by Judith Curry
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the globe is warming. What follows, as a normative matter?
Keith Burgess-Jackson at Animal Ethics answer the question in the following way:
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Nothing. As David Hume (1711-1776) pointed out long ago, you can’t validly deduce an evaluative proposition from a set of factual propositions. (Put differently, there has to be at least one evaluative premise in order for there to be an evaluative conclusion.) What we should do about global warming (again, assuming it exists) depends on the consequences of global warming. Few if any changes have only good consequences or only bad consequences. Almost always, there are both good and bad consequences. Whether we should do something to stop the change, therefore, depends on which type of consequence—good or bad—predominates.
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I have addressed this general issue in several previous posts:
- What constitutes dangerous climate change?
- Redefining dangerous climate change
- Uncertainty gets a seat at the big Table: Part IV (my congressional testimony, see section on climate winners and losers)
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How often have you heard a dispassionate discussion of the good consequences of climate change? All you hear, day after day, is a depressing litany of bad consequences. This alone shows that global warmists are biased. They want intervention to stop climate change, so they mention only the bad consequences of climate change. A rational person with no ideological axe to grind would attend to good consequences as well as to bad consequences. For example, how many people around the world die of extreme cold as opposed to extreme heat, and how would that change if the globe warmed? What is the optimal temperature for the alleviation of suffering, for both humans and sentient nonhuman animals? How many different species ofanimal or plant would there be if the globe warmed, as opposed to how many there are today? What is the optimal temperature for food production? Would there be more food rather than less if the globe warmed?
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JC comment: With regards to “This alone shows that global warmists are biased.” Back in 1992, the UNFCCC framed the entire issue of AGW in the context of dangerous climate change, which evolved into a charge for the IPCC (WGII) to identify the dangerous impacts. The NIPCC countered by focusing on positive impacts. I’ve stated before that the the UNFCCC put the policy cart before the scientific horse; recall that the conclusion from the IPCC FAR in 1990 was: “The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.”
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Change per se is neither good nor bad. Whether a given change is good or bad, all things considered, depends on its consequences (and how these are evaluated). I wish scientists would inform the public ofall the consequences of global warming, so that the public can decide for itself whether to expend its scarce resources in preventing it. That scientists have not done this is the best evidence yet that they are advocates rather than, as they purport to be, disinterested observers. Is it any wonder that they are not trusted? Do you trust people who are hell-bent on selling you something to the point where they omit relevant information? In law, this is called fraud.
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JC comment: Scientists working on the IPCC have been working under the charge of the UNFCCC, convinced that they were doing the right thing and responding to issues of concern to the policy makers. This framed the climate problem too narrowly: natural internal climate variability (multi-decadal and longer) and benefits of a warmer climate were not considered in a serious way. Science for policy IPCC-style has resulted in epistemic slippage (Mike Hulme’s phrase); I wouldn’t call this fraud.
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JC conclusion: Burgess-Jackson clarifies a primary flaw in the warming to mitigation argument: the absence of evaluative premises, beyond a prima facie assumption that warming is dangerous. This article leads us to ask the following questions. What are the appropriate evaluative premises for assessing the good versus bad consequences of AGW? Economic? Social justice? As per the Morgan paper discussed in the previous thread, expected utility isn’t a very useful concept here. Good versus bad is regional, in terms of regional variations in climate change, regional vulnerabilities, and local cultural and political values. When considering a unilateral global response to AGW such as CO2 stabilization, how do you weight these various factors? As I argued in my testimony, climate models predict more rainfall in South and Central Asia, where half of the global population lives, with all of these countries (except for Bangladesh) having major concerns about their future water supply. This is one example of a major benefit for half of the world’s population. Etc.
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Note: I just spotted this article by Anthony Sadar in the Washington Examiner entitled “State of fearful climate science.” The closing sentences from this piece:
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Many of us with years of real-world experience in atmospheric science would agree that, ideally, the practice of such science is about freedom to creatively combine fundamental scientific knowledge with individual skills and perspective to aid the evaluation of natural conditions.
In this way, the advancement of the field can occur for the benefit of both people and the planet. But, over the past few decades, by maintaining a state of fear, climate science has deviated from this ideal, damaging an honorable scientific profession. And that is truly scary.