Guest essay by Neil Lock
Today, I’m going to look at a mantra much trumpeted by environmentalists; the precautionary principle. I’ll seek to make a case that, since the early 1980s, this idea has been perverted. To such an extent, that the principle now has an effect all but opposite to its true intention. I’ll trace how this happened, and try to outline how we might fix the resulting mess.
What is the precautionary principle?
The precautionary principle, even in its original, pre-1980s form, is an elusive beast. There’s no generally agreed wording of it. But its essence can be summarized as “better safe than sorry,” or “look before you leap.” Though some – myself included – go further, and see it as akin to the Hippocratic oath for doctors: “First, do no harm.”
In this form, the principle is very sensible advice. Before they put a new product on the market, for example, sane business people will test it thoroughly to check it has no bad side-effects. If they don’t do this, and something goes wrong, they will face lawsuits, and perhaps worse.
But some wish to take the principle further. Today, it’s often interpreted to mean that if there’s a risk of something bad happening, particularly to the environment or to human, animal or plant health, then action should, or even must, be taken to avoid or to minimize that risk. And on this excuse, policies have been made that have imposed huge costs on all of us.
Risk
On examination, this new form of the principle doesn’t fit well with our common-sense ideas of how to deal with risk. For in thinking about risk, we recognize two kinds: risk to ourselves, and risk to others. As far as risk to ourselves goes, each of us must make our own decisions. We do it all the time; just about everything in life involves some degree of risk. We judge, rationally or otherwise, whether a particular risk is justified for us. And we decide either to take the risk, or not. For example, every time we go in a plane, there’s a risk it may crash and kill us. We weigh this up, consciously or not, against the gain we expect from making the journey. We look, and then we leap; or not. And most of us come out with the same decision: We get in that plane.
Today’s version of the precautionary principle is worse than useless in assessing risk to ourselves. For it would have us either avoid risks altogether, or focus on minimizing them. But a life without taking risks is, at best, the life of a vegetable. And a life spent focusing on risks is a paranoid one.
Risk to others is a more difficult subject. Sometimes our actions may have negative impacts on others; on their property, on their health, even in extreme cases on their very lives. Now, all individuals are responsible for the consequences of their actions to others, unless those actions were coerced. And it may be that in a particular case the harm, which an action causes others, exceeds what reasonable people will bear in a spirit of mutual tolerance. In such cases, in a sane world, we should be required to compensate those we have harmed. In environmental terms, that’s the basis of the idea of “polluter pays” – one with which I heartily agree.
There are, therefore, good reasons to invest in minimizing risk to others. I gave already the example of a company putting a new product on the market. In making decisions on such risks, particularly if the damage caused may be great, it makes sense to assess the risks, and their consequences and costs if things go wrong, as objectively as possible.
Rationally, we will invest in minimizing such a risk as long as the likely gain from the reduction of risk exceeds the cost involved in reducing it. Beyond that point, we have only two options; we either go ahead and face the consequences, or we scrap the whole thing. If we tried to use the precautionary principle as often interpreted today, however, we would have to spend forever more and more to allay less and less likely, or less and less serious, risks.
Weak and strong precaution
In the original (weak) form of the precautionary principle, the burden of proof is always on the party wanting to make change. If one party wishes to stop or restrict an activity of another party on the grounds that it causes risk to them or to others, it’s up to the accuser to show that the risk is real and significant. It’s also up to the accuser to show that the change they propose is both necessary and beneficial. And the cost effectiveness of any such change must be taken into account. For it isn’t reasonable to expect anyone to spend more on reducing a risk, than the gain which results to those whose exposure to the risk is reduced.
However, many environmentalists, politicians and regulators favour a stronger form of the principle. In its strong form, it can be used to regulate or prohibit any action that has actual or perceived risks, even if those risks cannot, or cannot yet, be accurately quantified. Further, the burden of proof is inverted, so that the proponent of an activity must prove that it is harmless. And the costs of preventative action are not to be taken into consideration. Thus the strong form of the precautionary principle is, simply put, a power grab and a tool for tyranny. A long, long way from “First, do no harm.”
