From: Kime, Robin
Location:
3500 WJCN
Importance:
Normal
Subject: Introductory Meeting with Oren Cass
Start Date/Time: Thur 7/13/2017 6:00:00 PM
End Date/Time: Thur 7/13/2017 6:30:00 PM
170102-How to Worry About Climate Change (National Affairs).pdf
170321-The Problem with Climate Catastrophizing (FA).pdf
170417-Whos the Denier Now (NR).pdf
170531-Goodbye to Paris (Commentary).pdf
170601-Well Never Have Paris (CJ).pdf
170605-Dont Apologize for Being Honest about Climate Change (NRO).pdf
Directions: Please use the William Jefferson Clinton North Entrance located on your right as you exit the Federal Triangle Metro Station. Please arrive 20 minutes prior to the meeting with photo IDs to clear Security.
EPA Contact: For an escort from Security to the meeting call (202) 564-4332; for all other matters call Robin Kime (202)564-6587.
Contact: adamwhite.dc@gmail.com
Request: My friend and co-author, Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute, has written far-andaway the best commentaries in recent months on climate, Paris, and the EPA. He has some advice for you on some things to consider as Administrator Pruitt structures his red-blue team approach. Specifically, he wants to urge you that one of the most valuable things you could do is to study the "baselines" that are being used to forecast potential emissions trajectories; this is a huge shortcoming of current science and is being badly mischaracterized/misused. An EPA analysis of it would be hugely valuable. I can't recommend strongly enough that you meet Oren soon Here's his bio. Some of Oren's recent commentaries in favor of reforming climate policy:
"The Problem with Climate Catastophizing" -- Foreign Affairs, March 2017
"Who's the Deniers Now" -- National Review, May 2017
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"Goodbye to Paris: The Sin of Being Honest" -- Commentary, May 2017
" We'll Never Have Pai:
climate change agreement was designed as a feel-good, do
nothing program" -- City Journal, May 2017
''Don't Apologize for Being Honest about Climate Change" -- National Review, June 2017
Debating President Trump's Withdrawal from the Paris Accord -- NPR, June 2017
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NATIONAL AFFAIRS
How to Worry about Cl mate Change
Oren Cass
i KI o chai lenge --no chai lenge-poses a greater threat tefu I tu re generations than cl mate change,''said President Barack
Obama in his 2015State of the Union address. Yet his own adm-inis t ration's best estimate for the economic cost of that challenge, if left unaddressed, totaled only1% to4% of annual global GDP by 2100. For comparison, whi lepromoting the AffordabldDare Act in2009, the pres ident'sCounci I of Economic Advise rsesti mated that "genuine heal th care reform" could increase U.S. GDP by 8% by 2030. A2015 report by the McKinsey Global Instituteestimated that improvementsin gender equal i ty wor Idwidecould increase global GDP by 11% by 2025. In what way, then, is the chai lengeof cl mate change "greater'?
To be su re, GDPoffersa notoriously incomplete measure of human flourishingBut the real problem with assessing Obama's assert ion is mo re fundamen t a I: CI i mate change is a d i ffe ifendf of p rob lem from health-care reform, gender equal ity, or almost any traditional subject of political attention and action. Its relevant effectsa re st i 11 decadesor centuries away. Scenarios with the most extreme effects, rat her than the most I i ke I y ones, provide the sense of urgency and the rationale for pol icy responses. Those ext remeoutcomesareoftendistant ripplesfrom the initial effectof a warmer cl mate, transmitted outward through mul tiplestepsof causation and combinedwith other factors to produceor ampl ify the damage. By the time actual impactsar rive, the time for ac tion may have long passed. But if cl matechange is not a typical pol icy problem, how should pol icymakers approach it?
This is not an abstract question. Asa new administration takes of fice,i t must recal ibratefrom the extraordinary attention its predecessor
Oren Cass isasenior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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lavished on the issue. Where does cl imatechangefitin theconstel lation of chai I enges facing the nation and theworld?For the administration's opponents, how much energy should go toward lamenting a shiftin cl mate pol icy versus high I ighting other areas of concern?
Much of the po I i t ica I rhetoricand pol icy ana I ysissur rounding cl i mate change starts from a premise that the chai lenge is t ruly unique, demanding unparal leled levelsof focus and action. A cl mate-change conference could attract the United Nations' largest ever gathering of wor Id leaders in 2015 because, as French president Francois Hol lande declared at its opening, "nevertruly neve^have the stakes of an international meeting been so high. For the future of the planet, and the future of I ife, are at stake." Comparisons to Wor Id War II have be come commonpl ace, and proponentsof strong climate action deride t hei r opponentsas "denier-s^a term previous I yassociated with refusal to acknow I edge t he occu r rence of t he Ho I ocaust. Left-wi ngpo I i t icians from former vice president Al Gore toSenator BernieSanders to New York City mayor Bill de Blasio warn that human civi I ization hangs in the balance.
This framing influenceqool icy di rect ly. During the2016 Democratic primaries, for instance, Senator Sanders suggested the nation's mobi I i zation for Wor Id War Ilin 1941 was "exactly the kind of approach we need right now," whi Ie former senator and Secretary of State Hi I lary Cl intonofferedher plan to create a dedicated "cl mate map room" in t he Wh i te House, aki n to P residen tF rank I i n Rooseve 11'sown map room during that same war. The mindset is reflectedn the Democrats'official platform, which "commit[s]to a national mobi I ization,and to leading a global effortto mobi I ize nations to address this threat on a sea Ie not seen since Wor IdWar II." Lest the claims be taken as less than I iteral, theAfew Republic clar ifiedin its headline of an article by activist Bi 11 McKibben: "We Need to Literal ly Declare War on Cl mate Change."
Based on such di re out looks, advocates of aggressive cl mate ac tion justify thei r proposals under the "precautionary principle" or as "insurance,''even where the measur able costs appear to far outweigh measurab I ebenefits.They dismiss skepticism about that approach as an i r rational fai I u re to understand the scope of the problem or an excessive d iscoun t i ng of fu tu re damage. " I f g I oba I wa r m i ng took ou t an eye eve ry nowand then,"scoffecDan Gi Ibert, professor of psychologyat Harvard University,"OSHAwould regulateit into nonexistence."
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But the unmooring of cl mate changefrom any conventional policy framework has been rhetorical rather than reasoned. It requires-justifica tion--otherwise, theobsessiveandapocalypticpol iticsbui 11 atop it cannot be suppo r ted. Yes, c I i ma te change is a p r ob I em. Bu t vkfraiof p r ob I em?
calibrating Our VtDrries
Cl mate change stands apart from typical chai lengesin three important respects. Fi rst, whereas most chai \engeswnediate, cl mate change is forecasted. The political process usual ly engages with problemsas they p resen 11 hemse I ves o r based on expected consequences of cu r ren t even ts. Theclaim that high corporate-tax rates drive businesses overseas, or that high col lege tuition burdensgraduateswith overwhelming debt, can be tested against experienceandquantifiedin ter ms of ongoing costs. Claims about climate change cannot. Scientists do strive to identify contempo ra ry costs, bu 11 he sea I e of t he cha 11 enge and t he case fo r act ion depend on cal am ties yet tocomeindeed,assertionsthatclimatechangewil I be far outsideof existing experienceoftenplaya central rolein the case for i ts sign if icanceYet t h is absenceof refe rencepoi n ts c reatesa doub I e-edged uncertainty: Compared to most pol icy issues, the level of risk seems high but the level of confidencein predictionsis low.
Second, whereas most chai I enges ataEf/c, cl mate change btvensible. Medical errors ki11 more than 250,000 Americans each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Those deaths each represent an individual t ragedy and, applying the EPA'sprefer red estimate of $10 mi 11 ion per life, cost a staggering 15% of national GDP. But deaths one year have I ittleeffecton society's capacity to makefu ture progress on the issue. Even most forecasted problemsshare this characteristic: If demographic trends suggest an impending shortage of nursing-home bedsand pol it icians ignore the warnings, more capacity can sti 11 be bui 11 afterthe crisis hits. With cl matechange, by contrast, scientists warn the planet wi 11 reach a point of no return. Carbon diox ide, once emit ted into the atmosphere, remains therefor centuries. If temperatures rise and predicted meteorological dominos begin tofal I, subsequenteffortsto reduce emissions wi 11 not offer re I ief.
Third, whereas most chai lengesami/ned climate change jaen/asve. The typica I fo recasted p rob I em,even if i r reve rsi b I e, has I i m i ted reach. Popu I at iong row t h i n t he Arne r can Sou t h west may d r i vesome species to extinction in the coming decades. But there,or near there, that particular
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causal chain likelyends.lt is const rained geographical ly,thematical ly,and in theextent of damage. Not so with cl matechange. Itsglobal scope and I i nkages to many c r i t ica I envi ronmen ta I and econom icsystems i nvi te t he conjuring of disrupt ions in every cranny of modern civi I ization.
Cl matechange-forecasted, irreversible, and pervasive--might ther-e fore be cal led a "wor rying problem." Here, "wor rying" does not mean "concerning" (though it is that as wel I), but rather something tai Iormadefor worry. I ts effectsexist primarily in the imagination and have poo r I y def i necbounds t hat encou ragespecu I at ion; a poi n t of no ret u r n looms. Yet the con tours of those boundsand that point may become clear onlyafterit is too late to cor rect course.
Other wor rying problemsexist. They tend to emerge where clear long-term trends in technological or social change produceconcerning side effects.The obvious trajectory of growing fossi I -fuel consumption, p re requ isi te(wi t h cu r ren t tech no I ogy) to con t i nuedg I oba I i ndust r ia I iza tion, produces the cl matechai lenge.Simi lar ly,ever-denser urbanization coupledwith ever-more-frequent travel from ever-more-remote locations producesan ever-greater risk of aglobal pandemic.Such a pandemic is widely forecast to occur though the timing is unknowable; twill be too late to prevent once underway, and it has the potential to cause catastrophic damage throughout society. Increasing urbanization also exposes society to both higher I eve Is of social unrest and disruption by increasingly powerful and wel l-coordinatednon-stateactors.
Overuse of antibiotics around theworldcould render them useless in thefaceof rapidlyevolvingbacteria, possiblysetting back medical progress against disease and infection by decades. The rising sophistication7ubiq uity,and interconnectivityof financiaIsystems th reaten a g IobaI econom ic me I tdownof the typeonlynar row I y aver ted in 2008. The democrat ization of com m un cat ions tech no I og ies has a I ready p rovided fe r t i I e g round fo r te r ro r st netwo r ks to rec r u i t, coo r d i nate, and p remote t hemse I ves. N uc I ea r weapons represent in some respects a quintessential wor rying problem, though an oddly binary one: Thei r I ikely effectsare al I too wel l-under stood; their risk remains rough I yas present this year as last year as next. The issue typical ly attains salience only when condit ions suggest risk is trending upward-as early in the Cold War,during periods of prolifera tion, or when leadersappear potential lywil ling to countenance their use.
Just as technology can providea vector to heigh ten some risk, it can also pose the risk itself. For instance, many experts fear the prospect of
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faster computing hardwareand moresophisticatedsoftwareul timately yielding superhuman and potential ly hosti Ie artificial intel I igence. Computer vi ruses, meanwhi Ie, might someday a I low t hei r creators to commandeer the basic infrastructure of modern society. Continued advancemen tsi n nanotechnology-especial lyif weaponized-raise com par able fears of tools either inadvertent I y escaping the control of their creators or being deployed maliciously.
All these are wor rying problems. Al I present a potential scope of damagethat isat thispointonlyhypothetical butcouldbealmostunlim i ted-- i n pa r because i t is on I y hypot het ica I. Each is p I ausi b I yfo reseeab Ie gi ven p resen 11 rends, and each wou I d defy p reven t iononce underway,yet for each the momentor probabi I ityof reckoning is impossibleto know.
