Endgame
Thanks to John Roberts, the white man can finally get a break in this country:
— Why models overestimate the cost of environmental legislation.
— It would actually be a third stimulus rather than a second (we had a small one under Bush) but John Judis is right that we need one.
— Coal-loving congressfolk from Dixie might want to check out what climate change is going to do to their farms.
— TPM Media is getting a lot bigger.
— Applying economic cost-benefit analysis to a global problem that disproportionately affects the poor leads to insane conclusions.
Apparently in Australia you can advertise hard liquor on television, with brotastic results; a US ban on TV beer ads would probably improve public health and also serve as an important stimulus to print media.
34 Responses to “Endgame”
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June 29th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I saw Josh Marshall on Colbert and he was so cocky; I remember how humble he appeared to be on his first videos. How long until Marhshall becomes a dick showing up on Sunday panels?
But glad to see TPM get bigger.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I love dog balls and I cannot lie
A dog’s scrotum will satisfy
Whenever I need some action
A hound brings satisfaction! (Unless it’s a chihuahua.)
June 29th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Matt, the TV ad ban on hard liquor in the US is pretty much dead. Cable carries ads all the time.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
- Interesting to see obsessed libertarians coming by MattY’s blog trying to make liberals look bad by showing that, instead of attempting to engage me in debate, all they can do is act like 5-year-olds. But, then again, what did anyone expect from libertarians?
- Also interesting to see MattY supporting racism (albeit of the good kind) with the intro to this post.
- More proof that you can’t trust what you read at Google’s favorite online encyclopedia. (Note that my argument only concerns their “reliable sources” rule and not the other aspects of that story).
- Five days after I caught them in a lie, CAP is still spreading the lie. See americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/2trillion_solution.html, noting that that was promoted by MattY. If you don’t spot the major lie immediatedly – a lie involving nearly ten million people – see this. I guess to those – like MattY – caught in the Soros reality distortion field that lie isn’t a lie at all but is simply newtruth.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
economic models overestimate the costs of environmental legislation for the same reason that climate models overestimate human impact on global climate in the first place. These are incredibly complex real-world situations of endless and not terribly well-understood interelations and feedbacks. Trying to make accurate long-term predictions in such situations is virtually impossible, and ends up defaulting to the prejudices of the model-makers. It’s a simple case of garbabe in, garbage out.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
attention everybody, now that noted climatologist conradg has announced that this whole thing “climate change” thing is overblown, we can put all that behind us now.
my only question is why did he tell us this sooner? just think of all the countless years of research lesser climatologists have wasted!
June 29th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
As I pointed out at 538, the hardest hit regions is full of people that it’s in our interest to kill off in mass numbers so it’s not that surprising that US lawmakers dont’ want to do a whole lot.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
mATt Y was on the radio today speaking with co-founder of 80s pop duo Wham! Andrew Ridgeley.
(That wasn’t him.)
He had a British accent.
(Lots of people do Linus.)
That may be true.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Why models overestimate the cost of environmental legislation.
Because most of them, frankly, just aren’t all that bright.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
You’ll never get a second stimulus through Congress, no matter how bad things get, not even with a Democratic congress.
Never mind President Collins and President Nelson, places like DemocraticUnderground.com are full of ostensible progressives and liberals who can’t distinguish between the bank bailout and the first stimulus package, not to mention Democratic liquidationists who want to give the consumer society a good colonic via a proper crash.
The stimulus moment has come and gone — you couldn’t get 50 votes-plus-Biden for a new one. We’re riding this one all the way to the bottom.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Thanks to John Roberts, the white man can finally get a break in this country
If I ever meet the white man, I’ll let him know he should write Roberts a thank-you note…
June 29th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Now that noted blog commentator cleek has made another ad hominem put down, the science finally and truly is in. Experts in the field are ready to declare a grande douche here, and there are no counter-arguments possible.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Matt, the TV ad ban on hard liquor in the US is pretty much dead. Cable carries ads all the time.
Indeed, a variant on that Jim Beam ad shows frequently on cable in the US. Perhaps a ban on all alcoholic ads would have an effect, but it would have to cover cable to make a big dent.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
The link about insane GNP analysis of the consequences of the climate change has a quote about the impact of climate change on leisure.
