Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
One of the arguments frequently applied to the climate debate is that the “Precautionary Principle” requires that we take action to reduce CO2. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Precautionary Principle, which means something very different from the kind of caution that makes us carry an umbrella when rain threatens. Some people are taking the Precautionary Principle way too far …
Figure 1. Umbrella Exhibiting an Excess of Precaution
The nature of the Precautionary Principle is widely misunderstood. Let me start with the birth of the Precautionary Principle (I’ll call it PP for short), which comes from the United Nations Rio de Janeiro Declaration on the Environment (1992). Here’s their original formulation:
“In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capability. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
This is an excellent statement of the PP, as it distinguishes it from such things as carrying umbrellas, denying bank loans, approving the Kyoto Protocol, invading Afghanistan, or using seat belts.
The three key parts of the PP (emphasis mine) are:
1) A threat of serious or irreversible damage.
2) A lack of full scientific certainty (in other words, the existence of partial but not conclusive scientific evidence).
3) The availability of cost-effective measures that we know will prevent the problem.
Here are some examples of how these key parts of the PP work out in practice.
We have full scientific certainty that seat belts save lives, and that using an umbrella keeps us dry. Thus, using them is not an example of the PP, it is simply acting reasonably on principles about which we are scientifically certain.
There are no scientific principles or evidence that we can apply to the question of invading Afghanistan, so we cannot apply the PP there either.
Bank loans are neither serious nor irreversible, nor is there partial scientific understanding of them, so they don’t qualify for the PP.
The Kyoto Protocol is so far from being cost-effective as to be laughable. The PP can be thought of as a kind of insurance policy. No one would pay $200,000 for an insurance policy if the payoff in case of an accident were only $20, yet this is the kind of ratio of cost to payoff that the Kyoto Protocol involves. Even its proponents say that if the states involved met their targets, it would only reduce the temperature by a tenth of a degree in fifty years … not a good risk/reward ratio.
Finally, consider CO2. The claim is that in fifty years, we’ll be sorry if we don’t stop producing CO2 now. However, we don’t know whether CO2 will cause any damage at all in fifty years, much less whether it will cause serious or irreversible damage. We have very little evidence that CO2 will cause “dangerous” warming other than fanciful forecasts from untested, unverified, unvalidated climate models which have not been subjected to software quality assurance of any kind. We have no evidence that a warmer world is a worse world, it might be a better world. The proposed remedies are estimated to cost on the order of a trillion dollars a year … hardly cost effective under any analysis. Nor do we have any certainty whether the proposed remedies will prevent the projected problem. So cutting CO2 fails to qualify for the PP under all three of the criteria.
On the other side of the equation, a good example of when we should definitely use the PP involves local extinction. We have fairly good scientific understanding that removing a top predator from a local ecosystem badly screws things up. Kill the mountain lions, and the deer go wild, then the plants are overgrazed, then the ground erodes, insect populations are unbalanced, and so on down the line.
Now, if we are looking at a novel ecosystem that has not been scientifically studied, we do not have full scientific certainty that removing the top predator will actually cause serious or irreversible damage to the ecosystem. However, if there is a cost-effective method to avoid removing the top predator, the PP says that we should do so. It fulfils the three requirements of the PP — there is a threat of serious or irreversible damage, we have partial scientific certainty, and a cost-effective solution exists, so we should act.
Because I hold these views about the inapplicability of the precautionary principle to CO2, I am often accused of not wanting to do anything about a possible threat. People say I’m ignoring something which could cause problems in the future. This is not the case. I do not advocate inaction. I advocate the use of “no-regrets” actions in response to this kind of possible danger.
The rule of the no-regrets approach is very simple — do things that will provide real, immediate, low-cost, tangible benefits whether or not the threat is real. That way you won’t regret your actions.
Here are some examples of no-regrets responses to the predicted threats of CO2. In Peru, the slums up on the hillside above Lima are very dry, which is a problem that is supposed to get worse if the world warms. In response to the problem, people are installing “fog nets“. These nets capture water from the fog, providing fresh water to the villagers.
In India’s Ladakh region, they have the same problem, lack of water. So they have started building “artificial glaciers“.These are low-cost shallow ponds where they divert the water during the winter. The water freezes, and is slowly released as the “glacier” melts over the course of the following growing season.