Worrying problemscan also be sociological, rather than techno logical. Deci ining ferti I i ty rates coupled with extending I ifespans, for instance, pose precise I yferecasted, irreversible, and pervasive chai lenge to modern civi I ization.So too do economicand social t ransitionswith t he poten t ia I to make I a rgeswat hes of t he wo r k i ng-age ma I e popu I at ion effectiveIyunemployable.Insofar as two-parent fami I ies are a crucial contributor to successful chi Id-rearing, the col lapseof that social norm and i ts compounding across generat ions I ikewise exh bits the character sties of a wor rying problem.
Those may not seem intuitively I ike problemssimi lar to cl mate change. But imagine President Obama describing riots in Baltimoreas he might describe a major hurricane str ike: "Whi lesociologistssay no individual riot can be I inked conclusively to the absence of two-parent fami I ies, th is social unrest isexactly the type they say wi 11 become more p reva I en t and seve re as t he t rend wo rsens. " The p rob I ems may not seem as catastrophic. But that is a quest ion of degree, not kind, and therefore onethat permits relevantcomparison.Ifoneof thesewor rying phenom enawereonly toslow annual productivity growth by one-ten th of one percentage point for only one-tenth of the population, the economic impact threegenerat ions hence wou Id be of the same magnitude which is forecast in cl mate-change models.
Even thesustainabi I i tyof the Western we I fa re state itself is a wor ry ing problem. In the United States, the federal government has tens of t r i I lions of dol larsin unfunded entitlement liabilitiesandadebtpoised to spi ral out of control if interest payments begin to swal Iow4he na tional budget; most other developed economies face situationsat least
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as di re. A co 11 apsewou I d have i mmeasu rab I eeconom icand geopo I i t ica I impl icationsyet maygivealmost no advance warning.
Thereis, inshort,much toworry about. But while these problemsal I look fundamental lydifferentfrom other pol icy chai lengeti by their forecasted, irreversible, andpen/asnenaturedefy t raditional toolsof pol icy analysis--they stack next to each other quite cleanly. Per haps cl mate change and defer red bridge maintenance requi redifferentrisk-tolerance assumptions. But the thinking appl ied to cl mate change and pandemics should be simi I ar. Per haps it makes no sense to compare the long-term th reat from water-supplydisruptionswith the present cost of medical er rors. But water stabi I ityandfami lystabi I i ty have much more in common.
Worrying problems demand greater focus than day-to-day pol it i cal pressure might otherwise prompt, but long-term risks cannot be al lowed to sap al I attention away from the more routine but also more painful real itiesof the moment (consistent prog resson the latter is every bit as important to society's long-term heal th). In iso I at ion, each wor ry ingproblem can seem overwhelming. But theycannotal I be thegreatest chai lenge of futuregenerations,or grounds for mobi I ization on a sea Ie not seen since the global fightagainst fascism.
Each reader will I ikely have hisown reaction to the wor rying prob lems I isted hepewhichgenuinelyqual ify and which others have been over looked;whichamong them is truly forecasted, i r reversible,and per vasive; whet her thoseareeven the correct dimensions. But at least those are concrete and constructive discussions. The classificationof-prob lems into hierarchies, the establ ishment of shared assumptions bui 11 with acommon vocabulary, and reasoning by ana logy are al I critical to determining appropriate toolsof government power, the al location of resources, and the tolerance for risk.
Weshould heed the wel l-known warning: "What wor riesyou-mas tersyou." We need to choose and cal ib rate our wor ries with care. If, at least, cl imatechangeasvor rying problem but not tbe/yone, what makes i t most wo r ry i ng of a 11?
expectations in perspective
Environmental activists have an immediate and predictable response: "becauseweknowcl matechange is going to happen.''But that conflates two very differentconceptionsof cl mate chang^ected change and extreme change.
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Thescientificconsensus holds that the cl mate is warming and hu man act i v i ty p I ays a su bstan t i a I r o I e. Bu 11 he r e is no consensus abou t how much warming human activity has caused or wi 11 cause. According to the FifthAssessment Report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Pane I on CI i mate Change (IPCC) i n 2013, t he best est i mates of wa r m i ng for agiven increase in theatmosphericconcent rationof carbon dioxide range by a factor of three, a rangethat hasgrown wider in recentyears. Adoubl ingof carbon dioxide could produce a temperature increase of 1.5degrees Celsius, or 4.5degrees Celsius, or more I ikelysomething in between.Expected cl mate change, averaging the widely varying pro ject ions and assuming no aggressive effortsto reduce greenhouse-gas em issions, en tai Is war m i ng of 3 to 4 deg rees Ce I si us by 2100.
Even focusing within that range, est mates for the expected environ mental impacts of warming vary widely. The IPCC represents the gold standard for synt hesizingscient ifi(Est mates, and, crucia11y, its best guesses bear little resemblance to the apocalyptic predictionsoftenrepeatedbyac tivistsand politicians. For instance, the I PCC est mates that sea levelshave risen by half afoot over the past century and wi 11 rise by another two feet over the current century. At the high end of the3-to-4-degree range, it re ports the impact on ecosystems wi 11 be no worse than that of the land-use changes to which human civi I ization al ready subjects the natural world.
The responsibi I ityfor translating these and other disruptions into economic costs fa I Is to Integrated Assessment Models (lAMs). To ere ate its "Social Cost of Carbon," the Obama administration surveyed t h is econom ic I i te rat u reand focused specifica 11 ybn t h ree mode I s whose fo recasts t hemse I ves va ry w ide I y, even sta r t i ng f rom a com mon I eve I of warming. For warming of 3 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, the middle of the three mode Is est mates an annual cost of 1% to 3% of GDP.The low case estimates 0 to1%. Thtegsh case est mates 2% to 4%. Whi Ie4% is a largedol lar amount, ar riving at that impact over near ly100years imp I ies al most imperceptiblysmal I changes in economicgrowth.
The specif icsof this high-case model are informative: The Dynamic Integrated model of Cl mate and the Economy (known as the DICE mode I) developed by Wi 11 am Nordhausat Ya Ie University est imates3.8 deg rees Cel si us of warming by 2100 costing an associated 3.9% of GDP in that year. But over time, this cost is the equivalent of slowing eco nomiegrowth by less than one-tenthof one percentage pointannual ly. By 2100, regard I ess of cl mate change, the wor Id is more than six times
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weal thier than in 2015under this model; global GDP is$500 trill ion. Theeffectof cl mate change is to reduce that gain from a mu I tipleof 6.7 to a mu 11 ip I eof 6.5.The economy a I so con t i nues to g row, so t hat t he cl imate-change-affl icted/or Idof 2105 is al ready much weal thier than a wo r I d of 2100 faci ng no c I i mate change at a 11.
Such estimates might seem counterintuitively low,especial lygiven the rhetoric often employed. Part of the explanation I ies in the al most incomprehensible economic prog ress that human civilization is capa bleof making over the courseof a century.The annual cost identified by Nordhausin 2100 is $20 trill ien massive by the standards of 2015, manageable by the standards of 2100. Further, that cost repeats every year even as the impacts are spread over many years. Thus, over the 2090 to 2110 time period, Nordhausenvisions the wor Idspending a stunning$3501 ri I lion tocopewith cl matechange. One might despai r over what elsesuch resources might accompl ishover that time period. But one must also recognize that the economy of 2100 wi 11 likely be able to al locate those resources toward cl mate change whi Ie also al locating to every other facet of society far more resources than are available today.
Corroborating these mode Is, t he IPCC concludes that "for most eco nomicsectors, the impacts of drivers such as changes in population, age structure, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation,and governance a re projected to be large relative to the impacts of cl mate change." In other words,other worrying problemshavea far greater capacity to influencer ogress.
None of this means the dislocationsfrom cl mate change would be pain I ess or the disruptions cheap. It is merely to observe that -the im pactsexpected f rom cl mate change over the next hundred years look similar to those through which both civiI izationand our planet have successful ly muddled over the past hundred and continue to strugg Ie with today. Other wor rying problemshave thei r own anticipated but I ess-severe ana logs, too. Whether a global pandemic str ikes, epidemics will inevitably occur I ike the 2014 Ebolaoutbreak in West Africa that claimed more than 10,000 I ivesand cost the th ree count ries at its center more than a tenth of thei r GDP.Whether artificial intel I igence makes humans superfluous^elf-driving vehicles could throw mil lions out of work in the years to come. Some count ries wi 11 defaul t on thei r debt; somebusinesscycleswil I spawn deep global recessions.
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These chai lengesare not existential th reats or even ones that require analysisoutsidethestandardpol icyproee&iat is, theyarenot real ly worrying problems at al I.
ext reme cases
If expected cl mate change represents the most I ikely outcoteTe c I i mate change rep resen ts t he wo rst case: Mode I s cou I d be unde rest i mat ing the warming that emissions wi 11 cause; feedback I oops cou I d send a 3-degreeincreasesuddenlycareening higher;or evenat theexpected level theclimatecouldhitatripwirethat col lapsesglobal ecosystems or ocean cur rentsor icesheetsor someother prerequisiteof modern civi I ization.
Any of these things may be trueas is the natureof genuinetyecasted chai lenges, they are mostly non-falsifiableBut whi Ie extreme cl mate change is a quintessential ly wor rying problem, it is also one that has no guaranteeor even I ikel hood of occur ring. Certainly, the "scientificconsensus" or even the "scientificmainstream" on cl mate change does not extend to confidencein such scenarios.
Tocompareext remecl imatechangewith other wor rying problems, it is helpful to consider the dimensions that make a problem "wor ry ing": that it forecasted, irreversible, and pervasive. On al I three, cl mate change appears less wor rying than most.
Consider,fi rst,the magnitudeof the forecasted impact. Many wor ry ing prob lems feature the credible prospect of ki 11 ing a significantshare of the human population or erasing modern civi I ization. Not extreme cl matechange. For instance, even considering higher temperature in creases, the IPCC concl udes that:
Global cl mate change risks are high to very high with global mean temperature increase of 4C or more above preindust rial levels in al I reasons for concern, and incI udesevere and wide spread impacts on unique and th reatened systems, substantial species ext net ion, large risks to global and regional foodsecu rity, and the combination of high temperatureand humidity comp rom isi ng no r ma I h uman act i vi t ies, i nc I udi ng g rowi ng food or working outdoors in some areas for parts of the year.
Obviously, each of thoseeffectswouldentai I enormous economic costs, car ry severe consequences for ent i re nations, and wreak havoc with the
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natural envi ronment. But as a worst case, it nevertheless pales-in com parison to catast rophes that might ki 11 a significantshare of the human population or erase the basic physical and economic infrastructure of modern civilization.
Seriouseffortsto quantify existential th reats concur. A 2016 report by theGlobal Pr io r i t ies Project at Oxford offer edas itsexampleof a worst case that cl matechangecouId "render most of the tropicssubstantial ly less habitable than at present," as compared to hundreds of mil lions or bi 11 ions of deaths associated with other chai lenges. Another Oxford study from 2008 asked conference participants to estimate the-prob abi I ity of various global catast rophes leading to human extinction in the coming century,and did not even seefitto included matechange as an option, whi Ie respondentsgave molecular nanotechnology,super intel I igentartificiaIintel I igence,and an engineeredpandemiceach at least a2% chance of erasing humanity by 2100.
Some ana I ysts nonet he I ess p I ace c I i mate change among human i ty's genuinelyexistential th reats on the basis of its "fat tai I," arguing that some unknowable but non-zero chance exists at the far-right end of the probabi I ity distribution for an outcome with essential ly infinite cost. But this is true of al I worrying prob4eriirodeed, the charac ter istics of worrying problems might be viewed as those that generate such unknowable non-zero probabi I ties. Cl mate change cannot be distinguished from other wor rying problemson that basis. Rather, the argument begs the question: What characteristics of cl mate change make its tai I relativelyfatter or thinner?