It alleges some studies how temperature affects outdoor leisure, and that if the average yearly temperature is below 20 C, then warmer weather translates to more outdoor fun on the average. And very few people in USA live in warmer places.
So I looked up. Where I live, the average yearly temperature is 10 C, plus, I swear, hiking in snow is a kind of fun that I practice. And it is really more fun to hike when it is, say, -5 C (25 F) rather than 30 C (90 F). But how about the great outdoors in Houston, with average yearly temp. of 20 C?
Well, no problem at all: increase the global temperature average by 2.5 C, melt the Antarctic and flood the place?
Voila! Inhabitants move to more temperate places like Alberta or Manitoba, and enjoy more outdoors.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Global warming may need to be addressed but some people in Obama’s administration trying their own homebrewed policy may be setting Obama up for serious damage.
A guy I know in Appalachia says that the federal government is now trying to halt all new coal mining permits. They are not denying them outright –because that could be challenged in court via lawsuit. Rather, they are allegedly doing the “slow roll” — moving extremely slowly. Which can bankrupt businessmen who need cash flow.
That may not hurt the heads of most people here. But what should hurt their heads is a shortage of coal reserves. Like it or not, a huge chunk of our electricity is still generated by coal — and urban blackouts in mid-winter are not funny.
This situation could be amplified by the return of swine flu this fall. A Tamiflu-resistant strain was reported in Denmark today, the news from Argentina (which is currently entering its flu season ) is bad, and the federal government is already deciding who will die this winter due to lack of a sufficient supply of vaccines. See http://www.pandemicflu.gov/vaccine/prioritization.html#DraftGuidanceonAllocatingandTargetingPandemicInfluenzaVaccine
While essential personnel in critical infrastructure (including electricity ) have high priority, lowly coal miners are going to get the dirty end of the commode brush (along with 121 Million other adults in the 18-65 age range). By the time the brainiacs in Washington realize why the generating plants ain’t working, it will be too late.
Note how “essential government personnel” get high priority. If the flu has a high death rate in the fall, then 38 million old farts and 36 million people in the High Risk category ( diabetics, asthmatics,etc.) get tossed overboard in order to divert more vaccines to the Military, Intelligence, Homeland Security and Law Enforcement.
All of which will have people asking why the federal government pisses away $1 Trillion per YEAR on “Defense” and yet can’t defend us from a flu virus.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
“US ban on TV beer ads would probably improve public health and also serve as an important stimulus to print media.”
I find it creepy when progressives so readily propose legislation that limits what people can say. No, Miller Lite commercials aren’t Hamlet. But come on, man. Do we really want to go down that road? “Public health” is a pretty broad term. One conservatives can use pretty effectively, too. That could be bad.
Seriously. If you are the kind of person who would normally be studying in the library, but go out and funnel a case of beer because Spuds McKenzie or his modern equivalent said so… you deserve both the hangover and the lower life expectancy.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
But by all means, let’s talk about Michael Jackson instead.
Or maybe Dana Milbank’s complaint that only “real journalists” should be allowed to ask questions at a Presidential news conference.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I don’t buy it. Obama is all smoochy with the coal companies. He always has been. How do you think he won in southern Illinois?
“Clean coal” technology, mountaintop removal permits…I’m not sure I’m buying it, Don.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:05 am
“A guy I know in Appalachia says that the federal government is now trying to halt all new coal mining permits.”
I’m guessing this guy has not been successful in buying and selling coal permits. Unless he is, and is totally bullshitting you. Permits will slow down a little, but only because particularly controversial projects will get stopped and there can be a photo-op. But the coal mining will continue, don’t worry. The threat of lease restriction is what drives out the jokers in the investment pool, which is when the real boys buy out their stock and make a fortune. Because the lease will be approved if you bought the right Congressman. And there is a Congressman for every new lease looking for approval.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:36 am
OT: This needs more visibility, please:
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/right-wing-military-writer-we-may-have-to-kill-war-journalists/
h/t LGM
June 30th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Thanks to John Roberts, the white man can finally get a break in this country
A lot of people are saying stupid things about the Ricci case, but I don’t think that is an excuse for this statement. Cases like Ricci do in fact raise a serious problem, namely how to deal with the fact that conscious attempts to avoid Title VII liability can in fact look much like Title VII violations themselves.