A history of corruption
The perversion of the precautionary principle into an excuse for tyranny began in the early 1980s. And it was the United Nations that did it. The World Charter for Nature, a 1982 UN resolution, included an extreme formulation of the precautionary principle. It stated: “Activities which might have an impact on nature shall be controlled,” and “where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities should not proceed.” The Charter was passed by 111 votes to 1, with 18 abstentions. The USA was the only country voting against.
Fast forward a decade, to the Rio Declaration of 1992. Principle 15 states: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. 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.”
At first sight, this looks like a walk back towards the weak form of the principle. But there’s a catch; and a big one. If you don’t have a high degree of scientific certainty about the size and the likelihood of a problem, how can you assess whether or not a proposed counter-measure is cost-effective? You might (or might not) be able to estimate the costs of the measure accurately; but without high scientific certainty, you can’t accurately estimate the benefits to compare them with! And so, sneakily, the activists bypassed the cost effectiveness condition that was supposed to be built into the principle. The world’s politicians bought it; and they sold us all down the Rio.
Then there was the much touted Wingspread Declaration of 1998. This came out of a conference of academics, politicians and activists, convened by an organization, only formed in 1994, called the Science and Environmental Health Network. Whose mission statement reads: “In service to communities, the Earth and future generations, the Science & Environmental Health Network forges Science, Ethics and Law into tools for Action.” An activist organization, no?
Here’s how they re-defined the principle: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.” We’re back to the strong form, aren’t we? And worse. For when they talk of “the public,” they don’t mean us ordinary people. What they mean is that government shouldn’t have to bear the burden of proving its accusations; so we’re all guilty until proven innocent. Clever about-face, eh?
By 2002, the UK’s Inter-Departmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment had perverted the principle still further. They saw its purpose as “to create an impetus to take a decision notwithstanding scientific uncertainty about the nature and extent of the risk.” And they wanted to invoke the principle “even if the likelihood of harm is remote.” They said, too, that “the precautionary principle carries a general presumption that the burden of proof shifts away from the regulator having to demonstrate potential for harm towards the hazard creator having to demonstrate an acceptable level of safety.” And they misused an aphorism attributed to Carl Sagan, saying: “‘Absence of evidence of risk’ should never be confused with, or taken as, ‘evidence of absence of risk’.” Bureaucrats seeking more power, no?
What does all this add up to? First, the activists have inverted the burden of proof, and require the defendants (that’s us, who want to do things like heat our homes and drive our cars) to prove a negative. Proving a negative is often impossible. How, for example, would you prove there are no fairies at the bottom of your garden? Second, they want the judge to rule, and to find us guilty, before all the evidence has been heard. And third, even if there’s no evidence at all that our activity causes any harm to anyone, they wouldn’t accept that fact as evidence! In essence they have decreed, in contradiction to the norm of presumption of innocence, that absence of evidence of guilt is not evidence of absence of guilt. We’ve been had, haven’t we?
Post-normal science
Beginning in about 1993, an idea called “post-normal science” started to take root in academe. This claimed to be a new way to use the outputs of science, in situations where standard methods of risk and cost-benefit analysis were insufficient. These situations were described as: “facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.”
But what post-normal science actually is, is a hard question to answer. It describes itself as a “problem solving strategy.” It seeks to replace the hard edged objectivity of properly done science with something much woollier, that it calls “quality.” It seeks the involvement in the decision process of “all those who wish to participate in the resolution of the issue.” And through its concept of “extended facts,” it allows ideas which are not facts to be treated in the debate on an equal basis with facts.
In my view, post-normal science merely provides a way for glib, persuasive activists to direct policy debates towards outcomes which suit their agendas, even when the facts do not support those outcomes. It’s little different, either in intent or in effects, from the perversion of the precautionary principle into an activist tool. It’s not a form of science, but of nonscience. And it has been used to blur and to obfuscate the interface between science and policy.
Here are my own thoughts on the situations post-normal “science” claims to address. If facts are uncertain, you must put more effort into clarifying them. If values are in dispute, that increases the need for the decision to be, and to be seen to be, absolutely objective. For if not, those on the losing side of the debate will have good cause to become resentful. If stakes are high, that increases how much you should be willing to spend on making the decision as objective as possible. And if decisions are urgent, you must use the precautionary principle – properly. Look before you leap. First, do no harm. Don’t do anything that damages innocent people.
