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.
How much will it cost?
We are already spending/wasting 0.5% of world GDP each year on green energy/climate change. This has had no impact on the trendline for CO2 growth.
So waste 0.5% of world economic growth each year for Zero impact.
And a 0.5% here or there could make a huge difference to unemployment rates and overall standard of living (check out the unemployment rates in Europe for example). Its the difference between stagnation and slowly rising employment. Generally, 2.0% growth in GDP would be considered a healthy rate but would more-or-less lead to a stable standard of living, the bare minimum. 2.5% to 3.0% would be increasing prosperity and increasing employment.
Okay, do we raise the green energy/climate change waste to 2.0% of GDP and then have some influence in the CO2 growth rate. To get to the numbers the warmers want – zero or declining CO2 growth – we might need to go up to 3.0% to 4.0% wastage.
Basically, stop economic growth all together and/or accept slowly declining economic prosperity.
They do not know that is what they are implying (but they don’t understand economics in any event).
I believe there is a typo that paper’s webpage. The date should read: April 1, 2014.
Frank Davis says: April 8, 2014 at 7:48 am “Secondhand smoke.”
That’s actually not a good example because at least one study shows that it’s a benefit, statistically significant-wise: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9776409?dopt=Abstract
“ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer (odds ratio [OR] for ever exposure = 0.78; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.64-0.96).”
ZombieSymmetry says:
April 8, 2014 at 7:48 am
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.
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I’ve noticed on other sites (which concern themselves at least bit with science,) that the more ridiculous Lewandowsky becomes, the more that paid propagandists are deployed to defend him.
He is the Golden Child du jour of the warmist/statists.
I’m sure that Lew Doo is somewhat uncertain about the idiotic point he tried to make.
He’ll probably get a grant to research the subject.
Doesn’t this imply we must create the International Panel of Cryptoecological Change (IPCC), to deal with the possibility of Lava Dragons attacking the surface, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Cryptoecological Models, creating projections of Lava Dragon populations, which might be attracted by Carbon Pollution™? Just because of the uncertainty involved.
Earth will be hit by another huge asteroid, but the timing is fully uncertain. We must act NOW to build a worldwide trapeze net to bounce this demon back into space. (Let the other worlds in the line of fire/bounce handle their own danger.)
Apparently the scientists are unaware that all of this has been thoroughly vetted in other disciplines such as business, insurance, law, gambling, etc. The PP is quantified in what is known as “Expected Value” of a risky business proposition. You should be willing to spend only the amount that would be the expected loss of a given risk:
Percentage risk * Potential Cost = Expected Value of Loss
Greater uncertainty does not warrant greater expenditures. However, their gambit is to drive up the potential cost while also attempting to make the percentage risk seem higher (we are 95% certain, correct?) while also minimizing the offsetting or known benefits that offset the costs. Therefore, we should all be willing to spend more money, right? It is in quantifying the risk, the potential cost, and the offsets that the argument wins or fails.
The way that the PP is stated above leads me to believe that Mr. Lew and associates are spending their salaries on lottery tickets and asking the public to buy a very expensive “scratch off.”
“‘What would the consequences be if uncertainty is even greater than we think it is?'”
“Greater uncertainty also increases the likelihood of exceeding ‘safe’ temperature limits”
“”We can understand the implications of uncertainty, and in the case of the climate system, it is very clear that greater uncertainty will make things even worse.”
“”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.”
Their theory flies in the face of possibly the largest sample empirical study that’s ever been conducted. Everyday babies are born. Those babies are 100% uncertain about what will happen with the weather tomorrow. They have so little experience predicting the weather, and in fact have so little understanding of how the weather even works, that as far as they know it could be 1000 degrees outside tomorrow, or 2 degrees or negative 40 trillion gazillion, or even infinity. Now, from Stephy Lew’s point of view, because of uncertainty, each of those temperatures takes on a real probability. The probability is very small, but because the range is very big, it becomes more and more likely that the outcome will be unfavorable to humanity. In fact, the idea that in all those infinity of possible temperatures, the outcome would happen to be one that’s favorable to human life is minute. But the actual experiment shows that no matter how many uncertain babies are born, on average, every day is about the same temperature as the day before. To me, this experiment, performed billions and billions of times, over tens of thousands of years, proves that as human uncertainty about the weather increases, the chances that it will be much different from yesterday decreases. Thanks, no applause necessary.