The weight accorded to a wor rying problem'sforecasted effectsde pends great I yon the number of causal steps between the under lying phenomenaand worst-case outcomes. Where fewer stepsare necessary, or wheresteps are relatively more likely to occur, the probabi I ity of the worst case arising should increase. For instance, whether an engi neered pandemic devastates humanity depends on development of the necessary techno logy (high ly I ike I y), i ts use by a ma I iciousactor (-indeter mmate),and its spread defying effortsat containment (indeterminate). Generallyspeaking, technological threatswill have the sho rtest chains whi Ie socio logical threatswill have the longestones.
Cl mate change wou I dappear to sit somewhere in between. It has a very short chain tome impact--indeed, higher atmosphericconeen trationsof carbon dioxideareal ready having effectsBut the connection
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from warmer temperaturestocivi I izational catastropheishighl-yattenu ated. The initial warming must cross thresholds that produce feedback loops.The ensuing warmth must produce envi ronmental effectsthat cause unprecedented crises across societies. Those crises must in turn overwhelm the coping capacity of theentireglobal community,which must in turn produce wide-scale breakdowns in social orderor trigger mi I itary confl ict,which must in turn metastasize.Lnt/hat? Certainly, one can invent a scenario. But thespecificsquickly become hazy,anda worst caseenti rely outside of human experiencediff icu I to articulate.
The intent of this analysis is not to dismiss the severity of worst-case cl imatescenariosor tosuggest that "wide-scalebreakdownsin social or de r " a re accep tab I e. Bu t a 11 wo r ry i ng p r ob I ems have wo rst-case fo recasts that look this way, al I with indeterminate probabi I itiesof occurring, which I eaves on I y a few op t ions: We cou I d become ove r w he I med with despai r, emphasize whichever problemsare most pol itical ly useful, or seek out qual itativeand quantitative bases for analysis. Too mush dis cussion of c I i mate change adopts t he f i rsto r second approach. Effo r tsat the third approach wi 11 inevitably be imprecise and imperfect, but the burden of proof shou Id I ie on those declaring that cl mate change stands apart from other wor rying prob I ems to exp lain why that is so. Thesug gestion here is not that tltecasted threat of cl mate change does not belong alongside other worrying problems,only that the nature of its forecast cannot be what separates it as uniquely wor rying.
worrying in slOW mOOn
In the other ways cl mate change is a wor rying problem, meanwhi Ie, it is lesswor rying than most. This isespecial ly truewith respect to i r reversibi I ity. Whi Ie President Obama has lamented that cl mate change isa"compara t i ve I y s I ow-movi ng erne r gency, " t he one t h i ng wo rse is a fast-movi ng one. Most wo r ryi ng p rob I ems have wo rst-case scena r ios t hat sweep t he g I obe i n a ma t te r of mon t hs, days, o r even m i nu tes. Fo r c I i mate change, t he damage unfol ds over decades or centuries. Th is has several impl cations.
Fi rst, whi Ie cl mate change is i r reversible compared to the typical pol icy problem, it does al low for some potential interventions even once wel I underway. For instance, natural processes al ready exist for extracting carbon dioxidefrom the atmosphere,and new technologies could be developed that accelerate those processes or create artificial ones. Al ter natively, humans could useso-cal led "geoengineering" to
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effectother changes in the cl mate system that might counteract an i n tensi fy i ng g r een house effect .These app roaches offe rno gua r an tee o r even I ikel hood of success; turning to geoengineering might be seen as adisaster in its own right. But they offermorecause for optimism than exists with many other wor rying problems.
Second, time permits adaptation. Whi Ie the prospect of losing 50% of existing agricul tural capacity is daunting, over a50-year period only 1% of capacity needs to shiftannual ly. By comparison, over the past 50 years, total agricul tural output has t rip led. Si mi I ar ly, the need for hun dredsof mil I ions of people to migrateover a century amounts to little out of the ordinary on an annual basis. There are, for instance, more than200mil I ion migrant workerswithin China, aswel I asanother200 mi 11 ion international migrantsand at least 60 mi 11 ion refugees around the world right now.The United Nat ions est mates 2.5 bi I lion people wi 11 migrate to cities in just the next 35years. Further migration, or per haps the gradual abandon men t of some ci ties or evenenti re regions, wou Id obviously be ext raordinari lycost lyanddisruptivein human, eco nomic, and environmental terms. But the reason such adaptationsare rarely mentioned in the context of other wor rying problemsis not that they would be unnecessary, but rather that, in those other cases, they would be either impossibleor elsefuti Ie.
Purveyorsofcreativelycatast rophiccl i matecasesa Iso facea Catch-22: Developingever-mo reextreme scenarios typical ly requi resever-longer timescales. Even higher temperaturesand risks of further dominosfal I ingare threatene4by2300,or after"centuries."Confidentforecasts of mul t -meter sea-1 eve I rises a re issued, tooccur over mul tiplemi I len nia. Harvard University'sMartin Weitzman, the leading proponent of the case that cl mate change presents a uniquely "fat tai I," fal Is into precisely this t rap: The worst case he offersrel ies on continued tern peratu re increases over mul tip I ecenturies. But if heightening the th reat requi resextending the timeframe further, it becomes di luted th reefold: More time becomes available for adaptation, for economic progress and technological innovation that render the threat i r relevant,or for the model to fail. Any impact forecasted for 200, let a I one 2,000, years into the future becomes al most inherertefycognizable than those al ready under study for 2100.
Final ly, consider the pervasiveness of extreme cl mate change. By influencingthe I iteral atmosphere in which al I other human activity
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takes place, cl mate change per haps exceeds any other chai lengein the breadth of its causal connectionsand potential effects.But this same dynam ic a I so I eaves i ts connect ions to u 11 i mate damage mo re dependen t on interactionwithothercontributingfactors.Asa result,morealterna tiveapproachesexist for mitigation.
If one wants to prevent a financialcol lapsefrom sending the wor Id into economic depression,one needs to prevent the col lapse. By con trast, consider a favorite present-day causa I chain used to 1 lustrate the ful I specter of the cl mate th reat: the asserted connection between cl i mate change, drought in the MiddleEast, social upheaval in Syria, the count ry'sgruesomecivi I war, the rise of ISIS, and thefloodof refugees into Europe. Perhaps the catast rophe might have been aver ted or less ened had the re been no drought. But better weather wou Id seem an odd prescription for stability and prosperity in the Middle-Epfc&inly neither necessary norsufficienDemocraticgovernance,social progress, moreeffectivd/Vesterninterventionbyeither regional or global powers, or even just better water-usagepracticesare al I superior approaches.
Another count ry, bordering Syria, has sufferedthe same drought. But a report \&ientificAmerican explains, "Water is driving the ent ire [MiddleEast] to desperateacts. Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs." Whi Ie Sy ria's oppressed society was crumbl ing, Israel launched a new era of desa I nation tech no logy. The writer con eludes: "The contrasts couldn't be starker. A few mi les from [Israel], water disappeared and civi I ization crumbled. He re, a gal van zed Givi I iza tion created water from nothingness.AsBar-Zeevand I drinkdeep,and the cl matesizzles, I wonderwhichof thesestorieswi 11 be the except ion, and which the rule."
This is compel I ingstorytel I ing. At fi rstg lance it seems a cautionary taleof cl matechange.But read theconcludingsentenceagain. Cl mate change is not the independentvariable, it is the constant. The quest ion iswhether civi I ization wi 11 equip itself to th rive anyway. What separates a wor Id of 2100 dominated by drought-plagued fai led states and one fi I ledwith prospering democracies that export water from blooming desert plains is not cl mate change. It is the wor I d'sabi I ity to suppl ant radical ideology with modernity. This same pattern repeats itself in equipping societies to withstand natural disasters, feed themselves, eradicate disease, or thrive in the face of any other chai lengeclimate change might pose.
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Per haps socio logical chai lenges I ike deci i n i ng ferti I ity, workforce participation, or fami lystabi I ity seemed out of place in the initial I st of worrying problems. Yet it is these, not genuinely existential threats to humanity, with which cl mate change has the most in common. They all impose real costs but rely on lengthy causal chains to reach from basic phenomenon to true catastrophe. They al I unfoldslowlyand leave opportunity for intervention.Thei r pervasiveness in each case depends on interaction with other sociological conditions that al I invite pol icy interventions themselv^hese wor rying problems deserve attention, but not out of proportion to the genu ne nature of the threat they pose.
WDr rying prOper ly
"ISIS is not an existential threat to the Uni ted States," President Obama told theAf/ant/c'sJeffreyGoldberg. "Cl mate change is a potential-exis tential threat to theenti re wor Id ifwe don't do someth ing about it." The c I ai m is nonsensica I because i t com pa resa wo r ry i ng p r ob I em to t he t r ad i t iona I nat iona I -secu r i ty ch a 11 enge of a specif i cte r ro r st group. Obvious I y, the former wi 11 appear more I ike an "existential threat." Conversely,one might choose a measure that would shiftthe calculus: ISIS and ISISinspi redactorski I led mo re Amer cans in 2016 than did cl mate change.
The discussion would be more constructive, and dramatical-ly dif ferent, if "ISIS" were converted into the wor rying problem of which it representsan ear ly manifestation: As an existential threat, how does cl matechange compare to increasingly potent rel igiousextremism that I eve rages tech no I ogica I advances to i nc rease coo r d i nat ion, propaganda, andforcdPWhich I inks mo re credibly to greater catast rophegivenalOOyear timeframdPWhich wi 11 p rove mo red iff icu I to reverseor adapt td? In October, President Obama observed:
There'sal ready some real ly interesting womfat def in i t ivejDu t powerful--showing that the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and theSyrian civil war. Wei I, if you start magnifying that acrossa lot of states, a lot of nation states that al ready contain a lot of poor people who a re just right at the margins of survival, this becomes a national security issue.
Surely that remainsat least as true if the word "droughts" is replaced with "riseof radical Islam."
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The president's insistence on treating ISISonlyon its current terms rather than consideringa long-term, worst-case scenario is precisely the purportederror in logicfor which he ch ides anyone who refuses tofeel the burning urgency of cl mate change because itseffectstodayare not large. Or conversely, the over-pol iticizationof radical Islam he insists on rising above bears st ri king resemblance to the over-pol iticizationof c I i mate change he pu rveys.
According to t he Associated Press, on Iy17%of Amer cans "areal ar med by cl mate change and want action now." At the other ext reme,10% "are dismissive, rejecting the concept of warming and the science.''The si lent majo r i ty is ei ther "concer ned, t h inking i t'sa man-made t h reat, but some what distant in time and place" (28%)or "cautious,sti 11 on the fence" (27%).That "al ar med" 17% tends to be Heve it has a monopol yon rational assessmentof the situation and resorts to psychological explanations for the fai I u re of others to join. But if cl mate change is just one wor rying p rob I emamong many, t he si I en t majo r i ty may have it r ight. I n wh ich case some of that psychological analysis might best be turned inward.
For instance, Harvard geology professor Daniel Sch rag observed in a recent lecture, questioning reluctance to takedecisivecl mateaction: "Peoplescratch their headsand say: Why don't people do what's right? Wei I, maybe they' re rational. It's hard to accept. But in fact, maybe they actual ly don't value the future as much as some of us do." Sch rag cor rect ly identified hat the divide in perspectiveson cl i mate change reflects in part twodifferentviewson the future. But he simply assumes it is he and his audiencewho have it right. Yes, humans may i r rational-lydis count future harms. But they also routinelyfai I to account for the way technological and societal changewill render forecasts of the distant future useless. This latter error is especial ly prevalent in the-envi ron mental real m, where predictions of impending resource scar city and civilizational col lapse have been made frequently and provenwrong with equal frequency.
"Alarmed" analysts also complain that climate change is difficu I to communicate because it is too abstract or too far removed from ev eryday concerns. But at least compared to most worrying problems, c I i mate change is h ig h I y accessi b I e. At t he conceptua I I eve I, envi-ronmen tai calamity-especial Iy one purportedly caused by malfeasaRtes been a subject of fascination for the human psyche since the begin ningof recorded history. More tactical I y, every natural disaster, ext reme
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temperature reading, and even geopol itical event has become an excuse to tai k about cl i mate changeeit her by claiming a potential I ink, or else by asserting that it representsthe kind of incident that wi 11 become more common. Peoplewho understand these events to be an endless rush of "signals" would understandably but i r rational I y elevate cl mate change above other worrying prob I ems, even as the majority correctly tunes out most of the speculation as mere noise.
