On May 24, 8:25 am, James Annan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
This seems to be the point were you diverge 2C limit advocates.
Their main goal seem to be to avoid a tipping point. You get much
bigger economic impact after a tipping point.
But the attempt to avoid a tipping point may need to be adaptive
anyway since the research is ongoing to determine if there is a one
and where it is.
> 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.
Be sure to explain how climate science could be dead while this
tipping point question is hanging in the air. I'd think that would
make it even livelier. Hanson seems to be calling for detailed
simulation of Greenland in a world with no Artic ice, for instance.
Could be we have passed the tipping point. Lovelock thinks so. Some
seem to think the Artic melt is the last straw.
Hanson et al, thinks the tipping point may be 1C.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/7/2287/2007/acp-7-2287-2007.pdf
(50 authors, is that passed the tipping point?)
>
> James
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