Of course on the merits, I think you can argue that Kennedy (who actually wrote the Ricci opinion) at best has made this area of the law murkier and not clearer, and at worst has put employers in an impossible position such that litigation will be inevitable no matter how they try to deal with these situations. I also think you can fault the Court for not remanding the case after announcing a new rule. But I think making the claim that Roberts (and why just him?) was striking a blow for white people is just falling into the trap of playing the game by the rules set by those hostile to legislation like Title VII entirely.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Trying to make accurate long-term predictions in such situations is virtually impossible, and ends up defaulting to the prejudices of the model-makers.
That is a non sequitur. It is undoubtedly true that the relevant systems are chaotic enough that the amount of irreducible error in the predictions of the models is large (even noting the predictions take the form of probability distributions over a range of outcomes). Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the models are automatically going to be biased in any particular direction. And that is a very important point to understand, because among other things it means the error may well end up being an underestimation and not an overestimation of the probability-weighted negative impacts of our current course of conduct.
Generally, there is no avoiding making some sort of a decision: even just continuing on our current course of conduct represents a decision. Accordingly, there is also no avoiding the task of coming up with the best possible models for predicting the probability distribution over outcomes for the various possible decisions. And that remains true even if those models by absolute standards are not likely to be highly accurate. In other words, “best possible” doesn’t always mean “really good”, and yet “best possible” is still what we have to go with.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:19 am
The guy I spoke to is a lawyer for a company wanting to mine some coal I own as part of a heirship. While that coal would be mined underground, I believe the lawyer was talking about surface mining permits. For what used to be called strip-mining –when it was done on a small scale — but which is now called mountain-top removal.
Greater regulation of Mountain-top removal mining is the subject of debate in Washington. This recent news article from the local paper of Williamson West Virginia tells of some people from that area trying to attend hearings in the Capitol on the matter:
http://www.williamsondailynews.com/pages/full_story/push?article–Miners+take+message+to+Washington-%E2%80%98We%E2%80%99re+not+going+away%E2%80%99-%20&id=2846724&instance=home_news_lead
I hate strip mining — it turns the land into a desert and pollutes the water with sulfuric acid leached from the exposed slate. It destroys jobs –it doesn’t create them. Because it employs only a small number of men –a fraction of the men employed in underground mines — and depends upon giant earthmoving equipment.
But the “news article” above illustrates what “radical” Obama is going up against. The coal mining region of Appalachia often suffers from deep poverty and high unemployment –but has produced a few multi-millionaires: The Coal Barons. Those Barons OWN everything and everybody in those regions. Including the newspapers. They have hundreds of eager butt-kissing sycophants willing to promote the Barons’ interests as “concerned citizens” –whereas the large mass of people OPPOSED to the destruction of the land are intimidated into silence by the threat of vicious economic retaliation. Even if they themselves are immune (retired, etc) they have relatives who are not.
So regulate Mountain-top mining out of existence, if you want. But make sure you have enough coal reserves to keep the electrical generation plants running. Because Big Coal is looking for a way to make the Obama Administration look bad.
Realize that the Appalachian Coal Barons were big supporters of Texan Oilmen’s whore, George W. The Oilmen and Coal Barons have similiar values and interests — passionate greed, hatred of anything that gets in their way, and a deep contempt for the common citizen.
Realize also that in the 2001-2008 time period, a lot of coal mining shifted to mountain-top removal from underground mining. If you use Google Earth or Yahoo to look at overhead images of the western part of West Virginia, you will see something that resembles the lunar landscape. Some executives of the Coal Corporations went to Washington to “serve” in the Bush Administration.
By the way , the Williamson Daily News describes itself as
“balanced and fair”. Ring a bell?
June 30th, 2009 at 8:23 am
The great thing about AGW, if you’re looking to rid the world of humans, is that the human horizon for concern is 6 hours from now. Everything beyond that is a fairy tale.
First addict humans to plutonic sources of energy. That’s the key, of course. After that, just wait. They’ll burn through the cheap stuff in 150 years. Then, they’ll use the dirty stuff.
It’ll be like the guy who has a heart attack getting out of bed in the morning. After 50 years of cheeseburgers.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:19 am
DTM — chaotic systems are deterministic, but messy. They don’t have probability distributions strung out over the tail. Uncertainty and chaos are, strictly speaking, entirely different things. the fact that the two are jumbled up together in popular usage is no excuse to continue jumbling for convenience sake.