Perhapsmost important, motivated reasoning might playa role.The typical claim holds that, because people do not I ike the proposed so I utions to cl mate change, they prefer to minimize the extent of the p r ob I em. Bu t i t a I so seems to be t he peop I e most enamo red of t hose po I icies who consider cl mate change uniquelydemanding of the wor Id's attention. If they are wrong, it might be in part their enthusiasm for a government-ledgreen agenda that has led them astray. Notably, thei r emphasison address! ng cl matechange hasfal len by the wayside when faced with pol icy opt ions-nuclear power, fracking in China, carbon taxes offsetby tax cuts, renewablefaci I ties in envi ronmental lysensi tiveareas-that demand tradeoffswith their other priorities. ln2016, for instance, activists in Washingtonstate opposed a statewide carbon tax part ly because its revenue would not beset aside for "necessary in vestments in our communi ties" and because tax supporters we re not " I istening to communities of color."
"Global warming," they wrote, "does not just represent an-inter section of some of the most pressing chai lengesof our t+mdsalso representsour opportunity to address these core issues."
A moredispassionateplacementof cl matechangealongsidea range of wor rying problems does not mean there is nothing to wor ry about. But it points away frona//gener/s mitigation at al I costsand toward an existing model for addressingproblemsthrough research, preparation, and adaptation. It suggests that analytical exercises that would never be applied to other worrying problems, I ike assigning a "social cost" to each marginal unit of carbon-doxideemissions, are as inappropriate as estimating a "social cost of computing power" as it brings humanity closer to a possiblesingularity,or a "social cost of international travel" as i t e I evates t he r isk of a g I oba I pandem i c. Taxes on any of t hem a re c I ose r to political statements than efficientor rections of genuine external i ties, and each would be more likely tostal I meaningful economic and technological progress than to achieve a meaningful reduction of risk.
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Lessons might run in the other di rection as wel I: Weare not-focus ing as much on other chai lengesas we should. And perhaps, if cl mate change were consigned to its rightful place in the crowd, some addi tional attention might beavai labletoconcent rateelsewhere.If the level of research support, pol icy focus, and international coordination tar geted toward cl mate change over the past eight years had gone instead towa rd p reven tingand managing pandemics, imagine the progress that could have been made. For a fraction of the cost of de-carbon zing an industrial economy, it could be hardened against cyber attacks; with a fraction of the attention corporations pay to thei r own purported cl imatevul nerabi I ity, they could make real st rides in thei r own-techno logical security.
A littlebitof worry provides healthy motivation.Too much isa rec ipefor paralysis, distraction, and over reaction.
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SNAPSHOT March 21, 2017
The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing
The Case for Calm
By
limate change may or may not bear responsibility for the flood on last night's
Cnews, but without question it has created a flood of despair. Climate researchers and activists, according to a 2015 Esquire feature, "When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job," suffer from depression and PTSD-like symptoms. In a poll on his Twitter feed, meteorologist and writer Eric Holthaus found that nearly half of 416 respondents felt "emotionally overwhelmed, at least occasionally, because of news about climate change." For just such feelings, a Salt Lake City support group provides "a safe space for confronting" what it calls "climate grief."
Panicked thoughts often turn to the next generation. "Does Climate Change Make It
Immoral to Have Kids?" pondered columnist Dave Bry in The Guardian in 2016. "[I]
think about my son," he wrote, "growing up in a gray, dying world--walking towards
Kansas on potholed highways." Over the summer, National Public Radio tackled the
same topic in "Should We Be Having Kid
re Age Of Climate Change?" an interview
with Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, who offers "a
provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them." And
Holthaus himself once responded to a worrying scientific report by announcing that he
would never fly again and might also get a vasectomy.
Such attitudes have not evolved in isolation. They are the most intense manifestations of the same mindset that produces regular headlines about "saving the planet" and a level
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of obsession with reducing carbon footprints that is otherwise reserved for reducing waistlines. Former U.S. President Barack Obama finds climate change "terrifying" and considers it "a potential existential threat." He declared in his 2015 State of the Union address that "no challenge--no challenge--poses a greater threat to future generations." In another speech offering "a glimpse of our children's fate," he described "Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples." Meanwhile, during a presidential debate among the Democratic candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders warned that "the planet that we're going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable." At the Vatican in 2015, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio shared his belief that current policy will "hasten the destruction of the earth."
A boyflies his kite on dry and crackedfarmland in San Juan town, Batangas province, south ofManila, April 18, 2010.
ROMEO RANOCO / REUTERS
And yet, such catastrophizing is not justified by the science or economics of climate change. The well-established scientific consensus that human activity is causing the climate to change does not extend to judgments about severity. The most comprehensive and often-cited efforts to synthesize the disparate range of projections-- for instance, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
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and the Obama administration's estimate of the "Social Cost of Carbon"-- consistently project real but manageable costs over the century to come. To be sure, more speculative worst-case scenarios abound. But humanity has no shortage of worst cases about which people succeed in remaining far calmer: from a global pandemic to financial collapse to any number of military crises.
What, then, explains the prevalence of climate catastrophism? One might think that the burgeoning field of climate psychology would offer answers. But it is itself a bastion of catastrophism, aiming to explain and then reform the views of anyone who fails to grasp the situation's desperate severity. The Washington Post offers "the 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change." Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions introduces its guide to "The Psychology of Climate Change Communication" by posing the question:"Why Aren't People More Concerned About Climate Change?" In its 100-page report, the American Psychological Association notes that "emotional reactions to climate change risks are likely to be conflicted and muted," before considering the "psychological reasons people do not respond more strongly to the risks of climate change." The document does not address the possibility of overreaction.
Properly confronting catastrophism is not just a matter of alleviating the real suffering of many well-meaning individuals. First and foremost, catastrophism influences public policy. Politicians regularly anoint climate change the world's most important problem and increasingly describe the necessary response in terms of a mobilization not seen since the last world war. During her presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised a "climate map room" akin to Roosevelt's command center for the global fight against fascism. Rational assessment of cost and benefit falls by the wayside, leading to questions like the one de Blasio posed in Rome: "How do we justify holding back on any effort that may nieaningfully improve the trajectory of climate change?"
Catastrophism can also lead to the trampling of democratic norms. It has produced calls for the investigation and prosecution of dissenters and disregard for constitutional limitations on government power. In The Atlantic, for example, Peter Beinart offered climate change as his first justification for an Electoral College override of the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. The Supreme Court has taken the unprecedented step of halting implementation of the Clean Power Plan, Obama's signature climate policy, before a lower court even finished considering its constitutionality; his law school mentor, professor Larry Tribe, likened the "power grab" of his star pupil's plan to "burning the Constitution."
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The alternative to catastrophism is not complacency but pragmatism. Catastrophists typically condemn fracked natural gas because, although it results in much lower greenhouse-gas emissions than coal, it does not move the world toward the zero emissions future necessary to avert climate change entirely. Yet fracking has done more in recent years to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States than all renewable energy investments combined. It has boosted U.S. economic growth as well.
The idea that humanity might prepare for and cope with climate change through adaptation is incompatible with catastrophists' outlook. Yet if the damage from climate damage can be managed, anticipating challenges through research and then investing in smart responses offers a more sensible path than blocking the construction of pipelines or subsidizing the construction of wind turbines. Catastrophists countenance progress only if it can be fueled without carbon-dioxide emissions. Yet given the choice, bringing electricity to those who need it better insulates them from any climate threat than does preventing the accompanying emissions.
The cognitive fault lines separating catastrophists from others cause both sides to reach radically different conclusions from the same information. Catastrophists assume that their interpretation is correct, and so describe other thinking as distorted. But if the catastrophists have it wrong, perhaps the distortions are theirs.
CLIMATE CHANGE COSTS
A strong scientific consensus holds that human activity is producing climate change. But from that starting point, scientists have produced a range of estimates in response to a variety of complicated questions: How quickly will greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere? What amount of warming will any given accumulation cause? What effect will any given level of warming have on ecosystems and sea levels and storms? What effect will those changes in the environment have on human society? The answers to all of these questions are much debated, but broad-based efforts to synthesize the best research in the physical and social sciences do at least offer useful parameters within which to assess the nature of the climate threat.
On scientific questions, the gold-standard summary is the Assessment Report created
every few years by thousands of scientists under the auspices of the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By averaging widely varying
projections and assuming no aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,
they estimate an increas
ree to four degrees Celcius (five to seven degrees
Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. The associated rise in sea levels over the course of the
twenty-first century, according to the IPCC, is 0.6 meters (two feet).
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Most of the rise in sea levels results not from melting glaciers, but from the thermal expansion of ocean water as it becomes warmer. Melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica, which may eventually threaten a dramatic increase in sea levels, will barely begin in this century--in the IPCC analysis, the Antarctic ice sheet will have almost no effect and may even slow sea level rise as increased precipitation adds to its snowpack. Meanwhile, melting from Greenland's ice sheet will contribute 0.09 meters (3.5 inches). In fact, "the near-complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet," which could raise sea levels by seven meters, the IPCC reports, "would occur over a millennium or more."
What about ecology? Predicting or quantifying damage to vulnerable ecosystems and specific species is notoriously difficult, but the IPCC offers a helpful heuristic for the likely magnitude of damage from climate change: "With 4C warming, climate change is projected to become an increasingly important driver of impacts on ecosystems, becoming comparable with land-use change." In other words, the impact should be similar to that which human civilization has imposed on the natural world already. Substantial and tragic, to be sure; but not something that modern society deems intolerable or a threat to human progress.
Economic tools called "integrated assessment models" attempt to convert the potential
effects of climate change--on sea level and ecosystems, storms and droughts,
agricultural productivity, and human health--into tangible cost estimates. This exercise
is as much art as science, but it represents the best available exploration of how the
impacts of climate change will likely stack up against society's capacity to cope with
them. Three of these models form the basis of the Obama administration's analysis of
the "Soc
it of Carbon"--the U.S. government's official estimate of how much
climate change will cost and thus what benefits come from combatting it. Economists
and policymakers who want to place a price (that is, a tax) on carbon-dioxide emissions
to force emitters to pay for potential damage resulting from climate change typically
embrace the analysis as well.
According to the assessment models, a warming of three to four degrees Celcius by 2100
will cost the world between one and four percent of global GDP in that year. To put the
high end of that range concretely, the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE)
model developed by economics professor William Nordhaus at Yale University estimates
that in a world without climate change, the global economy's GDP would grow from $76
trillion in 2015 to $510 trillion in 2100 (an annual growth rate of 2.3 percent). A rise in
temperatures of 3.8 degrees Celcius would cost 3.9 percent c
($20 trillion) that
year, effectively reducing GDP to $490 trillion.
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A man wears a polar bear costume and holds a banner with the message, "Climate Change is Unbearable" as he participates in a demonstration near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, as the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) continues near the French capital in Le Bourget, December 12, 2015.
MAL LANGSDON / REUTERS
Twenty trillion dollars is a very large number--representing a cost greater than the entire annual economic output of the United States in 2016. But from the perspective of 2100, such costs represent the difference between the world being 6.5 times wealthier than in 2015 or 6.7 times wealthier. In the DICE model, moreover, the climate-changeafflicted world of 2105 is already more prosperous than the climate-change-free world of 2100. And because the impacts and costs of climate change emerge gradually over the century--0.3 percent of GDP in 2020,1.0 percent in 2050--in no year does the model foresee a reduction in economic growth of even one-tenth of a percentage point. Average annual growth over the 2015-2100 period declines from 2.27 percent to 2.22 percent.
