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Tom P[_3_]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/sc...h/04clima.html

August 9, 2009, 23:00:34 | jtaylor
The August 4 issue of the New York Times features a rather illuminating
article by Andrew Revkin - the Times' climate reporter - on sentiment
within the ranks of the IPCC as that organization begins work on its
upcoming 2014 report. Revkin reports that the IPCC's scientists are
frustrated that the world's governments - even those that are led by
politicians who habitually give end-is-near speeches about global
warming - are not taking the sorts of policy actions the organization
thinks are necessary to head-off global catastrophe. Hence, a growing
number of scientists want the IPCC to be more explicit and prescriptive
with regards to public policy, less inhibited when discussing scientific
issues where a great deal of uncertainty exists, more concerned with
best practices pertaining to public risk management, and more
politically sensitive about the issues that are examined at-length in
the upcoming report.

The subject line is misleading, it should read:

The IPCC Gets Sick of Political Inaction

In other words, Revkin reports that the IPCC wants to spend less time on
science in their next report than they have in past reports and more
time on issues for which it has no relevant expertise or comparative
advantage. Of course, Revkin doesn't put it quite that way, but that's
the unmistakable implication of what he reports.

Consider these complaints one at a time.

The fact that governments are not fundamentally transforming society to
address climate change is not necessarily a sign that either the public
or their governmental representatives are not listening closely enough
to the IPCC. Public resources are, after all, rather limited. There is
only so much time, energy, and money to address real, imagined, or
potential public harms. Hence, worries about climate change have to
compete with worries about AIDS, economic development, terrorism,
unfunded public health care and retirement programs, the global economic
recession, and numerous other things. Scientists who specialize in
climate change have no comparative advantage in sorting out which of
these worries are more important than others. In fact, there is very
good reason to think that climate change is less important than more
than a dozen other issues affecting human wellbeing even if one buys the
scientific arguments found in past IPCC reports.

Moreover, crafting "good" public policy (defined as policies that
maximize the spread between benefits and costs, broadly understood) is a
difficult undertaking. Political scientists and economists are trained
in this sort of thing. Scientists are not.

The worry that scientists aren't saying enough about things they are
unsure about is an odd complaint. "Knowing what you are talking about,"
after all, is generally thought to be a prerequisite for intelligent
conversation. Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider, however,
evidently believes that "knowing what you are talking about" needs to be
defined relatively elastically. "If you say nothing until you have high
confidence and solid evidence," he tells Revkin, "you're failing
society." Are we to believe, then, that saying things about which one
has low confidence and weak evidence is doing society a favor?

Even assuming the IPCC's assessment of climate-related risks is correct,
what exactly can scientists tell us about the kind and degree of public
risks that are acceptable and those that are not? Nothing. Risks -
public and private - are omnipresent in life. Risk preferences are
subjective. Scientists have no better or worse preferences in that
regard than anyone else. They can inform public decision making by
ensuring that our understanding of the risks at issue is as accurate,
but they can't tell us as scientists what we ought to do with that
information.

Finally, concentrating attention on those issues that public policy
analysts think are important is almost certainly less "honest" than a
report that concentrates attention on those issues that the IPCC's
scientists think are important. An IPCC that sees itself more as a
staff-arm of member governments than an arbiter of the published
scientific literature is an IPCC that defines itself more by its
political mission than its scientific mission.

This isn't just bad policy; this is bad science. As Roger Pielke Jr.
points out, "Scientists seeking political victories may diminish the
constructive role that scientific expertise can play in the policy
process." By way of analogy, if the public comes to believe that the
referee has definite preferences regarding the game's outcome, the
public is going to trust the refs a lot less than might otherwise be the
case. The IPCC's proposed remedy for a world that pays little real
attention to their reports may well lead to even less public attention
in the future.

Whether that's good or bad depends, of course, on your point of view.