Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Stephan Lewandowsky (of retracted Recursive Fury fame ) has just released a paper supporting the “precautionary principle” (h/t JoNova). According to Lewandowsky, the more uncertain you are about risk, the more you should spend to contain the risk.
Lewandowsky of course applies this principle to climate sensitivity – he suggests uncertainty increases the high end risk.
But now that Lewandosky has opened our eyes, let’s try applying his principle to other issues.
Witch burning. Just as there has never been a clear anthropogenic climate signal, so there has never been a clear demonstration of supernatural power. Yet can we be absolutely certain? Lewandowsky teaches us that the less you know about something, the more worried you should be. So for the sake of the children, we had better dust off those old witch finding books.
Flying saucers. There has never been a verified case of human contact with aliens. But there have been plenty of anecdotal accounts of alien encounters, many of which sound rather unpleasant. Lewandowsky teaches us that uncertainty is risk – can we be absolutely certain Earth is not being observed by malevolent alien beings? Better step up efforts to keep us all safe from the unknown.
I’m sure readers can think of other examples – chemtrails, rains of frogs, strange wart like pimples… it’s a long list.
Thank you Lewandowsky, for opening our eyes to what is really important.
From Lewandowsky’s page, an obvious piece of illogic right up front:
“Co-author, Dr James Risbey of Australia’s CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: “Some point to uncertainty as a way to minimize the climate change problem, when in fact it means that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty. This result is robust to a range of assumptions and shows that uncertainty does not excuse inaction.”
In terms of logic, the uncertainty makes it just as likely that the problem is likely to be much less than expected in the absence of the uncertainty which is our entire point. But that rather simple thought seems to have never occurred to these geniuses.
And an entire response paper could be written on the opportunity cost aspects of the situation, another thought that seems to have never occurred to them. Wikipedia actually has a fairly decent explanation of the concept, to quote a single line: “The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently.”
Ignoring opportunity cost is only valid if resources are infinite, which means of course it can only be ignored in academia.
oh and how the Holywood than thou elite are acting,
1st class travel and hotels around the world.
When the agw scientists run out of make believe scenarios send in the actors to make up.
The so-called “precautionary principle” is just another version of the fallacy better known as Pascal’s Wager. It has no basis in science, philosophy, logic nor even plain common sense. Giving claptrap a spuriously technical-sounding name doesn’t make up for it being claptrap.
Lucky me. The sky might fall, but I have a hard hat.
what about fear of the precautionary principle? after all, we have no conclusive evidence that it is true, meaning that it, itself, is highly uncertain (pretty much by definition) so should we not also take extreme precautions in applying the precautionary principle?
of course, one must also take extreme precautions about taking extreme precautions about taking extreme precautions about the uncertainty principle.
that way madness lies.
Of course Lew’s hypothesis is ludicrous. However, I don’t like the way this post attempts to show it.
There is after all, solid physics behind the notion that Co2 will warm the climate.The parallels drawn between witchcraft and UFO’s, and something that does in fact have a scientific basis is imvho, off the mark.
There are an abundance of good, solid arguments against climate change alarmism. We only weaken our position with this kind of stuff, no matter how entertaining.
Pascal’s wager anyone? The parallels between religion and AGW dogma are uncanny.
Correction, there has never been a demonstration of supernatural power, period. There’s been plenty of sleight of hand, and outright flim-flammery, but no supernatural powers at all.
the logical absurdity of the Precautionary Principle (PP) is apparently lost on the educated class. As I believe I said in my book Climate Confusion, the PP is doo-doo…flush it and forget it.
The less you know, the more you should fear. That is a giant step backwards into the Medieval days! The burning witches analogy is spot on!
But then that is what some alarmists have already advocated.
The Iraqi War of 2003 was launched on the basis of the Precautionary Principle and it shows.
Pamela Gray says:
April 8, 2014 at 7:09 am
I hate typing on a phone screen.
Oh how I agree.
I expect that Dr. Lewandowsky will eagerly join me in supporting the “let’s forcibly transplant the entire population of the US east coast to somewhere west of the Allegheny Mountains in order to protect them from the unknown risk of a future asteroid impact in the Atlantic Ocean causing mass devastation” effort.