To be sure, economic estimates are incomplete. They cannot incorporate the inherent value to a community of remaining in its ancestral lands or any obligation humanity might have to protect other species and habitats. Even within the economic sphere, the assessment models depend on subjectively chosen inputs and averages across disparate forecasts; they rest atop numerous other models, each with their own subjectively chosen inputs and averages. Among the three models the Obama administration picked
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for its analysis alone, the range of outputs is enormous: the DICE model's four percentof-GDP estimate is near the 95th percentile of the projections from the middle-case model, while the low-case model's one percent-of-GDP estimate is below the middle case's 5th percentile. But nowhere is catastrophe to be found.
Limitations and all, such estimates remain the best available. Further, the shortcomings of the integrated assessment models have little to do with their lack of support for catastrophism. The gap between what the models describe and what catastrophists fear does not emerge because the models disregard the heritages of indigenous cultures or the intangible value of every species. Nor do catastrophists disagree with particular inputs or outputs, expecting that tweaks to certain assumptions might validate their views. Rather, the societal collapse that catastrophists envision--one that poses an "existential" threat beyond the scope of other human problems, one that makes procreation an ethically dubious proposition--is simply irreconcilable with the outlook the science and economics offers.
Indeed, the logic of catastrophism seems to run backward: from the conclusion that significant human influence on the climate must portend unprecedented danger to the search for facts to support that narrative. But forecasts on these scales of time and magnitude exceed common experience and thus defy intuition, which facilitates misinterpretation and frustrates self-correction. Placing the problem in proper perspective requires appreciating the long-term costs in the context of the distant future when they will arise, distinguishing costs spread over long time periods from those borne all at once and, finally, applying separate analyses to expected outcomes and worst case scenarios. Catastrophists get these things wrong.
COSTS IN THE DISTANCE
The power of compounding growth is the most crucial and counterintuitive phenomenon for understanding long-term projections. Many first encounter it in the tale of the ancient chessmaster who offers to train the emperor in return for one grain of rice on the board's first square, two grains on the second, four on the third--doubling on each square through the sixty-fourth. This sounds quite affordable, but the payment for the last square turns out to be just over nine quintillion (million-trillion) grains.
An economy growing by some percentage each year follows a similar trajectory. If GDP rises by just three percent per year, the economy will grow almost 20-fold in a century. In constant 2009 dollars, U.S. GDP was less than $1 trillion in 1930. Eighty-five years later, after growing at an average compounding rate of 3.4 percent, it exceeded $16 trillion. Eighty-five years from now, even at half that growth rate, U.S. GDP will approach $70 trillion. For the majority of the world population, which resides in the
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developing world and thus starts further behind, progress will likely be faster--more closely mirroring the booms in the United States and other now-developed countries in the last century. A $500 trillion global economy in 2100 in which most of the world approaches the standard of living already enjoyed in the West may sound fantastical. But it only requires steady progress.
The first cognitive fault line separating catastrophists from others emerges here, over how to interpret the severity of climate-change damages in a world so radically different and more prosperous than our own. The standard narrative holds that most people improperly discount or ignore costs in the distant future. To the extent that those people are rational, their discounting of future problems must mean that they are immoral. "People scratch their heads and say: Why don't people do what's right?" remarked Harvard geology professor Daniel Schrag in a 2013 lecture. "Well, maybe they're rational. It's hard to accept. But in fact, maybe they actually don't value the future as much as some of us do. The benefits will go to their children, to their grandchildren, and beyond."
But what if, rather than not caring about their grandchildren, people have confidence that their grandchildren will enjoy a far higher standard of living and have a greater capacity to cope with whatever climate change might bring? In purely economic terms, both seem likely. Even after accounting for climate change, the DICE model forecasts a world 6.5 times richer than today's for a population only 40 percent larger. Condemn mainstream economic estimates as hopelessly optimistic, increase the annual cost estimate for 2100 tenfold from $20 trillion to $200 trillion, and the world is still four times richer than today.
The abstract GDP totals represent more than just a hypothetical capacity to absorb costs. The concrete implications of this growth will be leaps forward in societal resilience and technological capability of the same magnitude achieved in the last century. Without predicting the future, analogs from the past indicate the kinds of change to expect. In many cases, they address squarely the central concerns raised by climate change.
Environmentalists, for example, have long worried about global population outstripping food supply. In 1970, the biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that, due to population growth, "at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." Instead, a technological revolution caused agricultural yields to surge. Today, even as concern grows about potential water crises around the world, the seeds of their resolution may be sprouting as well. Israel, suffering from the same drought often blamed for helping plunge Syria into civil war, is using desalination technology to make the desert bloom. Recently, it found itself with a water surplus. India is constructing
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more than one million irrigation ponds that will increase agricultural yields by as much as 300 percent and buffer against changes in the timing of the monsoon season.
Continued progress in public health, through new breakthroughs and the transfer of best practices to the developing world, will likely ensure that life expectancy and quality will continue to increase regardless of how the climate changes. Perhaps climate change will increase the range of tropical diseases compared to a no-climate-change world. But in absolute terms, the prevalence of and mortality from such diseases should plummet. The public health challenges of 2100 will be as distant from today's as today's are from those of the early 1900s, prior to the development of either antibiotics or vaccines, when one in three American deaths were from pneumonia, tuberculosis, or diarrhea and enteritis.
To offer one more example, human infrastructure continues to triumph over the challenges and disasters of the natural world. Richer countries experience significantly lower fatality rates from natural disasters and also significantly lower damages relative to the size of their economies. The World Health Organization reports that in the three cyclones of maximum severity striking Bangladesh in 1970,1991, and 2007, total fatalities declined from 500,300 to 138,958 to 4,234. The diffusion of existing technologies worldwide, and the development of new ones--coupled with unprecedented resources for implementation--should ensure that these trends continue.
Incremental improvements in water management, public health practices, and infrastructure are a conservative vision of progress. But innovation beyond today's imagination, in directions by definition unpredictable, is likely as well. Robin Hanson, a researcher at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote a well-received book called The Age ofEm in which he argued that by 2100, computer simulations of humans will dominate an economy that doubles in size every month. James Lovelock, the British scientist, has likewise argued that, "before we've reached the end of this century, even--I think that what people call robots will have taken over."
Conversely, if innovation and economic growth stall; if the developing world halts its development; if wealthy nations begin to move backward--climate change will be the least of humanity's worries. The world's economic system of debt-based capitalism, predicated on continued growth, would collapse. The political systems built on that economic system would collapse as well. In that world, as in the prosperous one, the effects of climate change are a marginal consideration.
At its extreme, the conflation of future impacts with present circumstances produces
incoherent results. Take, for instance, the EPA's "Climate Change Risks ai
tlysis"
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project. Among its most prominent claims: Unmitigated climate change will cause more than 12,000 annual deaths from extreme heat in major U.S. cities by 2100. (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the EPA report fewer than 500 heat-related deaths in 2014, a figure that has been on a downward trajectory over the past 15 years). To reach 12,000 by 2100, the analysis took each city's mortality rate from extreme heat in 2000 and applied it to the hotter temperatures forecast for 2100. It concluded that, by 2100, the heat in New York City would be killing at 50 times the rate in Phoenix in 2000 (even though the New York City of 2100 is not expected to be as hot as the Phoenix of 2000). If one believes that residents of New York City will be dropping like flies from heat in the future, climate change must seem terrifying indeed. But that is not a rational belief.
COSTS OVER TIME
A second cognitive fault line emerges over interpretation of climate change's slowmotion onset. Catastrophists lament this characteristic and blame it for humanity's failure to feel properly alarmed. The frog-in-boiling-water parable is popular here, even appearing in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: try to throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, and it will leap out; but heat the frog in a pot of cool water, and it will sit there until dead.
The problem is that the parable turns out to be completely wrong. A frog tossed into boiling water will be killed or badly injured; one heated up will jump out when it becomes uncomfortable. In this, people are something like frogs: the one thing worse than a slow-motion crisis is a rapid one.
In the climate context, even from the vantage point of a prosperous 2100, the sudden inundation of coastal cities or disappearance of the monsoon would produce civilization-rattling disruptions. "Just imagine, for example, monsoon patterns shifting in South Asia where you have over a billion people," warned Obama in 2016. "If you have even a portion of those billion people displaced, you now have the sorts of refugee crises and potential conflicts that we haven't seen in our lifetimes." Catastrophists frequently cite this specter of hundreds of millions of refugees, which offers a vague but ominous scenario that might derive from any number of catastrophes and cause any number of others.
But would shifting monsoon patterns displace so many? Remember, growing wealth and infrastructure in the developing world will ensure a level of resilience far greater than today's. Of equal importance, gradual challenges invite adaptation: even if fully half of global agricultural production must relocate over a century, the required shift each year is only 0.5 percent of total production. For comparison, annual additions to global food production have averaged more than two percent over the past 50 years.
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Even stipulating that adaptations will displace hundreds of millions of people, that displacement will not happen all at once. Spread over decades, such a disruption would look little different from the status quo. China alone currently supports a domestic migrant worker population of 278 million. According to estimates by the United Nations, there are currently 232 million international migrants. The organization projects that the figure will grow by several million each year. By 2050, the World Bank estimates that 2.5 billion people will migrate to cities for reasons unrelated to climate change. Climate change may thus be among the forces that cause the twenty-first century to witness upheavals and migrations on a scale similar to those of the nineteenth and twentieth--other forces were on full display in 2016--but that can hardly earn it the designation of "unprecedented" or "existential."
The costs of climate adaptation can also appear deceptively large if the alternative of maintaining the status quo is imagined to be free. But regardless of climate change, almost every component of the global economy's capital base--from city sewers to farm silos--will be fully depreciated and will need to be replaced by new investment over the next 100 years, both because existing infrastructure will deteriorate and because new alternatives will be worth installing. In that way, major coastal cities will be entirely rebuilt regardless of whether rising seas threaten them. If people allocating capital--be they small-town farmers, resort designers, or mayors--have the information and incentives to incorporate climate adaptation into their planning, it need not impose sudden and unmanageable recovery costs.
Recall Obama's warning: "Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow." The statement actually began with the caveat that it is "a glimpse of our children's fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it." But certainly the climate is not yet changing too fast for society to address. And if societies continue to exhibit and build upon the adaptability they displayed in the lastcentury, the glimpsed fate will never come to pass.
Faced with the claim that total climate costs of $20 trillion in 2100 represent an entirely manageable burden, the catastrophist might respond that $20 trillion must be implausibly low for the extent of disruption climate change might entail. He or she might also emphasize that climate change is not a one-time phenomenon: its effects will accumulate and compound, striking year after year against societies with a constrained capacity to respond.
But that argument gets the dynamic backward. Although climate impacts may be permanent and on-going, costly adaptation--if done wisely--need occur only once. A Manhattan properly insulated from rising waters will not require new protection each time sea level climbs another foot. Conversely, that hypothetical $20 trillion represents
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the resources that society might commit to the problem in the single year 2100. In Nordhaus' DICE model, the total allocated to climate costs between 2050 and 2150 is more than $2.5 quadrillion, all without ever slowing annual growth by more than one tenth of one percentage point. The world's productive capacity, bolstered by innovation and adaptation over time, is orders of magnitude larger than the demands climate change is expected to impose. Such adaptation may represent a tragic long-term drain on society's resources, but that does not mean it will noticeably alter the trajectory of human civilization.
COSTS IN THE EXTREME
To the climate catastrophist, even a credible argument that climate change is manageable may offer little comfort. So what if the IPCC's best guess of sea-level rise by 2100 is only two feet? Some scenarios contemplate much worse outcomes, and what if those come true?
The Esquire article describes the views of Michael Mann, the climatologist who created the famous "hockey-stick" chart used to argue that centuries of climate stability were giving way to sharp warming in recent decades. "As Mann sees it, scientists like [NASA's Gavin] Schmidt who choose to focus on the middle of the curve aren't really being scientific.... A real scientific response would also give serious weight to the dark side of the curve." In Mann's own words: "Maybe it is true what the ice-sheet modelers have been telling us, that it will take a thousand years or more to melt the Greenland Ice Sheet. But maybe they're wrong; maybe it could play out in a century or two."