How to fix the problem
In my view, those that have perverted the precautionary principle, and have tried to discredit science and to substitute it by nonscience, have acted in bad faith. To fix this, we first need to restore the precautionary principle in the public understanding to its proper meaning, of “Look before you leap,” or “First, do no harm.”
Second, we must seek to compensate those who have been unjustly harmed by bad policies made as a result of these perversions. If we accept the idea of “polluter pays” – and we should – then why should we not also accept the idea of “politicker pays?” Should we not hold those, that have acted in bad faith in support of those policies, responsible for the effects of what they did to us? Should we not require each of them to compensate us for their share of the bad things they did to us? And if any of them have committed offences such as perjury, should we not be seeking to prosecute them too?
To sum up
Over the last 35 years or so, the precautionary principle, “Look before you leap,” has been perverted out of all recognition. It no longer tallies with our common sense ideas of risk. At the instigation of the United Nations and other activist groups, the principle has been re-cast into a strong form, which inverts the burden of proof and has become a tool for tyranny. There has also been a movement to obfuscate the interface between science and policy. These perversions have helped politicians to make environmental policies that have harmed all of us.
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Having worked where the “precautionary principle” hits the road and has dramatic influence economically and safety-wise I greatly appreciate Mr. Lock’s essay. I worked in several areas where the left wished to regulate human activity, e.g., endangered species management, fisheries management, mosquito control, sewage control, etc. I will leave endangered species mostly for another day. Let’s say that the federal government listed a newly discovered species of seagrass as critical habitat for an endangered species all based on the “precautionary principle.” No one had ever seen the animal in question do anything but swim over the areas where this species was “believed” to exist much less eat it. The most telling case of the misuse of the precautionary principle I dealt with was relative to legacy adulticides used for mosquito control. In the early days of pesticide approval a government contracted laboratory had produced some fraudulent data use to “label” a series of pesticides. The fraud was not discovered until some 20 years later, long after the products had been in use. Even though no one could show harm above and beyond the obvious, pesticides kill organism of similar size and species, several mosquitocides were required to relabel; meaning years of testing, all extremely expensive. In fact the manufacturers could no longer support the label, meaning they didn’t make enough profit to justify the expensive re-testing. EPA of course demanded the most expensive testing and refused to look at “in the field” experience, i.e., when used by the label no one had ever shown harm. All this was based on the precautionary principle. Since then other pesticides used for mosquito control have fallen by the wayside. Those remaining in in the portfolio of professional mosquito control even though labeled under modern standards are under attack all based on the precautionary principle taken to the nth degree. The latest, demonstrate beyond any doubt that a given pesticide is not playing some role in honey bee hive collapse. Now the ultimate harm is that we have re-emerging arthropod vectored disease. And NO global warming has played NO role these are all diseases that have existed for a long time. So we have fewer tools in our control system. A big problem is that mosquitos especially domestic mosquitoes, those that have evolved to live around humans, have developed resistance. To combat resistance especially when attempting to control a disease outbreak we must have alternative pesticides. Because of precautionary principle as applied by EPA few companies are willing to spend the money for the extensive research need to label a new product.
Polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb frequently addresses the Precautionary Princible in support of his warmest position. He is an expert in risk analysis, maybe not so much in general science.
I eagerly read him but always skeptically, as always skeptically.
The biggest risk seems to be that if the political left accepts the truth that they have been so wrong for so long about the effect of CO2 on the climate, people will start to question the correctness of their other positions.
That would be nice, and it could happen, but I expect they’ll hold to their ground. They’ll claim “We never said the catastrophic consequences were likely, just that it was important to try to avoid them because they would have been, well, catastrophic. Now, thankfully, we have avoided them. Bully for us. In the meantime we have made wonderful choices for the environment.” This is why I believe it is crucial for us to require that the CAGW proponents state their case clearly and quantify the probability and magnitude of any risks they hypothesize.