As to Roberts and the white man, perhaps we need a Supremes rewrite of the old Mose Allison song Young Man Blues (second time in a week or so I’ve had occasion to use Young Man Blues — an expression of chaos or randomness?)
Well a young man
He ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
I said a young man
Ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
In the old days
When a young man was a strong man
All the people stepped back
When a young man walked by
You know nowadays
Well it’s the old man’s
Got all the money
And a young man
Ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
You know nowadays, if you’re the young man
You ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
June 30th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Uncertainty and chaos are, strictly speaking, entirely different things.
That is not quite correct. “Uncertainty” is a very broad concept, and basically can apply to any limit on our ability to exactly and accurately describe past and present events or predict future events. “Chaos” refers to the general attributes of a certain class of dynamical systems, and one of the defining characteristics of such systems is that they are functionally unpredictable in certain specific ways. Accordingly, properly speaking chaos is one of the many possible sources of uncertainty.
By the way, at a guess you may be thinking of the difference between truly “random” (or stochastic) processes and chaotic processes. It is true that chaotic processes are not properly considered stochastic processes because chaotic processes are fully deterministic and truly stochastic processes, by definition, are not. Accordingly, properly speaking stochastic processes should be classified as a different sort of source of uncertainty than chaotic processes.
Again, though, the concept of uncertainty is broad enough to cover the functional limits that both stochastic and chaotic processes place on our ability to predict future events.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:53 am
DTM, you are wrong about this and are just contributing to continued public fuzzy headedness about these issues. Of course, you can at your convenience take “uncertainty” to mean whatever broad sort of smudge you choose, and thereby mix buzz words carelessly, but that’s just rhetoric.
For example, your initial statement in this thread in this vein was “It is undoubtedly true that the relevant systems are chaotic enough that the amount of irreducible error in the predictions of the models is large (even noting the predictions take the form of probability distributions over a range of outcomes).”
Despite your handwaving at 26, this statement (which I think is mostly yammering) blithely mixes the chaotic term dropping with the probability distribution term dropping. i.e., it violates “Accordingly, properly speaking stochastic processes should be classified as a different sort of source of uncertainty than chaotic processes.” even though it sounds way cool and smart and probably just rolls off the tongue.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
bdbd,
As usual when you get off on one of these semantic tangents, I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I’ll just note that since I have done graduate work in this area, I am fairly certain I understand the terminology.
As for the specific statement in question, the point of my parenthetical was that even though the relevant predictions of the models take the form of a probability distribution over a range of outcomes, those distributions still fail to reflect all of the irreducible uncertainty associated with those predictions. If you are familiar with chaos theory, then you should know that this is one of the standard indications of a chaotic rather than a purely stochastic system.
But again, from long experience with you, I suspect you are going to get so caught up in some ego game that you will fail to take the time to consider that I just might know what I am talking about, and that maybe the problem is that you didn’t properly understand me at first. So feel free to have the last word if that sort of p!ssing match is where you want to go with this, because I honestly don’t care, and I doubt anyone else would either.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
“Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the models are automatically going to be biased in any particular direction. And that is a very important point to understand, because among other things it means the error may well end up being an underestimation and not an overestimation of the probability-weighted negative impacts of our current course of conduct.”
Assuming that human beings, even scientists and economists, have no biases that affect how they re-create reality, is a very dangerous thing. Computer modelling is subject to intensely subjective decisions in thousands of variables of design that can skew the results one way or another. So can data “adjustments”. It’s been shown that the raw data on temperatures, for example, has been “adjusted” upwards for recent decades, and downwards for the past, creating a more impressive argument for rapid warming. If these adjustments were simply random, it would even out, but scientists trying to prove AGW theory find ways to make things turn out their way. And the same is true to an even greater degree with computer modelling. The models get adjusted to predict higher temperatures, and when the results differ, the models get re-adjusted to fit the past, but still retain that catastrophic future. This kind of jiggling is highly suspect. If you saw people on the other side of an argument making those kind of “adjustments”, you’d cry foul too.
