Michael Tobis wrote:
> James, (or anyone) could you state an adaptive policy in a form that
> you might expect the general public to understand and support?
Apologies for the delay, an intrusion of Real Life :-)
The underlying presumption of the rational, economically optimal
approach seems to be that "we" should choose the "best" temperature
change in say 2150 (actually a discounted change over all time, but
still...), and then use climate model to work out what CO2 level this
amounts to, and use a carbon cycle model to work out what CO2 emissions
will produce this result, and then set economic policies to generate
the emissions. And we have to take account of all the uncertainties at
all stages (and for anyone who thinks the climate science aspects are
uncertain, 150 years of economics and technology is at least a binary
order of magnitude worse). What hubris!
("Best" is not really set a priori, but is itself dependent on the
economic policies necessary to achieve the result, but that's a bit of a
detail.)
"Adaptive" means that we try to point in roughly the right direction,
with the understanding that our policies will change according to all
future innovation and knowledge gains, but without any precise outcome
in mind. Of course we need to think a bit about what "roughly the right
direction" means, in order that we don't set off in the wrong direction
entirely. But we don't need to know what our great-grandchildren will be
doing in 2100, let alone telling them what they ought to be doing.
In theory there may not be a whole lot of difference between the policy
choices on the ground, but I am confident that the latter approach would
make such choices easier to justify. It's really a matter of mind-set
- rather than worrying about the uncertainties, we should just embrace
them, pick low-hanging fruit in the meantime and put downward pressure
on emissions. There is no real need to talk and plan endlessly about it
- we can already "Work as if you lived in the early days of a better
nation." Even though I personally suspect that the climate and
environment systems are a bit more robust than most people seem to say,
I would fully support efforts to reduce our impact on them. Even those
who are officially "sceptics" are often more reasonably sympathetic to
renewable energy and efficiency gains, so long as they are packaged
appropriately.
I suppose this is also quite closely related to my "Is climate science
dead" blog post which I haven't written yet...maybe I should do that
some day.
James
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