It’s absolutely certain that the Earth will be hit by another asteroid some time in the future, so we should spend absolutely no money finding such potential planet killers and planning how to divert them.
Tsunamis are inevitable, so we should spend no more money on early warning; we should build our nuclear power plants and hotels as close to the water’s edge as possible.
Another earthquake on the San Andreas Fault is certain, so we should stop spending extra money on earthquake-resistant buildings and early warning research.
Hurricanes…tornadoes…locusts…politicians…but I repeat myself.
“I’m sure readers can think of other examples – chemtrails, rains of frogs, strange wart like pimples… it’s a long list.”
Secondhand smoke.
It is interesting to note that the lead author is a psychologist. 😛
I’ve been reeling ever since I saw this. The guy is clearly a complete crank. How or why such a thing past peer-review is unfathomable.
The abstract from part II:
“In public debate surrounding climate change, scientific uncertainty is often cited in connection with arguments against mitigative action. This article examines the role of uncertainty about future climate change in determining the likely success or failure of mitigative action. We show by Monte Carlo simulation that greater uncertainty translates into a greater likelihood that mitigation efforts will fail to limit global warming to a target (e.g., 2 °C). The effect of uncertainty can be reduced by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together with the fact that greater uncertainty also increases the potential damages arising from unabated emissions (Lewandowsky et al. 2014), any appeal to uncertainty implies a stronger, rather than weaker, need to cut greenhouse gas emissions than in the absence of uncertainty”
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1083-6.
This is speculative circuitous logic at best. If sensitivity is the issue (as mentioned in part I abstract) reduction of CO2 emissions does absolutely nothing to address other potential causes of climate variation. Additionally, mitigation does not solve the sensitivity riddle.
Both papers are pay-walled, but it is axiomatic (however inconvenient) that the probability of monetary waste increases in proportion to expenditures in mitigation strategies that fail to assign probability ranges to climate sensitivity. This is a crude attempt to skirt the sensitivity question.
Apparently I was sleeping during Risk Management training. Apparently now you don’t need to worry about quantifying the likelihood of a risk occurring, the impact of it occurring, the costs if it does occur, potential mitigating actions, cost of those mitigating actions,the residual risk remaining after mitigation and all that dull stuff.
You just need to identify a vague unmeasurable risk, then spend an unquantified and unlimited amount of money on “mitigations” – that may or not actually address the risk, may or may not cost more than the impact of the risk if it happened or, even, may have worse consequences than the original risk. Nice.
I also have a vague recollection of a general principle along the lines of “IF (cost to mitigate) > (quantified cost of risk) THEN (forget about it and bugger off to the pub)”.
My wife, after reading these comments, said something about worrying Bigfoot would take the car keys to the Aztec kingdom and hook up with Dora the Explorer. Perhaps I should worry… 🙂
“…the researchers investigated the mathematics of uncertainty in the climate system and showed that increased scientific uncertainty necessitates even greater action to mitigate climate change.”
Okay! What actions has Lew taken to reduce his carbon footprint? When Lew and Gore and all the AGW advocates reduce their footprints to less than that of the average human inhabitant of Earth, I’ll start listening to them.
Manbearpig. Definitely. Oh wait, Manbearpig already was paid $200 million. This proves Lew’s thesis. Carry on.
It’s as if he thinks uncertainty is just a buzz word fed to the media and has no real meaning. Like noise simply doesn’t exist! Data is all crystal clear, and only “pretend” noise and uncertainty are fed to the media to … keep them on their toes or something?
Isn’t this just a reiteration of the post normal science approach that only enjoys any credence in the most desperate reaches of climate prediction as it is?
I just realized that Lew has been watching too many commercials:
Cooking your meat kills potentially harmful bacteria but there’s always a risk that – you didn’t kill them ALL. Lewandowsky’s solution to deal with this pesky uncertainty – http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nAmQLWq7QRI/SH56xEluFUI/AAAAAAAABuw/-uqalmisU2c/s400/burnt.jpg