Posting here will continue to be light as Kerry and I make our way to the Hawkeye State, but please turn your attention to the new issue of Cato Unbound, “Keeping Our Cool: What to Do About Global Warming,” featuring a lead essay by the estimable Jim Manzi. Commenters include: Joseph Romm, climate wonk at the Center for American Progress; Indur Goklany, author of The Improving State of the World; and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of Breakthrough.
Here's a taste of Manzi:
The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative. If it turns out that even the outer edge of the probability distribution of our predictions for global-warming impacts is enormously conservative, and disaster looms if we don’t change our ways radically and this instant, then we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning. We have no good evidence that such a disaster scenario is imminent, but nobody can conceivably prove it to be impossible. Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.
But to force massive change in the economy based on such a fear is to get lost in the hothouse world of single-issue advocates, and become myopic about risk. We face lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity. A regional nuclear war in Central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of HIV, or a rogue state weaponizing genetic engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.
In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options. The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate literally all theorized climate change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime. The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.
We have ideas about what a real, rigorous, intellectually honest debate about climate policy should look like. We hope this will be it.
Will Wilkinson 