These are the best type of response to a possible threat from CO2. They are inexpensive, they solve a real problem today rather than a half century from now, and they are aimed at the poor of the world.
These responses also reveal what I call the “dirty secret” of the “we’re all gonna die in fifty years from CO2” crowd. The dirty secret of their forecasts of massive impending doom is that all of the threatened catastrophes they warn us about are here already.
All the different types of climate-related destruction that people are so worried will happen in fifty years are happening today. Droughts? We got ’em. Floods? There’s plenty. Rising sea levels? Check. Insect borne diseases? Which ones would you like? Tornados and extreme storms? We get them all the time. People dying of starvation? How many do you want? All the Biblical Plagues of Egypt? Would you like flies with that?
Forget about what will happen in fifty years. Every possible climate catastrophe is happening now, and has been for centuries.
So if you are truly interested in those problems, do something about them today. Contribute to organizations developing salt resistant crops. Put money into teaching traditional drought resisting measures in Africa. Support the use of micro-hydroelectric plants for village energy. The possibilities are endless.
That way, whether or not the doomsayers are right about what will happen in fifty years, both then and now people will be better prepared and more able to confront the problems caused by the unpleasant vagaries of climate. Fighting to reduce CO2 is hugely expensive, has been totally unsuccessful to date, will be very damaging to the lives of the poorest people, and has no certainty of bringing the promised results. This is a very bad combination.
Me, I don’t think CO2 will cause those doomsday scenarios. But that’s just me, I’ve been wrong before. If you do care about CO2 and think it is teh eeeevil, you should be out promoting your favorite no-regrets option. Because whether or not CO2 is a danger as people claim, if you do that you can be sure that you are not just pouring money down a bottomless hole with very poor odds of success. That’s the real Precautionary Principle.
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You left out a slash. Try: http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
I think its denotation is the same as “denier” (someone who irrationally “denies” what is plain to any rational observer), but without its nasty connotation (the Holocaust).
There are certain devotees of “scientism” who believe that science can, in principle, answer any question about the natural, or material, world, and/or that science, and only science, can speak authoritatively about knowledge.
To a science fiend, it is outrageous irrationality, or subjectivism, or mere hand-waving, to claim or imply that some subject matter can’t be made to yield to the scientific method. It is an a priori “given” to them that “science,” given sufficient resources, cannot be long baffled by any situation involving interacting natural forces.
But there are certain fields where science hasn’t been able to provide much insight or get much traction. These include, most obviously, the soft sciences of psychology, politics, sociology, and economics. In two particular cases I can think of offhand, science has failed spectacularly (i.e., labored, but brought forth a mouse): behavioral psychology and artificial intelligence. These two fields were those infested by know-it-all / reductionist / focus-on-the-tangible “science fiends.”
The behaviorists dismissed all objections to their strict materialism as “subjectivism”–a ghost in the machine. Everything boiled down to stimulusand response. The American journals of psychology in many decades in the first half of the 20th century were dominated by behaviorists who were determined to kept “junk” psychology from contaminating their field, just like the Team and its allies. The heads of psychology departments were similarly intolerant, and getting a PhD in the field pretty much required adherence to the settled doctrine. Ditto climatology in the recent past.
The AI-ers similarly dismissed “consciousness” as another ghostly intangible. Everything boiled down to a series of yes/no decisions, or computations. In artificial intelligence, no expert in the field was a disbeliever. The critics were outsiders; the experts were all, in various degrees, believers. People went into the field because they were believers. Ditto climatology in the recent past. This is where the consensus comes from.
Those two “bridges too far” should have given reductionist climatologists pause, and so should chaos theory and complexity. Here is how one commenter on Christopher Booker’s recent article on the Met put it:
Despite these considerations, climatologists are convinced, like the behaviorists and AI fanatics before them, that they have the problem surrounded, and therefore they can dismiss appeals to “natural variation” as an invocation of a ghostly nonentity, lacking substance. It follows (to them) that anyone who won’t accept the reasonings of the scientific consensus is a flat-earther:
This is the arrogant, scientistic, “we-have-the-problem-surrounded” metaphor. (It doesn’t give enough weight to the idea that the earth might attempt to self-regulate its temperature with clouds, for instance.) It tries to evade the “skeptical” burden-of-proof, null-hypothesis objection by implying that all the important factors in the planet’s temperature have been accounted for in a problem-surrounded “heat budget” that leaves no room for “natural variation,” which is relegated to ghost-in-the-machine status.