Perhaps this fits in somewhere as an example, just posted on SEPP. I used to help a refuge biologist count nests. Gulls would dash in to a tern nest for the egg or young if we disturbed it. They are very aggressive and look like their social behavior is more because they are parasites.
http://archive.kitsapsun.com/news/local/climate-change-may-be-turning-gulls-into-cannibals–382b4a27-a9a7-1b60-e053-0100007fb7d5-388042092.html/
Humans are totally responsible unless they are biologists. There is even a word for it–pseudoreplication, as in being part of the experiment. Hurlburt, S. H. 1984. Pseudoreplication and the design of ecological field experiments. Ecological Monographs. 54:187-211.
This is an important topic. Thanks for the article. I feel the PP is being used to justify several kinds of marginal behaviour that are now accepted in Western societies. For example, the whole “safety Nazi movement” seems to be based on abuse of the PP. Here in BC we spend vast amounts of money straightening roads so that the risk of falling asleep from boredom while driving replaces the risk associated with not being able to negotiate a curve in the road. Talking on a cell phone while driving apparently turns people into homicidal maniacs (in fact talking on cell phones is only one component of the very vague accident category called distracted driving) while the best determinant of the likelihood of an accident, that is, a previous history of accidents is largely ignored. PP based on imagined risk creeps into everything and makes response to real risk increasingly difficult. The government forces the majority to follow rules that are irrelevant for most to protect society from the shortcomings of a minority. The cost in terms of dignity and sometimes in dollars, is enormous.
Reference on crash prone drivers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095756415000252
“The cost in terms of dignity and sometimes in dollars, is enormous”
You see this excessive emphasis on ‘safety first’ everywhere you look. A friend of mine recently retired from a successful career in an excavating business where they used heavy equipment to install water and sewer works. I asked him why he was retiring so young and selling everything at auction.
He stated that occupational health and safety regulations had become so onerous and time consuming that he simply did not have the stamina to deal with it and god forbid if my company was ever held liable for an injury or death. Not only could these powerful government sanctioned boards take everything I have spent a lifetime building, I could easily end up in prison; a risk I’m not willing to continue to take.
AH yes – but the fines for drivers “talking on a cellphone” provide an adequate income for Johannesburg traffic police, and an extra excuse for them not being out catching dangerous drivers…
“…post-normal science merely provides a way for glib, persuasive activists to direct policy debates towards outcomes which suit their agendas, even when the facts do not support those outcomes. It’s little different, either in intent or in effects, from the perversion of the precautionary principle into an activist tool. It’s not a form of science, but of nonscience. And it has been used to blur and to obfuscate the interface between science and policy.”
This certainly does sound like a newer version of Lysenkoism to me.
Why is it that quackery*, bad science*, and very stupid, very harmful ideas* take hold of the public? Is this an indication of mental laziness, or because it’s faddish* and over with quickly?
*quackery – snake oil; *bad science – Lysenkoism; *very harmful ideas – don’t vaccinate your kids; *faddish – drink raw water that hasn’t been touched, filtered or purified, otherwise, go all-vegan
Sara, I have pondered your question for decades since I had to deal with folks believing in bad science much of my career. I know part of it is a lack of critical thinking, especially among those below the age of 50. Most colleges just no longer teach real “critical thinking.” Certainly the teaching of formal logic and Western Philosophy are no longer required. History had become a joke. I knew a prominent lady who heads a not-for-profit that cannot understand cause and effect especially after she found some “scientific” article on vaccines. After all the article had statistics. Trying to get through to her I used my old statistics professors example of a false correlation, refrigerators cause cancer. She seemed incapable of understanding that just because 99% of people who got cancer ate something from a refrigerator and there was a significant correlation with the data, that refrigerators were not the cause of cancer. She still believes that vaccines, especially, though not limited to, children vaccines, are far more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. After all we seldom see those diseases any more. When the second in command of one of the major anti-vaccine groups child got whooping cough and changed sides, the lady in question was outraged. When the doctor in the UK was banned from medicine because of his fraudulent research she claimed it was all a giant conspiracy by the vaccine manufacturers. In other words when government regulators which she strongly supports proved the doctor’s misdeeds she refused to believe it was some evil corporation attacking the guy. How dare anyone contradict her long held beliefs.