I don’t think that modelling in itself is a wrong approach. It has to be done to some degree. The problem is the weight that people give to models that can’t show predictive success. The public hears a report about these models, and because it comes from scientists, they think it actually means something, that it must be true, or close to the truth, when in fact it has very little to do with the truth, and entirely to do with the assumptions built into the model. Those assumptions are geared towards the particular theories of the modeller. One doesn’t have to presume a conscious attempt at fraud to see how this could end up with highly misleading results.
Take Mann’s “hockey stick”. It’s based on using a certain set of temperature proxies, out of the about 45 available, many of which are highly divergent from one another. He ignores some of the better proxies, and includes others that are considered quite suspect, in order to end up with his dramatic “hockey stick” over the last thousand years or so. The odd thing about his findings are that somehow the Medieval warm period never happened, nor did the Little Ice Age. But if you take out just four of his worst proxies, the hockey stick disappears, and a much more reasonable, historically accurate temperature model comes into being. But if you fed the assumptions of Mann’s model into a computer, it would give a very different result than a more comprehensive temperature record. And it ends up spitting out results that suggest we are going through some unprecedent warming period that will lead to catastrophe. When, in reality, this result is achieved from jigging the assumptions in order to acheive dramatic results.
This is why Hansen from NASA, the world’s leading advocate of AGW theory, says we should ignore the models for now, because they don’t correspond to reality yet. He favors observational methods, since observation includes all that actually does drive climate, whether we know what all those drivers are. And based on observational methods, he says we can expect a .15-.18 rise in temps per decade. This may not turn out to be correct, but at least the method is sound and rational, and not placing undue weight on unproven assumptions. Likewise, even Hansen admits that the failure to see new temperature highs over the last decade is becoming a bit of a problem for AGW theory, and that if this continues even a few more years there will have to be some further downward adjustments.
You are right that we can’t avoid making a decision. But we should avoid making bad decisions. I compare this to the right’s obsession with Iraqui WMDs because it should be clear in retrospect that when we don’t actually know if we are in a terrible situation, not acting is often the best course. We need to avoid falling into Cheney’s “1% solution”, the idea that if we are facing even the smallest chance of a bad outcome, we have to act as if it’s a 100% certainty. That’s where the “slam dunk, the science is in” thinking comes from. WMDSs were nowhere near a slam dunk, and the climate science is clearly not in. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act at all – I agree with that much. We should be spending tons of money on energy R&D and paving the way towards non-fossil sources of energy. Not just as insurance in case catastrophic AGW theory turns out to be correct, but because of other issues like Peak Oil, the poltiics of oil producing nations, acid rain, ordinary forms of pollution, etc. But capping carbon and thus capping economic growth in any serious way would be a mistake, in that the current reliable science simply doesn’t support it. The only good thing one can say about the current bill in congress is that it’s been watered down so much as to not be very effective, and that it includes lots of money for energy research. I’m all in favor of electric cars and every kind of alternative energy, and I have a basic faith that science will find ways to make these cheaper. But using scare tactics, even to acheive something worthwhile, is a very neocon way of doing politics, and it has severe blowback potential.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Regarding the issue of uncertainty in chaotic vs. random processes, it’s apples and oranges. Stochastic processes are by their very nature unpredictable in their specifics, but highly predictable on large scales. Radioactive decay is a stochatic process. POredicting when an individual atom will decay is impossible, but predicting how a large mass of radioactive material will decay is quite easy.
The opposite is the case with chaotic systems. Predicting the results of a large, complex choatic system is much, much harder than predicting the results of a small, simple system, thought both can still be difficult. Thus, predicting short term weather can be done with some degree of certainty, but predicting long-term climate change is very, very difficult, and even the degree of uncertainty is highly uncertain. The reasons are complex also. There’s the incredible complexity of the system in the first place, the lack of full understanding of how it works for another, but also the lack of accurate data for enough iterations to see how the natural pattern works.