Here’s the counter of “Invariant” (on this site, recently) in defense of the “spring”:
Besices such problem-surrounded scientism, the consensus is also based on groupthink; on faddism; on behind-the-scenes political machinations; on worries about funding; on the alarmist/activist bias inculcated by climatology departments; and on consensus participants being “selected for” by the predilections of those potential students who found that bias attractive. (I.e., climatology offered them a new and growing field in which they could rise rapidly, and which gave than an unprecedented opportunity to make a mark on the world.)
Therefore, climatology’s consensus is, fortunately, not representative of consensuses in mainline science, and one needn’t be an anti-scientific nut to be a climate contrarian.
Stefan,
Yes I wanted to say that as a human being I have a point of view, but also more.
I was really thinking about what and how I teach my children and how this is different from what they learn in school.
It seems that in 12 years of Honors classes, my children have been taught nothing about how to have a proper intellectual argument. You know, how to recognize twisted logic or how to spot and answer a pre-supposition in a statement, and how to respond to it.
An example is: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? There are two pre-suppositions, one that you beat your wife, and two, that you still do.
If you take the bait and respond to either one of the presuppositions, you do not address the other and you are left feeling beaten-up but are not sure why.
These kinds of difficult statements and even simpler stuff, like name calling, and threats, are rife in the public forum. Most people do not know how to dodge them. I’ll admit I am still learning too.
But these are the kinds of things that every voter should know. Every voter should know how to spot the flaws in arguments, how to look for bias, to look for the flaws in their own nature, and how actions should match the words… so that they cannot be fooled.
My children asked me, “Why do I have to learn algebra. I’ll never use it.” The answer is, so that you cannot be fooled by someone who does.
Another problem that I see is, even though schools teach the scientific method, they don’t practice it. In science class, students are given a lab with expected out comes. The students are graded on how closely they match the expected outcome. What is the message that they are really receiving?
Don’t even get me started on economic theory!
So, my post was really about: What are we teaching our children, and what should we be teaching them so that they can resist the onslaught of advertising, cults and even “experts.”
[REPLY – Gosh, yes. Recently I told a class (of 7th graders) that it was not my job to teach them what to think, it was my job to teach them how to think. ~ Evan]
Good summary – Thank you.
See, Willis, what you’ve got us into? Discussing the foundations of what’s required to “think effectively,” whether a scientist or not… Really! Such a waste of time when we could be name-calling the idiots at CRU or NASA. Let’s get this blog back to the fun knuckle-dragging SS accused us of.
Interesting that since this thread has become a more broadly philosophical discussion relevant to the AGW debate that SS hasn’t had much to say to advance the thinking here — whether or not in support of AGW.
/sarc off
Hey, but this has been fun! Thanks for sharing, folks. Now, how about that weather, ain’t it cold out?
P. S. One effective answer to “Have you stopped beating your wife?” is:
WHEN did your get the idea that I beat my wife?
By answering the question with “when” instead of any other interrogative, you haven’t admitted to anything and you force the offender to begin a discussion with you about a specific incident that he may have in mind. Most likely, he doesn’t actually have a specific incident in mind and is left floundering. If he does, the topic is now open for discussion and it is limited to a specific incident instead of a generality.
Stefan,
The paradigm/framework you’ve outlined makes a lot of sense both for personal and societal development… especially some of the more schizophrenic-seeming tendencies we grown-ups tend to exhibit due to, as you put it, “the existence of multiple stages concurrently” – As well as our own mini-evolutions from childhood to adulthood.
It’s an absolutely fascinating insight into an area of study that I am admittedly unfamiliar with. A big thanks good sir!
JP/R/Roger,
Thanks as well for the great posts. My apologies for derailing!
r, January 3, 2009 (14:15:50) :
“I was really thinking about what and how I teach my children and how this is different from what they learn in school.