Chauncey Starr (1969) made the point that people are willing to tolerate risk in proportion to the perceived benefit of the risk. That is, people in the USA tolerate 30,000 automobile deaths annually because of the importance of cars to our way of life. His original paper plotted various activities that people engage in, versus the amount of money they willingly spend for the activity, such as skiing. He plotted the results on a semi-log graph; I discovered that plotting on a log-log graph yields an almost linear relationship. Note that the relationship is to perceived, not actual benefit. The perception can be changed by what the MSM writes (nuclear power is dangerous), or what the current fad happens to be (texting while driving).
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/165/3899/1232
The precautionary principle makes sense when the costs are known and small, and the risk while unknown is potentially huge.
In the case of climate warming, the costs are huge, while the risk is known and small to non-existent.
Climate zealots torture the precautionary principle by claiming that an investment should be made now to prevent a small probability event with an extremely high cost from happening. However, they always inflate the probability, underestimate the uncertainty, and inflate the costs should the event occur. Basically they assume the worst case scenario is the most likely or only scenario. Since the probability of armageddon is so low, and the perceived cost to humanity so high, just a small error in those estimates suddenly makes their conclusions economically reasonable, though of course they are not.
Besides, their precautionary principle abuse is only one sided. Couldn’t we also argue that we should be adding CO2 to the atmosphere at all costs to prevent an ice age? There is no end to the direction that the precautionary principle could be used to make poor decisions for humanity. That’s why I’d rather not have a cabal of elites decide what’s best for humanity at all.
I’ve heard (from the Left) governmental actions against CO2 emissions compared to taking out an “insurance policy” to protect the earth, with the implication that “we all will die” or “our children will all die” if we don’t spend trillions of dollars now on renewable energy and sequestering carbon dioxide.
Except that when the costs and benefits are actually calculated, it’s equivalent to taking out a life insurance policy that pays a million dollars to the beneficiary if the insured person dies, but the premiums are a billion dollars per day. No one in their right mind would buy such a policy, but some policymakers have been misled into believing that the risks of global warming are virtually infinite, and avoidance of such risks justifies any cost.
The truth is, even if a warmer future climate causes some ice to melt and sea level to rise (slowly), the cost of seawalls can be calculated, and it’s not infinite, since seawalls have been built in the past. An extra hundredth of a percent (100 ppm) or so of CO2 in the atmosphere would not be catastrophic–let’s compare the cost of dealing with that to the poverty inflicted on billions of people by reverting to 18th century energy sources.
Thanks for this well written article.
“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.”
The industrial scale wind turbine incursion on rural residents was able to happen because of Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration of 1992. Many people have been/are being harmed be these turbines and are being viewed as ‘collateral damage’. This information is in the public domain.
Strong arguments can be made that these turbines are not “cost effective” or necessary and yet the Precautionary Principle, as altered in 1992, remains the ruling.
Good essay. About the absence of evidence of risk vs evidence of absence of risk: I see plenty of evidence for the absence of warming risk concerning emissions of carbon dioxide. It’s called “weather”. A great example, often mentioned here at WUWT, is a thunderstorm, which illustrates powerfully to the honest observer that heat cannot be trapped successfully at the surface. The atmospheric heat engine is not de-rated one bit by carbon dioxide. The math is not hard. A one-inch-per hour rate of rainfall implies a 16,000 W/m^2 rate of upward heat delivery, to very high altitudes, unimpeded by the greenhouse effect.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy prince, and his daddy king went to a soothsayer to read his fortune.
“Your son will die from a lion” said the soothsayer “before you do”.
So alarmed was the queen, that she confined the boy to the royal palace, and forbade any mention of Lions or anything to do with Lions, anywhere within the palace grounds.
One day the Young prince, bored with his confinement, took to exploring all the old unused rooms in the palace, and in one he discovered to his complete anger, hung a picture of a Lion. So incensed was he that he smashed his fist against the wall, where the nail from which the picture hung, pierced his hand, and he died from tetanus two weeks later.
