the 3rd world. etc etc. Last. Climate change
There are a lot of problems with the approach they took (considering only at the monetary value of lives not the "spiritual" value, assuming that charitable giving is a finite resource), but their approach of trying to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis yields some very interesting results.
If I really thought the cost was equivalent to "counting beans" and the benefit was avoiding a situation where we could no longer find arable land, I would agree that we should act quickly and strongly to halt CO2 emissions. In fact, I suspect that allowing the third-world access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy will benefit them more than avoiding small changes in climate.
Of course, when it comes to American's perceived god-given right to drive around in monsterous SUVs...I come down firmly on the side of the environmentalists!
While economic analysis is very important in this case it is also very difficult. You can get any result you want be fiddling with the discount rate.
I would argue that the consequences in breakdown of African civil society due to a continuing AIDS epidemic will have a similarly long-term consequences as climate change...and thus a similar discount rate should apply to both.
We need to keep spending on research in the area until we can find a solution that will make financial sense.
PS: look up the TED talk on the Copenhagen Consensus for a quick review of the issue
In the context of newly developing countries (i.e. third world countries that won't be third world countries in a few decades) the development of greentech is of paramount importance. The technologies and research behind preventing climate change (as theoretical as it all is) is very, very related to smart growth and green technology. By researching and implementing such tech, helping the reversal of our earth's possible climate change will (hopefully) be a useful side-effect.
What I'm trying to say, I think, is that by arguing that we should sit around and do nothing, we are setting ourselves up for disaster, and not just in the context of global warming. Sure, there is plenty of room to debate not only our contribution to the earth's warming, but even if we are warming at all.
There is not room to debate, however, whether or not we should pursue green fuels, smart growth, and to begin visualizing how our society is going to react to the end of the era of cheap oil.
These are some great Ted talks on the subject. The tragedy of suburbia. Hilarious, profane, and spot on. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121
John Doerr talks about the importance and profitability of green tech, the $6 trillion 'mother of all markets'. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/128
The fixed amount of money concept assumes that solving the other problems (eg. AIDS, 3rd world health, etc) are realistic opportunity costs for tackling climate change... but I don't think people would (in aggregate) willingly spend the money saved from climate change regulation on solving these other problems. They'd probably just buy more stuff for themselves.
The equivalent scenario would be if governments taxed people the same amount as the cost of regulation - and that is a tad unrealistic.
The conference was run by Bjorn Lomborg who is an avid climate change skeptic and hence there may be some bias. Read Scientific American's critique of his work and you can judge for yourself: http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/reading/sciam.pdf
It was also only attended by economists, and the effects of the discount rate and formula they applied (only considering a the next 300 years) might were said by one of the attendees that "climate change was set up to fail".