On Jun 1, 3:42 pm, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> > 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, eghttp://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
True, he has a Phd in aerospace, an MBA, and he seems to collect MS
degrees for a hobby. But none related to bio or earth science. He's
currently working an a computer science MS, that's maybe on hold
with his current demanding job.
> and it seems to me that he got
> asked his personal opinion here.
He's the head of the agency that generates more info on global warming
than any other in the US, and has some unique capabilities essential
to the whole effort to get info about earth sciences. The inteview
questions were about the priorities of his agency and about a critic
that said that earth science should be priority #1. Maybe he was just
being ask for a bottom line on the importance of the global warming
info his agency generates.
> I also think that Griffin accepts the
> IPCC consensus on the climate science,
Based on what? Even a charitable reading of his remarks make it sound
like perfectionism is an important issue. Clearly that is not the
issue, as indicated by the IPCC impact report. The issue is dangerous
climate change, not a desire for no climate change. If you could
prove
it highly likely that 3C was not dangerous, then the IPCC would back
off to beyond that value.
I don't think Griffin has an understanding of the IPCC consensus or
climate change issues.
> 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.
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