Catastrophists worry that warming temperatures will set off an uncontrollable feedback loop, begetting ever-accelerating warming that leaves the planet uninhabitable; ocean currents might suddenly reverse, sending local climates into wild gyrations; unexpected ice-sheet dynamics might produce rapid glacial melting that causes sea levels to rise rapidly by multiple meters; agricultural yields could collapse, triggering widespread famine and conflict. Perhaps. If nothing else, such claims are unfalsifiable.
But it is difficult to know how to weigh such extreme hypothetical. Emphasizing them risks departing the world of empirical research and model-based forecasting for one governed by fear. A variety of other long-term challenges with truly existential worst case scenarios already exists, from the archetypical nuclear war to the emergence of artificial super-intelligence hostile to humans, to the global spread of an engineered pandemic, to coordinated cyberattacks on physical and financial infrastructure. Working with a catastrophic mindset and a century-long timeline, one can construct an apocalyptic scenario from almost any problem.
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Here, the third fault line emerges over placement of climate change in broader context. Catastrophists see their worries about extreme climate change as unique from, and more concrete than, other speculative fears. But when held up for comparison, extreme climate change does not justify a special status. In objective terms, the worst case for climate change does not even place it among the worst of worst cases. For instance, the Global Priorities Project at Oxford observes that climate change could "render most of the tropics substantially less habitable than at present," as compared to the hundreds of millions or billions of deaths associated with other challenges. Another Oxford study surveyed conference participants about the extinction-level risks of various catastrophes and neglected to even consider climate change; respondents gave molecular nanotechnology, superintelligent AI, and an engineered pandemic all at least a two percent chance of erasing humanity by 2100.
A climate change worst-case scenario also differs from others in its speed. Although genuinely existential threats to civilization might circle the globe in months, days, or even minutes, total climate catastrophe unfolds over decades or centuries. One might not like humanity's chances of reversing or coping with such a threat, but the chances must be higher than for threats striking hundreds or thousands of times faster.
These factors place catastrophists in a catch-22. To locate climate-change impacts of sufficient magnitude, they envision scenarios that require temperatures to climb and dominos to fall across multiple centuries. But extending the timeframe dilutes costs faster than it can increase them. No matter how apocalyptic, impacts forecasted hundreds of years in the future are inherently less alarming than those under discussion for the year 2100.
Several factors may help to explain why catastrophists sometimes view extreme climate change as more likely than other worst cases. Catastrophists confuse expected and extreme forecasts and thus view climate catastrophe as something we know will happen. But while the expected scenarios of manageable climate change derive from an accumulation of scientific evidence, the extreme ones do not. Catastrophists likewise interpret the present-day effects of climate change as the onset of their worst fears, but those effects are no more proof of existential catastrophes to come than is the 2015 Ebola epidemic a sign of a future civilization-destroying pandemic, or Siri of a coming Singularity.
Catastrophists express frustration that the diffuse and intangible impacts of climate change prevent the threat from receiving sufficient attention--"if global warming took out an eye every now and then," Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, wrote in 2006, "OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence." But as compared to other long-term challenges, claims of climate impact appear constantly.
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Natural disasters, extreme temperatures, and even geopolitical events find themselves linked to discussions of climate change or, if no link is available, cited as the kind of thing climate change might make more common. Greater obsession with climate change produces more coverage of it, stoking greater obsession. Meanwhile, arguments against catastrophism rarely reach the audience that might benefit most from hearing them.
Finally, "motivated reasoning" likely plays a role. A charge issued frequently by catastrophists is that anyone expressing inadequate concern must be avoiding the problem because he dislikes the consequences of taking action--bigger government, more regulation, less growth. But this presumably cuts both ways. The policy agenda and social outlook demanded by the catastrophist perspective tends to align closely with the pre-existing preferences of catastrophists. Perhaps tellingly, when proposals arise that are less to their liking--nuclear power and fracked natural gas as substitutes for coal, carbon taxes paired with other tax cuts, use of conservation land for renewable power, research on geo-engineering--the overriding imperative to address climate change has tended to fall by the wayside.
COSTS TO CREDIBILITY
The errors of today's climate catastrophists repeat those made by the last generation of environmental doomsayers. As Paul Romer, the chief economist of the World Bank, recently observed:
During the 1970s, the Club ofRomefamously argue d that our economic system was on the verge ofcollapse because we were running out offossil fuel. This analysis wasflawed not simply because it got the magnitudes wrong. It got the signs wrong. The problemfacing the world is not that the earth's crust contains too little fossil fuel and that we won't have enough innovation to solve this problem. The real problems are that the earth's crust contains far too much fossil fuel and that too much [innovation] is making this problem much worse.
In other words, even though the Club of Rome was wrong in the 1970s, Romer believes its broader perspective should be embraced. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, he attributes the failure last time around to "an instance of motivated reasoning. Advocates seem to have been too eager to generate a sense of pessimistic urgency."
Schrag, the Harvard geology professor, is even more blunt. Reflecting on Ehrlich's predictions of eminent mass starvation in the 1970s, Schrag acknowledges that "none of his predictions came true." Nevertheless, says Schrag, "It's quite amazing that we're
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actually able to feed the world at all. Ehrlich wasn't wrong in '68, he's just wrong today." In this view, the catastrophist is not accountable for considering how growth, innovation, and adaptation might avert catastrophe. But Ehrlich was indeed wrong in 1968, for the same reasons his intellectual heirs are likely wrong about climate change today.
Some catastrophists do acknowledge, at least implicitly, the limits of their case. Unfortunately, this leads them to demand the creation of new evidence. Nicholas Stern, lead author of the United Kingdom's climate assessment, wrote recently in Nature: "The next IPCC report needs to be based on a much more robust body of economics literature, which we must create now. It could make a crucial difference." Stern expressed concern that the current generation of economic models fails to adequately account for the risk of shocks "such as the thawing of permafrost, release of methane, and other potential tipping points," or of social costs "such as widespread conflict as a result of large-scale human migration to escape the worst-affected areas."
Dave Roberts, whose TedX presentation entitled "Climate Change Is Simple" warns of "Hell on Earth" by 2100, suggests that the integrated assessment models should use surveys of "expert opinion" to produce "better, more representative modeling." But the DICE model, as an example, already incorporates such a survey. Undoubtedly, new models designed to vindicate the catastrophists' perspective will soon emerge. But perhaps the existing models are saying something very important about the nature of human progress and long-term challenges that catastrophists need to hear.
Or perhaps they hear more than they let on. Obama catastrophized in speeches, but seldom when the prospect of a follow-up question loomed. Pressed by New York Times reporter Mark handler whether he "believe[s] the threat from climate change is dire enough that it could precipitate the collapse of our civilization," Obama relied on his legalistic rather than rhetorical gifts: "Well, I don't know that I can look into a crystal ball and know exactly how this plays out. But what we do know is that historically, when you see severe environmental strains of one sort or another on cultures, on civilizations, on nations, that the byproducts of that are unpredictable and can be very dangerous." True enough--and the same could be said for a whole host of other challenges. For instance, try replacing Obama's phrase "severe environmental strains" with "strains of militant religious extremism."
As for Biy, the newspaper columnist; Rieder, the philosophy professor; and Holthaus, the meteorologist? They each decided to have kids after all.
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SlitPruitt cLirirylisarifirrratimheariiy tobad theBi/irmmit PrctmApry, January 18,2017
Who's The
Clheto
Now?
BY OREN CASS
he epithet "climate denier," intended to invoke Holo caustve're going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may
Tdenial, has always been tasteless and inapt. Cli mate well not be habitable," he was not laughed off the stage, change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the Often, the politicians and pundits targeted with the "denier" accuracy and predictive power of a scientific model like label did deserve blame. Ignoring the best available scientific
questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 mil- research--an obvious starting point in any other policy debate--
lion Jews. But climate activists delighted in defining their opposi-was irresponsible or dishonest. Their arguments rarely emerged
tion this way, with help from prominent figures such as Barack from any valuable scientific insight, but usually from a fear that
Obama, who in 2014 used Twitter to condemn "climate change acknowledging the scientific basis of climate change would
deniers" and promote a website, run by Organizing for Action (fomiean accepting radical and costly responses. This was doubly
merly Obama for America), that featured large black-and-white counterproductive: Not only did it grant by default a mainstream
pictures of then--House speaker John Boehner and Senator Marco foothold to outlandishly over blown climate fears, but also it side-
Rubio atop a green "Climate Change Deniers" banner. "On cli- lined and undermined more important and compelling policy
mate," asked the site's headline, "whose side are you on?"
based objections to the activist agenda.
For a while, this seemed to work. Framing the climate debate as And then a funny thing happened: "Denial" gave way to those
one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akinmore reasoned arguments. Perhaps the accumulation of scientific
to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything. Toevidence changed minds. Perhaps it was only the political reality
the casual observer, even the most egregious exaggeration about that sank in. Regardless, opponents of aggressive climate policy
climate science could seem reasonable compared with its outright mostly stopped questioning whether the climate was warming
rejection. Thus, Obama's assertion in his 2015 State of the Union and whether human activity played a role--the two points of
address that "no challenge--no challenge--poses a greater threat agreement that define the famous "97 percent consensus" of di
to future generations than climate change" became widely accept-mate scientists--and started explaining why that consensus did
ed. When Senator Bernie Sanders warned during a presidential not justify costly and ineffective policies.
debate that "the scientific community is telling us that if we do This shift in focus from the basic science of climate change to
not address the global crisis of climate change . . . the planet that its public-policy implications has been a disaster for climate
activists, exposing the flabbiness at the core of their position.
Mr. Oasisasibr felb/vat theMatattcn Irtttub
Softened by years of punching down at their opponents' worst
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T. J. kirkpatrick bloomberg v ia getty images /
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arguments, they became addicted to asserting that "science says tweeted, "#Pruitt on #climate: `Science tells us climate is chang-
so," and they are now lost when it doesn't.
ing' but says extent of human role is up for debate. False." In her
When Sanders, back in the Senate, questioned Oklahoma attor- accompanying story, she reported that Pruitt's views were "not
ney general Scott Pruitt during the latter's confirmation hearing consistent with the scientific consensus" as reflected by the
to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, it was the inter U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
rogator who couldn't keep his facts straight. Pruitt asserted that What does the IPCC actually say? While it is "extremely likely
"the climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that that human activities caused more than half of the observed
in some manner," explaining that he had inserted the caveat ("in increase in [temperature] from 1951 to 2010," the attribution for
some manner") because "the ability to measure, with precision, the approximately 0.6C of warming requires wide ranges that
the degree of human activity's impact on the climate is subject to are "likely" to be accurate: between 0.5 and 1.3C for greenhouse
more debate." Pressed by Sanders, he stated again: "The climate gases, between -0.6 and +0.1 C for other human activity, and
is changing, and human activity impacts that."
between -0.1 and +0.1 C apiece for natural causes and internal
Pruitt wanted to discuss "the job of the [EPA] administrator," variability. For the slower warming observed during the period
which he noted was "to carry out the statutes passed by
from 1998 to 2012, the IPCC could offer only low to medium
[Congress]." He also agreed that the "EPA has a very important confidence in its explanation.
role at regulating the emission of CQ." But Sanders was deter So Pruitt's comments were not "False." Indeed, in a later story
mined to show that Pruitt rejected the scientific consensus, even Davenport's colleague Justin Gillis acknowledged that Pruitt's
if this meant falsifying the contents of that consensus.
position was "almost axiomatically true." But, Gillis argued, it
Sanders claimed that "97 percent of the scientists who wrote remained problematic because
articles in peer-reviewed journals believe that human activity is the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change." That is wrong. A survey-of-surveys published last ye&rEMvironmental Research LettersepoAeA that prior surveys had found 78 percent of scientists agreeing that "the cause of global warming over the past 150 years was mostly human," 82 percent agreeing that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures," and 85 percent agreeing that "anthro
anybody who did not know better might come away thinking there is room to doubt whether humans are the main cause of global warming. Mr. Pruitt did not actually say that, of course. . . . Mr. Pruitt and the other Trump nominees labored to avoid overt denial while signaling to their allies that there is enough doubt to justify inaction on emissions or even rolling back steps the Obama administration took.
pogenic greenhouse gases are the dominant driver of recent
This is the crux of the matter. Statements about climate change
global warming." Of course, even among those expressing
are no longer being policed for their accuracy, but rather for the
agreement about the "significant" or "dominant" human role, degree to which they help or harm the activist ageriHas Atlantic
debate would presumably have emerged about whether natural explains that "the new climate denial is like the old climate denial"
factors accounted for 0, 10, 25, or 50 percent.
because "both are excuses for inaction." Why didn't Sanders ask
Sanders also claimed that "97 percent of scientists who have Pruitt the obvious follow-ups: "Do you see that lack of precision
written articles for peer-reviewed journals have concluded that as relevant to the policy choices facing us?" or "Of course, science
climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is is always subject to imprecision, but do you believe we should
already causing devastating problems in our country and around take action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions?" Sanders didn't
the world." As to the devastating problems, this also is false. He ask these questions because he had no interest in discussing cli
said "the vast majority of scientists are telling us that if we do mate policy, where his own ideas make no sense (including, for
not get our act together and transform our energy system away instance, banning nuclear power and "bringing climate deniers to
from fossil fuel, there is a real question as to the quality of the justice"). His position rests on the fiction that scientists unani
planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our
mously agree, and that is where he must make his stand.
grandchildren." Also untrue.