WIth short term weather, we have millions and millions of short-term observations that tell us, over many iterations, how particular weather patterns tend to turn out. We can simply run statistical models based on these observations and come up with a set of results for any given five day forecast, and know what our degree of certainty is, based on past events. BUt this simply isnt’ trut of climate research, which tracks changes that occur over thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, and for which even the recent 150 years of relatively accurate temperature measurements is a drop in the bucket, and for which the 30-35 year period of proposed AGW warming, from 1970-2000+ is simply not terribly meaningful, in that we have very few other periods of accurate temperature fluctuation to compare it to. And certainly we have no known accurately measured period of increased CO2 levels driving temperature increases to compare it to. So we are very much flying in the dark on this one. Climate modelling is being done on such a scale simply because of the lack of good observational history, but that doesn’t make it accurate, and it’s a very poor substitute for actual data. Trying to computer model a vastly chaotic system like climate in the absense of sound historical data is highly unreliable, and very little weight should be given to it therefore. That’s the attitude of most scientists, anyway. Like Hansen, they rely on observation and proven physical theory, not computer models built on sand.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
conradg,
As I have noted many times before, since I am not a climate scientist, I don’t think I am qualified to discuss the specifics of given models. In the end, scientists are already well-aware of the problems we are discussing, and they play a role in the debates scientists have among themselves. So, I think the best thing policymakers can do is rely on majority positions formed after the scientists have argued among themselves.
But I did want to address one point:
I compare this to the right’s obsession with Iraqui WMDs because it should be clear in retrospect that when we don’t actually know if we are in a terrible situation, not acting is often the best course.
“Not acting” (or, more precisely, continuing with the prior course of action) was the better course in that case because “acting” (or, more precisely, dramatically changing the prior course of action) took the form of starting a war. Wars are known to be hideously destructive of lives and property, and therefore the burden of proof before starting a war should rightly be very high.
But pricing carbon is not like starting a war (for numerous reasons). In fact, all the same points you are making about potential biases in climate models apply to economic models as well, and there I think it is clear the vested interests favor overstating the likely costs of pricing carbon. So as compared with starting a war, I think the burden of proof for pricing carbon should rightly be lower.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
c’mon, DTM, you’re just caught once again being sloppy in your use of technical terms, to impress the rubes I suppose. I realize you are eager to backtrack etc but your initial statement conflating chaotic stuff with probability distributions and what not is what I responded to, and that initial statement was high flown gibberish. I”ve taken this stuff in graduate school too, and I try to be accurate with it from the outset, not when someone’s spotted a bit of flimflam, as is your wont. If you want to think this has something to do with ego and doesn’t represent a reasonable response to your own glib sloppiness, suit yourself. Chances are, you’re wrong about this one too.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
bdbd,
As usual when we reach this point in these discussions, if there is actually any substantive content in your 3:06 post, I can’t find it.
Have a nice day.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
DTM,
I agree that the burden of proof should be different in the climate debate vs. in starting wars. But there’s still a very serious burden of proof to overcome, and that just hasn’t been met, if we are talking about truly serious carbon abatement in the near future. We have to realize that, if the catastrophic predictions are true, the kind of abatement we must engage is staggeringly expensive, and many, many people will actually die as a result of economic effects. Even so, if they are true, we have to swallow that pill. But if they are not true, or only minimally true, we will have effectively killed many millions of people, and sentenced billions more to poverty, all for nothing, which adds up to the effects of a major war.
There are serious consequences in both cases. So the question is, which is more likely to be true? I’m not a climate scientists either, but at least I’ve tried to do my homework, and it sure seems that the catastrophic predictions simply aren’t supported by real science. So then we are left with taking the kind of actions that I think are simply good for us whether or not catastrophic AGW theory is true: lots of energy R&D, incentives for switchover to electric cars, reducing our dependence on foriegn oil, developement of all kinds of alternative energy programs, massive conservation measures, etc. I’d leave aside carbon restrictions on coal plants, for now, and concentrate on reducing/eliminating oil. All these things are essentially good for us whether or not AGW is a real threat, and if it is, at least it gives us some kind of head start in dealing with it, if it ever comes down to that (which I don’t think it will).
The science certainly suggests we have time to develop all these things. Based on the fantastic technological improvements in solar, wind, geothermal, and even unproven things like cold fusion, I’d say there’s a very good chance that within 50 years we won’t need to be burning much carbon anyway, even in the third world. The sooner we get to that point, the better, but the best way to get there is through economic growth, and anything that holds that back will actually delay our getting there. So we have to use our capitalistic economic machinery to get there, rather than seeing that as the enemy which has to be curtailed. Economic growth will actually lead to a cleaner future, because technology is going to make alternative energy production much cheaper and cleaner than what we are now doing. So I’m just saying, don’t butcher the golden goose just because it leaves turds on the floor.