I think this traditional tale illustrates the precautionary principle, when applied to climate change extremely well.
One imagines a modern day environmentalist in this situation…
http://vps.templar.co.uk/Cartoons%20and%20Politics/unoriginal.jpg
“Do you KNOW what this will do to society if you Invent Fire?”
Let’s move to socialism quick !! just as a precaution.
The most effective argument I’ve ever seen on the Precautionary Principle is that it cannot even pass it’s application to itself.
If you cannot proceed with something until it’s proven it’s not harmful, then proving that negative also applies to the PP.
“Better safe than sorry” for one group translates into “totally screwed” for another group, where the Paris Accord is concerned, … for example of how the precautionary principle can backfire to become its opposite.
Requiring a hard hat be worn in a construction area is a relatively cheap precaution.
To require everyone where an Ironman suit (complete with an arc reactor) is ridiculous to the point of “California Dreamin'” fantasy.
Enviros’ precautions fit the later, not the former.
TYPO!
“To require everyone wear an Ironman suit…”
The precautionary principle is used to stifle debate and cut short further useful scientific inquiry into the real nature of the problem. CAGW enthusiasts love the precautionary principle as it gives them licence to inflict extensive suffering on peoples of the World without proving anything about their vague assertions that CO2 is Bad, Bad, Bad.
One of the positive things about PNS is it reflects disillusion with the corruption of science well known to readers of this site. Left to itself PNS will probably spontaneously have to reinvent the very scientific method it scorns. How will lay people and activists judge one scientific fact from another? What is true and what is not? Perhaps someone will suggest comparing various competing ideas to real world observation. ☺
They already have. Theory, absent actual observation, is considered “fact”. Hypothetical possibilities are considered certainties. A computer program can now tell us what the temperature was somewhere where there was no thermometer within a hundred miles. The computer output is considered to be an observation. A “fact”.
Policy is based on and ideology benefits from such “facts”.
The precautionary principle has been one that I have said is a potential excuse for some to believe and limit the output of CO2, however, over the last 20 years, the idea of the precautionary principle has eroded dramatically.
This is because we have learned a lot more in the last 20 years. First, we now have evidence of the last 70 years of the impact of higher levels Co2 on the environment and on our rapid increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.
After 70 years since WWII (1945) humans have put in 110ppm of CO2 increasing CO2 levels as much as happened during the ice ages. This is 94% of all the CO2 man has ever put into the atmosphere. Thus we have a confined time period in which we have run this experiment. The results for the first 70 years are in.
So far, about 0.35 -> 0.4C temperature change from 110ppm or about a 30% increase in Co2 levels.
There were concerns about catastrophic releases of methane, species going extinct and many theories of various ways glaciers would collapse and produce significant sea level rise. All of these concerns have turned out to be disproved. That is to say, not just “haven’t happened yet” but not happening for thousands of years if ever.
When CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic Global warming) was put forward many ideas were tossed out. To my knowledge, not a single theory of any potential catastrophic outcome has shown valid. Many have been outright disproved. We don’t see any increase in storm activity or severity. We don’t see the arctic ocean sea ice collapsing nor Antarctic mass decreasing.
There is always the possibility of something terrible happening at a higher level (Tipping points) but many of these have been tested and proved wrong. Further, we have a very good long term understanding and observation of the response of the atmosphere to injection of massive quantities of CO2. The atmosphere will react as it did in the past. Another 30% increase of CO2 will produce likely a 0.4C increase in temperatures. End of Story.
The Earth will not react differently to the next 30% of co2 than it has to the last. With 70 years to back us up and halfway to 2100, it seems incredibly unlikely that any scenario exists where a co2 increase in the range of 30-50% would cause a significant change in the way the atmosphere reacts to co2. To predict anything different would be unscientific. The atmosphere has reacted and we’ve seen the result. We don’t have to guess anymore.