Pruitt's emphasis on the difficulty of measuring, "with preci
sion, the degree of human activity's impact" also crosses a red line
for activists, because the precision with which climate models can
IN fact, scientists and economists hold widely varying views describe what is happening links directly to the precision with on the costs that climate change has caused and will cause. which they can describe what will happen. If scientists do not Surveys of scientists rarely address social consequences or know exactly how the climate system is behaving now, we might
policy implications. When President Obama tweeted that accord less weight to their projections into the distant future.
"Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hit that tripwire in his own con
real, man-made and dangerous," eve&z/owhad to acknowledge firmation hearing when he said: "The increase in the greenhouse
he was wrong to say "dangerous." Only half of the economists gas concentrations in the atmosphere aisu+|| having an effect; our
surveyed by NYU's Institute for Pol i cy Integrity in 2015 believebility to predict that effect is very limited." Professor Katharine
"immediate and drastic action is necessary" on climate change; Hayhoe mocked the claim, suggesting that perhaps it would have
only 56 percent said that "if nothing is done to limit climate been correct in the 1800s. "In 2017? Not so much." Professor
change in the future" it would be a "very serious" problem for the Michael Mann called it "indefensible." In the Guardian, Dana
United States; only 41 percent believed "climate change is
Nuccitelli concluded, "Functionally [Tillerson] might not be very
already having a negative effect on the global economy."
different than a Secretary of State who outright denies climate
But the New York TimeAiaA categorized the Pruitt nomination change." Mashable s Andrew Freedman warned that Tillerson,
under the heading climate change denial, albeit without any Pruitt, and fellow Trump nominee Rick Perry had "moved from
support. So when Pruitt testifiedHwiesreporter Cor al Davenport outright climate denial to a more subtle, insidious and risky form.
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MAY 1, 2017
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But as the IPCC emphasizes, the range for future projections read the quotes discovered that most of them raised no issues
remains enormous. The central question is "climate sensitivity"-- -with climate science at all.
the amount of warming that accompanies a doubling of carbon In early March, Davenport tried calling Trump appointees
dioxide in the atmosphere. As of its Fifth Assessment Report in "skeptics," rather than "deniers." But Gillis summarized her
2013, the IPCC could estimate only that this sensitivity is some story, headlined "EPA Head Stacks Agency with Climate
where between 1.5 and 4.5C. Nor is science narrowing that Change Skeptics," in a tweet as "Top posts at EPA are being
range. The 2013 assessment actually widened it on the low end, stocked with climate-change denialists." He then acknowledged
from a 2.0^l.5oC range in the prior assessment. And remember, that the conflicting word choices were no accident and that the
for any specific level of warming, forecasts vary widely on the Times "cannot seem to achieve internal consistency about what
subsequent environmental and economic implications.
word to use, despite best efforts." That was awkward, though not
At least one might assume that reasonable minds could be as awkward as Professor Michael Mann's testimony before the
allowed to differ on the ultimate question of how well society is House Science Committee later that month: "I don't believe I
likely to cope with the effects of climate change--a political, called anybody here a denier," he asserted, "yet that's been stated
social, and economic question several degrees removed from over and over again. So I've been misrepresented quite a bit
anything resembling a scientific consensus. Not so. I addressed today." To which Professor Judith Curry, sitting just to his right,
these issues in a recenforeign Affairsessay, in which I called the responded, "It's in your written testimony." Sure enough, on
IPCC "the gold-standard summary," cited it repeatedly, and page 6, Mann referred to "climate science denier Judith Curry,"
adopted its estimate that temperatures could rise by 3 to 4C this even averring, "I use the term carefully."
century. My essay further embraced the Obama administration's Activists, so eager to bar the gates to the public square and
"Social Cost of Car bon" analysis and adopted its high-case keep their opponents out, have instead locked themselves in. If
model for economic cost. But the essay argued that the likely everyone agrees with the 97 percent consensus, and that consen
impact of all this was "manageable" rather than "catastrophic." sus does not dictate any particular policy outcome, they have
The president should clean up the embarrassing ambiguity and vacuity in his own views. And his administration should make
clear that it works from mainstream scientific conclusions
Mann decried it as "#Koch climate denial propaganda." Eric nothing else to say. Perhaps this is for the best. If the extremists
Holthaus, mete orologist and host of the podcast Our Warm from both sides become sufficiently marginalized, a reasoned
Regards, called it "a master class in modem climate denial." policy debate might emerge about the real risks of climate
change and the cost-effective responses. This would require the
media to admit that their "denier" terminology has lost all mean
he scope of viewpoints that constitute "denial" is rapidly ing and to attend equally to the scientifically unsupported state
Texpanding to swallow all opposition to favored climate policies. In Scientific American, blogger Peter Dykstra
ments from both sides. It would also require a consistent, scientifically accurate mes
declared "grudgingly admitting the problem while scramblisnagetofrom the White House. The president should clean up the
avoid addressing it" to be a form of climate denial. Writing in embarrassing ambiguity and vacuity in his own views. And his
Rolling Slone Bill McKibben pathetically attempted to introduce administration should make clear that it works from mainstream
the term "Renewables Denial" ("at least as ugly and insidious as scientific conclusions. EPA Administrator Pruitt confused matters
its twin sister, Climate Denial") to describe skepticism that wind greatly with comments to CNBC last month that went beyond his
and solar power can meet the world's energy needs anytime soon. testimony about "precision" and "debate" and suggested that
At stake are the boundaries of debate in our democratic soci human activity was not the primary cause of recent warming.
ety, on an issue that the self-appointed enforcers insist is the Pruitt had no basis for taking that position, nor does he gain any
most important one facing us. The ad hominem "denier" criti thing from it; even Fox News confronted him. Conversely, an
cism places arguments and their purveyors beyond the pale, accurate statement of the science would only strengthen his posi
unworthy of response. Appealing to a purported "97 percent tion in defending the policies he seeks to implement. The more he
consensus" asserts that the question has been scientifically
focuses discussion on costs and benefits of EPA actions, the more
answered and policymakers have no business debating it. Such reasonable he will seem--and the more reasonable he will be.
rhetorical techniques are wildly inappropriate where science is For now, though, navigating the climate debate will require
in fact, by its own admission, not settled, and especially where translating the phrase "climate denier" to mean "anyone unsym
science is but one input to a difficult policy question.
pathetic to the most aggressive activists' claims." This apparently
Fortunately, this nonsense is unsustainable. THeznestried let includes anyone who acknowledges meaningful uncertainty in
ting people speak for themselves, introducing quotes from twelve climate models, adopts a less-than-catastrophic outlook about
of Trump's Cabinet nominees with the summary: "Most of the the consequences of future warming, or opposes any facet of
people President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen for the top the activist policy agenda. The activists will be identifiable
tiers of his administration have expressed doubt that climate as the small group continuing to shout "De ni er!"; the "deniers"
change is caused by human activity." But anyone who actually will be identifiable as everyone else.
NR
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5/31/2017
Goodbye to Paris
Goodbye to Paris | commentary
The sin of being honest.
By Oren Cass
A u i te dedcRseTue ce Rf Preside t TrumS's Paris AccRrd i decisiR has bee e SRsure Rf the agreeme t's u derl i g fraud. The activists a d G leaders beseechi g him desSeratel tRremai begged the TuestiR What sRrt Rf climate club wRuld wa t a member whRcalls its tRSic a "hRa " a d flatl rejects its SRlic SrescriStiR s? O e whRse Srimar SurSRse is gRRd fRRd a d cR versatiR , Rt a substa tive i ter atiR al resSR se tR climate cha ge.
PrRSR e ts R ce argued the had built sRmethi g i mSRsi g--"the e duri g framewRrk the wRrld eeds tRsRlve the climate crisis," as Preside t Obama described it, with "bRld" a d "ambitiRus" targets. But the SrRsSect Rf the Tuee bee leavi g the table SrRmSted assura ces that SarticiSatiR is reall Ri cR ve ie ce at all. Please, Mr. TrumS, just sta fRr dessert
This revised view is clRser tRthe truth. The AccRrd was dRRmed befRre egRtiatRrs ever assembled fRr ShRtRgraShs i December 111 i The were Rt there tRcRmmit each cRu tr tRmea i gful gree hRuse-gas reductiR s rather, ever R e submitted their vRlu tar Sledges i adva ce, a d all were acceSted withRut scruti . Pledges did Rt have tRme tiR emissiR s levels, Rr were there Se alties fRr falli g shRrt. The cR fere ce itself was, i esse ce, a staSli g e ercise.
Celebrati g the success Rf this cRllatiR cRalitiR , Secretar Rf State JRh Kerr claimed that"
atiR s i the
wRrld came tRgether tRsubmit a Sia , all Rf them reduci g their emissiR s." That was Rt true. I fact, mRst Rf
the majRr develRSi g cRu tries, whRse emissiR s will drive climate cha ge this ce tur , Sledged R 1 tR
cR ti ue with busi ess as usual.
Chi a cRmmitted tRbegi reduci g emissiR s b IJ1 I ] rRughl whe its ecR Rmic develRSme t wRuld have caused this tRhaSSe regardless. I dia made RemissiR s cRmmitme t, Sledgi g R 1 tRmake SrRgress R efficie c --at half the rate it had SrRgressed i rece t ears. Pakista Rutdid the rest, submitti g a si gle Sage that Rffered tR"reduce its emissiR s after reachi g Seak levels tRthe e te t SRssible." This is a defi itiR Rf the wRrd "Seak," Rt a cRmmitme t.
Si ce the , the farce has SrRceeded as farces dR Secretar Kerr claimed the AccRrd wRuld u leash clea -
e erg i vestme t. "It is gRi g tRmRve the marketSlace," he said, calli g it "a break-awa agreeme t which
actuall cha ges the Saradigm" a d will "sSur massive i vestme t." I stead, glRbal i vestme t Slummeted b
Scree t i
cRmSarcd tR fl 11 j accRrdi g tRBIRRmberg New E erg Fi a ce. The first Tuarter Rf fl 111
saw a Rther LU Serce t decli e versus J11 1
The vRlu teer Sledges have cRmma ded Srecisel the resSect the deserve. A ASril reSRrt b Transport Environment fRu d R 1 three EurRSea cRu tries Sursui g SRlicies i li e with their Paris cRmmitme ts a d R e Rf thRse, Germa , has Rw see twRstraight ears Rf emissiR s increases. The PhiliSSi es has Rutright re Ru ced its cRmmitme t. A stud Sublished b the America GeRSh sical U iR war s that I dia's Sia ed cRal-Sla t cR structiR is i cRmSatible with its Rw targets. All this behaviRr is sRciall acceStable amR gst the climate crRwd. O 1 TrumS's SresumStiR that the agreeme t mea s sRmethi g, a d that cRu tries shRuld be fRrthright abRut their cRmmitme ts, is be Rd the Sale.
