Climate change

[Aractus]

I'm interested in the cost of eliminating my genital warts vs. the benefits. But I have no fucking idea how to proceed because I'm not a fucking physician. So do I consult my favorite politician or my banker? No, I discuss it with my fucking physician because he or she is the one who IS qualified. I'm not locked in to his or her opinion. I could discuss it with other physicians. But I'm not stupid enough to try and figure it out myself because I have the sense to realize I lack expertise in that area. And when every physician I solicit an opinion from tells me the same fucking thing, I have the sense to take their advice.

Right, so your reply is completely inconsistent. When it comes to climate change you want the climate scientists to be the ones to tell you what to do. But when it comes to a medical issue, you don't want to talk to the experts or scientists, instead you want to talk to a practising physician.

Climate scientists can give you the science. But as for policy advice, their perspective will be influenced by their field of expertises. In order to get a fair assessment you need an unbiased approach to assessing the information; and that's what you ask a committee to do for you. One that can fairly weigh up the options, give you a cost-benefit analysis (so yeah you're going to want an economist, and an accountant on your committee as well), and all the other information you need to make an informed decision. You don't just go to the climate scientists and get them to give you their opinion and then take that and form a policy - that would be a terrible way to respond to environmental concerns or other scientific-based issues that you may want to address with a targeted policy intervention. And THAT'S why you wouldn't use the IPCC report - it just doesn't have a broad enough input. It doesn't even consider projected outcomes of policy interventions - and if it did it would show just how ineffective targeted action towards CO2 reduction is in relation to reducing temperature long-term. It doesn't fairly weigh out the positive environmental outcomes against the negative outcomes. There's a lot of things it fails to address that are needed in order to make an informed policy choice.

In any case here's one of the experts (Judith Curry) testifying just last month in front of a USA House of Representatives Committee just last month:

http://youtu.be/rce5CeKOC0c

As you can see, she highlights the fact that that the USA President's climate plan is projected to reduce global temperature by just 0.03 - 0.1 degrees by 2100. I'll quote you part of her testimony:

"The climate has been warming since the 1700s, since the end of the little ice age. We don’t know what’s causing that warming in the 18th Century, in the 19th Century; it's not attributed to humans."

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Why don't I give you the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that the world spends approx USD 1 trillion tackling climate change over the course of the 21st century; and when we get to the dawn of the 22nd century at 2100 we discover the Earth has warmed by 8 degrees Celsius anyway despite our efforts. As I mentioned in my previous post, this will mean great things for some parts of the world - but will be absolutely terrible for small vulnerable countries that have lost their annual rainfalls to other regions and will create the need to relocate around 10th of the planet's population (1 billion out of 10 billion people). So let's imagine that happens. Wouldn't we look back and say "why didn't we spend the 1 trillion on helping the world's most vulnerable people instead"?