Aside from the fallacious nature of the precautionary principle that others have pointed out, the alarmists also neglect the fact that the climate change Armageddon they fear will not be an instantaneous event. Rather, IF it happens (which likely will not), it would happen slowly over decades or centuries. Therefore, the precautionary principle is not applicable, as action can also be taken at a later date if/when better information is available.
We should resume sacrificing a young virgin female on December ~20 to satisfy the sun god the way we used to. The sun god is probably very angry that we stopped; think of the risk of being plunging into perpetual winter for eschewing human sacrifice? It’s not all that bad a precaution to take, only one life per year.
I absolutely agree that the best way to develop public policy is to give the win to the people who conjure up the scariest parade of horribles.
Let’s apply Big Lewandowsky’s insight to a practical world. Surely the biggest uncertainty – or a lack of precise knowledge – leads to a greatest urgency of an immediate action. In this light, I wonder how much Greenpeace and similar organizations know.
Our ancestors used to have heated arguments on how many angels could dance on the end of a pin.
This must be the type of uncertainty Lew is talking about.
Anyhow, I think our ancestors were wiser than Lew as there is no record of them throwing too much much money at this non-problem. They were certainly a lot wiser than us, when you look at the amount of money we are throwing at the non-problem (because it does not exist!) of CAGW.
What rational person(s) employs such an irrational man?
“Ian W says:
April 8, 2014 at 7:14 am
Does the converse hold true?
You are CERTAIN about a particular risk that will lead to a real life threatening occurrence, therefore spend less on it than something that you only have suspicion about but very little information?
No I thought not.
But it does explain why we are repeatedly told to worry about our grandchildren by multimillion dollar grant seeking academics like Lewandowsky, while there is a child dying every 5 seconds from hunger and one dollar could save their lives.”
Sadly, you have wrapped up the problems with humanity is so few words. I could add only that our current way of living is – Forget about the past, to hell with the present, be concerned only with the future. But the lives we waste now ARE every bit as important as those as yet not born. Why can’t we understand that?
Most people are not gifted with the “absolute certainty” of the typical WUWT blog reader/contributor that (a) green house gas emissions are not a problem and (b) steps to reduce them will destroy the economy. Nor can they as easily overcome the contradiction of simultaneously arguing that “the science isn’t settled” and “we have nothing to worry about”.
That’s why people do things like buy fire insurance, spend money on fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, and pay taxes for fire stations. They haven’t dismissed the possibility (not the certainty) of a fire in their house and assign value to those actions.
More specifically, this puts Lewandowsky right in line with the anti-vaxers and anti-GMO crowd, not to mention the anti-frackers and basically the anti-everything people.
Rather than informed risk-assessment, what we have here is risk-avoidance verging on the pathological.
Uncertainty?
I thought the science was settled.
Please, please, please stop writing about this guy. You absolutely know he is reading and delighting in each word written about him here. He is a nobody, and we are giving him exactly what he wants.
One mans opinion.
I am getting really uncertain about Lewandowsky. Maybe it’s time to contain him just to make sure he’s safe?
Yet he still uses electricity.
We are almost certainly facing another ice age at some point in the future. Therefore, we should, in addition to spending trillions to combat global warming, spend trillions to combat global cooling. and at the same time, because the risk is just too great. /sarc And that’s okay because it’s not about the temperature, it’s about the money. /snark
my wife runs a team that cares for severely handicapped children in the community. When she gets a new referral, she has to produce a risk assessment and at every step of the way she has to perform a cost benefit analysis. I often proof read all this checking for typos and jargon and it is impressive stuff. Childrens live and well-being depend upon it.
I told her about this paper and she laughed. She laughed real tears.
She managed to say something about a cornocupia, unlimited budget, economy the size of a small country per child still not enough. Then she had to leave for work. A real job , not a lew job. A job with hard and real choices and decisions, with real lives depending.
Leo Geiger:
“That’s why people do things like buy fire insurance, spend money on fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, and pay taxes for fire stations. They haven’t dismissed the possibility (not the certainty) of a fire in their house and assign value to those actions.”
That’s a valid argument. But when you buy fire insurance, spend money on extinguishers, etc., you are spending your own money. Others can do the same, or opt to live dangerously. In the case of climate change, I think it behooves those who believe that impending doom is around the corner to demonstrate that as such – to make a convincing argument. Instead, they just put their hand up and scream “THE DEBATE IS OVER, DENIER!”
If you want to spend MY money on a perceived apocalypse, you’ll either have to convince me that the apocalypse is indeed coming, or you’ll have to resort to violence.