Category Archives: Policy

by Judith Curry

As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.

To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a border collie to catch a frisbee by first applying Newton’s Law of Gravity. – Haldane and Madouros

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by Judith Curry

Indeed, if there is a single message that sums up all of Sagarin’s work, it’s that organisms realized long ago that the world is a much less predictable place than humans would like to believe.  “We spend a lot of time in planning exercises, making predictive models, and in optimization routines,” says Sagarin. “All of which have essentially been selected against in nature, because they’re incredibly wasteful when you live in an unpredictable world.”

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by Rud Istvan

Groundbreaking science is sometimes a global collaborative effort (CERN, Higgs boson, July 4). It is more often a contact sport—especially when individuals challenge a prevailing paradigm. In 1926 the president of the American Philosophical Society called Wegener’s theory of continental drift “utter damn rot”. Climate science has become just such a contact sport. There is a consensus paradigm represented by 4^th IPCC. There are apparent  flaws and uncertainties in that consensus. The government-climate complex stifles healthy scientific discourse about them.

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by Judith Curry

So, how do you think Machiavelli would advise the Prince on dealing with climate change?

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by Judith Curry

Corruption and climate change? Most people don’t see a connection. This is likely because they aren’t in the habit of thinking of climate change as a multi-billion dollar global industry. And wherever money flows plentifully, corruption is quick on its heels. – Alice Harrison, Transparency International’s Climate Governance Program

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by Judith Curry

Philosopher Roger Scruton agrees that the environment is the most urgent political problem of our age but argues in his new book “How to Think Seriously About the Planet” that conservatism is far better suited to tackle environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism. 

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by Judith Curry

Two recent articles of interest, both from a conservative perspective.

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by David Hagen

The results of The Copenhagen Consensus 2012 have just been released. Bjørn Lomborg assembled a blue ribbon panel including Nobel Laureate economists. They ranked the top 30 most important humanitarian projects.

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by Judith Curry

The Obama administration proposed on Tuesday the first ever standards to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, a move likely to be hotly contested by Republicans and industry in an election year.

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by Judith Curry

The need for policy makers to understand science and for scientists to understand policy processes is widely recognised. However, the science-policy relationship is sometimes difficult and occasionally dysfunctional; it is also increasingly visible, because it must deal with contentious issues, or itself becomes a matter of public controversy, or both. We suggest that identifying key unanswered questions on the relationship between science and policy will catalyse and focus research in this field. 

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by Judith Curry

In late February, Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, gave the Dimbleby Lecture for the BBC.  There are some good statements in his address, but here I focus on his statements about the relationship between science and society.

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by Judith Curry

There are several topics in the news regarding climate policy, that I am trying to follow and understand.

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by Judith Curry

The United States and five other countries agreed this week to fund an effort to cut emissions of methane, soot and other pollutants to start to slow the rate of human-induced climate change.

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by Judith Curry

What can public and private decisionmakers learn from a wide-ranging look at the social sciences and the issue of human choice and climate change that illuminates the evaluation of policy goals, implementation strategies, and choices about paths forward? 

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