> The role of scientists is not limited to pure science. There are > social and ethical responsibilities.
You are certainly right about that. Still, most government organisations have, I believe, a mandate to be policy neutral, which I understand as meaning that they provide facts, but not political advocacy. How that's to be interpreted is another matter, but the basic principle that objective facts and subjective opinion should be separated out, as far as possible, seems eminently sensible. There is a big grey area there, eg think of one of your pet concerns, namely the assumptions that go into economic models. I understand that we are adapted to the present climate, and that climate has been stable for a long time, so any change comes at our peril, and I've commented extensively on both points fairly recently here, eg http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/msg/ff2d74d601ef5ce5 Economic models, depending on the assumptions you feed them, in the peer reviewed literature do include negative damages in their range (see the paper by Tol I quoted earlier), so believing that modest climate change may be beneficial is not nearly as outlandish as some people here seem to think. Let me say one final thing about Griffin. Looking at his CV, climate change is not at all his speciality and it seems to me that he got asked his personal opinion here. I also think that Griffin accepts the IPCC consensus on the climate science, but when it comes to questions like the value of eco-systems for their own sake, or whether developing world farmers can be sensibly asked to do other jobs in the future, and for their food to be imported from a Siberia or Canada with large scale water projects to deal with both droughts/floods, I'd suspect he'd make similar value decisions and/or let's call it "guesses about the future of a complex system like human societies and the world's eco-systems that cannot be made on an entirely rational basis due to too little being known about them" than I'd make myself. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