SRmewhat i credibl , TRdd Ster , the Obama admi istratiR's lead climate egRtiatRr, tRRk tRthe Washington Postfix Slai that the U.S. cRuld eve revise dRw ward its Rw cRmmitme t tRelimi ate a SRte tialburde . "Ik Rw," he seemi gl bragged, "because I helSed egRtiate that fie ibilit CRmSare this tRhis defe seRfthe agreeme t whe sig ed, i which he reSeatedl used the wRrd "ratchet" tRdescribe a SrRcess where cRu tries
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Goodbye to Paris [ commentary
wRuld R 1 stre gthe their cRmmitme ts. But rather tha see the cRcktail hRur i terruSted, eve that last vestige Rf substa ce was flu g RverbRard.
SRshRuld the U.S. have sta ed Rr gR e? TRTuRte a Rther Rf Preside t Obama's secretaries Rf state "What
differe ce, at this SRi t, dRes it make?" FRr the climate, Rt much Rf R e. The Massachusetts I stitute Rf
Tech RIRg 's assessme t Rf the agreeme t fRu d that eve full cRmSlia ce wRuld R 1 have reduced glRbal
temSeratures i
b RI degrees Celsius.
I stead, the debate devRlved i tRthe ki d R e Rtherwise hears abRut the UN Huma Rights CRu cil, a fRrum R R e mistakes fRr a seriRus effRrt tRadva cehuma rights. If Rther cRu tries are gRi g tRsit arRu ddiscussi g the climate, shRuld 't we at least atte d? This is what Mille ials might call the "FOMO" LFear Rf Missi g Out defe se.
Further, as Ster argued, "withdraw! g frRm the Paris agreeme t wRuld be a stai R the legacies Rf bRth the Sreside t a d Secretar Rf State." Other cRu tries "wRuld see withdrawal as a slaS i the face." But R which Sreside t's legac is Paris a stai ? The CR stitutiR reTuires the Se ate tRratif treaties b a twR-thirds suSermajRrit i Sart tRe sure that the U ited States sSeaks with a si gle, cR siste t vRice R the i ter atiR al stage. It was Preside t Obama whRRffered the wRrld a u wise cRmmitme t fRr which he gRt Rthi g i retur . It was Obama whRrefused tRsubmit that cRmmitme t fRr Se ate aSSrRval because he knew he did Rt have it.
TrumS ca reverse his SredecessRr's mistake. Withdraw! g frRm the AccRrd thrRugh a Se ate vRte wRuld make clear that Obama shRuld ever have sig ed i the first Slace. It wRuld establish the Srecede t fRr seeki g Se ate aSSrRval Rf a such cRmmitme ts i the future. A d if, R behalf Rf Rur cR stitutiR al reSublic a d cRmmR se se, we i suit Rther Sart gRers? PerhaSs we ca se d a card.
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CITY
JOURNAL
We'll Never Have Paris | City Journal
EYE ON THE NEWS
We'll Never Have Paris
The climate change agreement was designed as a feel-good, do-nothing program.
Oren Cass
June 1, 2017
Even before President Trump had completed his announcement that the United States
would withdraw from the Paris Accord on cl mate change, howls of disbelief and
outrage went up from proponents of the agreement. But the critical dynamic underlying
the 2015 Accord, willfully ignored by its advocates, is that major developing countries
offered "commitments" for emissions reduction that only
3d their economies'
existing trajectories. Thus, for instance, China committed to reaching peak emissions by
2030--in line with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's prior analysis. India
committed to improving its emissions per unit of GDP--at a rate slower than that metric
was already improving. President Obama, meanwhile, pledged America to concrete and
aggressive emissions cuts that would require genuine and costly change.
Asi wrote in National Review at the conclusion of the Paris conference in December 2015:
(The full scope of the catastrophe will emerge only in the years to come. One of the agreement's few binding provisions is a requirement for countries to gather and review |their commitmentsand their adherence to them every five years. Given the caliber of the pledges, that promise of review has little value; countries that promised to proceed |on their existing trajectories will pass with flying colors. But the United States, whose (commitments far exceed what even the aggressive Obama agenda is expected to produce, will be the nation off track.
Su re enough, a rec
I ne from Inside Climate News blares, "China, India to Reach
Climate Goals Years Early, as U.S. Likely to Fall Far Short." That is, China and India are
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reaching the "goal" of proceeding along their unaltered course, while the U.S. is "falling
short" of a very high bar.
One might think this prima facie evidence of the agreement's folly, but Jonathan Chait
of New York magazine
as proof that the Right's criticism of Paris "has
proven incontrovertibly false." Citing data from Climate Action Tracker, heavers that
"India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33-35
percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42-45 percent by that date. China
promised its total emissions would peak by 2030--an ambitious goal for a rapidly
industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal." Chait
concludes, "The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition
to Paris has melted away beneath its feet."
However, Climate Action Tracker's own
in
December 2015 determined, "according to our analysis, with the policies it already has
in place, India will achieve an emissions intensity reduction of around 41.5% below 2005
levels by 2030." India committed to less than business-as-usual, has proceeded with
business-as-usual, and now wins applause from Chait for beating its worthless
commitment. It's easy to slim down to 180 pounds, if you weigh 175 to begin with.
Likewise, in December 2015, it was Climate Action Tracker's view that "under a scenario with currently implemented policies, Chinese CO2 emissions are likely to peak around 2025." The New York Times reports that Chinese emissions 2014, just as the nation's leaders were formulating their international pledge. Is it more likely that the Chinese inadvertently made a pledge they could meet without trying, or that Chait has fallen for a pledge that was formulated such that it would have to be met?
The giveaway for the Paris charade is the refusal to set baselines. If nations are to hold one another accountable for progress on greenhouse-gas emissions, surely they must agree on a starting point from which to progress. Yet the framework for Paris pointedly omitted this requirement. Countries could calculate their own baselines however they chose, or provide noneat all. Now, per Chait, the pledges have themselves become baselines, and each country receives applause or condemnation in inverse proportion to its seriousness.
Even failing on one's commitment is acceptable, so long as the right things get said.
Carbon Market Watch
that "despite all of the fanfare that went on at the time, it
seems that there are currently only three European Union countries pursuing climate
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policies that put them in line with the agreements made at the Paris Climate Change
Talks." Angela Merkel said that she finds the G7's discussion of climate change "very
difficult," but not because her nation's emissions have risen the last two years. Her
difficulty arises from those ugly Americans' unwillingness to keep up appearances.
Later this week, we will be treated to the spectacle of "a statement backed by all 28 EU states, [in which] the European Union and China will commit to full implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement"--undoubtedly accompanied by lamentations that the United States has disrupted the charade by walking offstage. How the world misses President Obama's enthusiasm for a debating society that delivers no substantive action, or even a useful framework for assessing results, only a forum for bashing America. Such nerve, our nation has, to excuse itself from that pastime.
Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
52 Vanderbilt AvenueNew York, NY 1
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National Review Online | Print
NATIONAL REVIEW
Don't Apologize for Being Honest about Climate Change
A response to Ross Douthat's lukewarm lukewarmism By Oren Cass -- June 5, 2017
riting about climate change in the New York Times, Ross Douthat describes "lukewarmers" as those who:
accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization's ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe's statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.
Douthat placed himself among the lukewarmers and very graciously referred his readers to some of my recent work for a longer discussion of those themes. But his column was also quite gracious in conceding two problems with lukewarmism, which instead deserve rebuttal.
Douthat's Problem #1: "No less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry picking and selection bias, reaching for any piece of evidence -- and when you're dealing with long-term trends, there's a lot of evidence to choose from -- that supports its noncatastrophic assumptions, even if the bulk of the data starts to point the other way."
This is a generic critique that might apply to any position on any issue. School-choice advocacy is vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, as is support for universal pre-K. So are the claims that Scandinavian-style welfare states are good or bad for innovation and economic growth. And the claims that an interventionist U.S. foreign policy promotes or harms our national interest. Highlighting such a complaint about lukewarmism would make sense only if the position were uniquely reliant on such bad behavior.
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To the contrary, the key hypothesis (of my work, anyway) is that even workingfrom the
mainstream scientific and economic studies advanced by alarmists, the data do not support a
conclusion of catastrophe. That is, the effects identified by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change are serious but manageable. The economic costs identified by the Obama
administration's Social Cost of Carbon analysis are no larger than those associated with a
variety of other policy issues.
Of course, plenty of people cherry-pick this or that study in an effort to undermine the mainstream conclusions of climate science. But such analysis is unnecessary to a moderate view of climate change and, I would argue, often counterproductive. Lukewarmism is, or should be, about describing accurately the mainstream of climate research and then assessing how well human society's resilience and capacity for adaptation will allow it to cope with the challenges we might face.
Douthat's Problem #2: "While lukewarmers may fancy ourselves serious interlocutors for liberals, we're actually just running interference on behalf of know-nothing and donothingism, attacking flawed policies on behalf of a Republican Party that will never, ever advance any policies of its own."
This mistakes an argument about the nature of the climate problem for one about the ideal solution. Lukewarmism is an effort to provide much needed perspective and context on the climate debate. Importantly, it is a corrective to the outlandish claims of catastrophe, made by environmental activists, that bear no relationship to mainstream research -- they can hardly complain that others are taking the time to point this out. If we want the public to interpret correctly the implications of climate change, the correct interpretation should be given a vigorous defense. Insisting that policy deliberations begin from an appropriate policy definition does not worsen the quality of those deliberations and is not "running interference."
Further, climate policies are typically flawed in ways that remain obvious regardless of how seriously one takes climate change. Obama's Clean Power Plan was costly, it was an illegitimate expansion of federal power, and it would not have materially affected global temperatures. The Paris Agreement was an absurd piece of political theater that disadvantaged the United States and endorsed the developing world's refusal to take serious climate action. These observations hold equally well if one is ice cold, lukewarm, or boiling mad.
But sometimes a firm grasp of the problem matters a lot, and then the lukewarmer's obligation is to apply his conclusions honestly. If someone proposes truly radical solutions that might avert climate change at unfathomable cost, lukewarmers should decry the overreaction. Likewise, if someone rejects sensible policies that have concrete benefits by rejecting any cause for concern,
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lukewarmers should insist they be serious. As I wrote for Fox News when Trump signed his
executive order on the topic, "Trump Is Wrong on Climate Change":
We should want government planners at every level to take the best existing research into account as they make public investments and set policy that will influence others. If farmers and resort owners and mayors and naval planners all build with an eye toward how the future might change, then those changes as they arrive won't be so harmful or expensive.
Yet, in addition to starting the repeal of costly mitigation efforts like Obama's Clean Power Plan, Trump's executive order entirely erases an Obama order aimed at "preparing the United States for the impacts of Climate Change." Many of the points in that program still make sense. Perhaps the greatest mistake made by those who overinflate the risk of climate change is to forget that our society has a tremendous capacity to adapt and innovate. But it would also be a major mistake to forget that public policy can either foster or hinder that process.
Certainly, that's no comprehensive agenda. But it is a message that the politicians and policymakers of both parties would benefit from hearing.
READ MORE: The Fanatical Prophet of Climate-Change Doom Bill Nve's Embarrassing Face-Off on Climate Change A Top Climate Scientist Blows the Whistle on on Shoddy Climate Science
-- Oren Cass is a seniorfellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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