“It seems that in 12 years of Honors classes, my children have been taught nothing about how to have a proper intellectual argument. You know, how to recognize twisted logic or how to spot and answer a pre-supposition in a statement, and how to respond to it.”
You are right. Try one or more of these for the kids.
Downes, Stephen. “The Logical Fallacies, Stephen’s Guide to : Welcome.” http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/welcome.htm.
—. “The Logical Fallacies: Table of Contents.” http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/toc.htm.
Holt, Tim. “Logical Fallacies.” Logical Fallacies. http://www.logicalfallacies.info/index.html.
Miriam Joseph. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric: Understanding the Nature and Function of Language. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2002.
“The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies.” http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html.
Re: r, January 3, 2009 (14:15:50) :
“I was really thinking about what and how I teach my children and how this is different from what they learn in school.
“It seems that in 12 years of Honors classes, my children have been taught nothing about how to have a proper intellectual argument. You know, how to recognize twisted logic or how to spot and answer a pre-supposition in a statement, and how to respond to it.”
You are right. Try one or more of these for the kids or for your own amusement and confirmation of your post.
Downes, Stephen. “The Logical Fallacies, Stephen’s Guide to : Welcome.” http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/welcome.htm.
—. “The Logical Fallacies: Table of Contents.” http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/toc.htm.
Holt, Tim. “Logical Fallacies.” Logical Fallacies. http://www.logicalfallacies.info/index.html.
Miriam Joseph. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric: Understanding the Nature and Function of Language. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2002.
“The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies.” http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html.
(Sorry if this is a repeat. The first try simply disappeared.)
REPLY: [ When a posting “simply disappears” without even an “awaiting moderation” that means it was put in the SPAM queue (which is serviced, but more slowly…) often from ‘too many links’. We fish them out, but it’s a bit slower. -mod ]
There are also various books and threads on “critical thinking” that may also help (google for the term). I think that teaching this material is more important than most other subjects commonly taught.
But I have two concerns about these lists of fallacies. First, I don’t think that logical fallacies make up the majority of the off-track thinking and arguing one sees online and elsewhere. It’s more often “bad faith,” woolly-mindedness, escalatory responses, deliberate obtuseness, tunnel vision, perverse unreasonableness, and various kinds of “debater’s tricks” that are not “logical” fallacies. What’s needed is a catalog of such flaws and tricks.
Second, some people can employ spotting-a-fallacy as a mere weapon and become over-accusatory about the supposed logical fallacies they think they spot, or employ them in an unreasonable “gotcha” fashion.
For instance, the term for the “appeal to authority” fallacy was originally (I suspect) employed in order to make a contrast to “appeal to reason,” and was limited to cases where traditionalists cited Aristotle on the number of a woman’s teeth, or the Bible on the age of the earth, as a means of playing a trump card and shutting down debate.
This classic fallacy has been stretched to the point that it can indict an opponent who merely cites the number of “authorities” in a field who agree with him. That’s not an appeal to a mere ipse dixit dogma that lacks any other foundation, and it’s not necessarily an attempt to shut down debate (although it can be), so it’s not quite the same thing as the original “fallacy.” (It of course can be attacked on other grounds, such as that the consensus might be wrong, uninformed, “manufactured,” not correctly counted, etc.)
There are two or three other fallacy-accusations that I think are over-played, but I can’t call them to mind at the moment, and I don’t want to belabor this point, so I’ll end. (This could turn into quite a tangent.)
Roger Knights (23:43:35) : edit
A valid point. I make a clear distinction between on the one hand someone who tries to buttress his argument with “the IPCC says” or “the American Association for the Advancement of Science says” or “the consensus of scientists on this question is”, and on the other hand someone who refers to “the statement by Professor Smith on page 7 of his 1994 study of left-handed rabbits”. One is a meaningless appeal to authority, and the other is a reference to a particular scientific claim and its supporting evidence.
noble and calm outlines, became decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of desperate fear.
analysis of the costs of caution and precaution did not provide any unambiguous results that would allow one to determine if it would be less costly to anticipate climate change or plan cautiously.adijuh.ru