We also have to understand the improbability of what CAGW enthusiasts try to argue with the precautionary principle. CAGW enthusiasts and climate scientists are arguing
1) That the perfect temperature of the Earth was obtained in roughly 1780 and that since then we have been raising the temperature of the earth in ways that are causing more negative effects than positive effects. This is a well known canard that almost always is false. It is extremely unlikley that 1780 or 1980 was the perfect temperature of the Eartth or living things. Living things have lived through temperatures 16F warmer and 16F colder over the whole Earth. Life has prospered in most of these ranges but if anything has clearly done better in warmer periods, some considerably warmer than today.
2) CO2 levels have been observed as high as 4,000 ppm or 10 times the levels of today and life did great. In fact, for the vast majority of the last 60 million years CO2 levels have averaged closer to 2,000ppm of CO2 or 5 times the current level and this is how we got to the world where human beings live. Experiments in greenhouses show that plants thrive more and more in CO2 levels much higher than today’s 400. In fact, up to 1200 ppm seems to be where plants are ideally ingesting Co2. They show the maximum productivity and health at these much higher concentrations which were common over the last 60 million years in which almost everything living today evolved.
For all these reasons and more the idea that the next 200 or 400ppm of CO2 will cause catastrophic consequences is robustly disproven. There is no scientific rationale for arguing that CO2 levels below 2,000 could lead to any significantly negative outcome and it is highly likely that the world would get better with CO2 levels closer to 1200 than current levels.
Will glaciers melt with higher temperatures and higher CO2? Yes. It will take thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, maybe a hundred thousand years to melt the Antarctic glaciers. Humans have no way to understand such long time periods. All of humanity has only been 5,000 years under civilization. Most structures on the Earth are considerably under 100 years old. To rebuild everything we have built while it would be expensive over a period of 1,000 years would be trivial and will be done anyway regardless of sea levels.
How are the warmistas going to stop global warming without running smack-dab into their own precautionary principle?
One of the big problems is a lack of sense of proportion. Fears of tiny risks lead to calls to shut down very important and beneficial activities. Precautionary actions can lead to worse side-effects.
I have known people who were so afraid of things they would not leave their house. Even more common is people who won’t let their kids go outside to play or go to a friend’s house to play due to fear. This is no way to live and we sure don’t want such people telling the rest of us how to assess risk.
“If they don’t do this, and something goes wrong, they will face lawsuits, and perhaps worse.” They get sued anyway and for listed side effects. When there’s money to be extorted, some sleazy lawyer will be out there gobbling it up.
Why is anyone worrying about CO2 when the most alarming trend is the rise in “background radiation” that is occurring every time a nuclear bomb is tested or a nuclear power plant melts down? This stuff doesn’t go away and it is not part of the cycle of life as CO2 is. Nuclear waste is the agent of death.
What Nagasaki, Fukashima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island have taught us is that eventually all the plutonium we have created is going to be vaporized into the atmosphere or washed into the oceans and we are powerless to stop it.
The say nuclear power is safe, but actually they fail at about the same rate the space shuttle did. (A bit better perhaps, 2 shuttles blew up in 100 flights whereas 5 reactors have melted down out of 400.) Only the space shuttle program could be abandoned and was. All the spent nuclear fuel is still sitting around in above ground or shallow burial storage of one sort or another. It won’t stay there. If something happens to the power grid that lasts longer than 2 weeks or so, all of those spent fuel pools are in trouble. (Because that’s about how much fuel is on site to run the backup generators. Once that’s gone the pools will boil off. Refueling in that situation isn’t an option because if the power grid is down you can’t deliver the diesel.)
Everyone is worried about an EMP device because it will take down the grid, if such a weapon actually exists of which I am skeptical. But a regular nuclear bomb strategically placed would do the same thing. After that, it is only a matter of time before the reactors melt down and the spent fuel escapes in the affected area. After that a “domino effect” will start as people have to evacuate contaminated areas and leave the reactors to their fate.
If it’s not one terrifying fear, it’s another. Life without a overwhelming fear is apparently impossible.
I think a little fear here is appropriate as it is time to take action and bury this stuff a long way down and stop making more of it. The end game is clearly calculable if we don’t. Meanwhile we are wasting time on CO2.
A little fear????
The biggest problem with the precautionary principle is that it implicitly ignores any risk from the precautionary measures themselves. If logically applied the principle would in fact be self-prohibiting because of such risks.