Reader Norman Fraser in his amazement despises this site:

I am amazed at how intellectually short-winded most of your posts are…

Yet mothishly he flickers to and fro around its warm glow. See his latest comment on my posting below about those climategate email Source Code Hiccups:

Still kidding yourself in ever more verbose and pseudo-technical ways Charles

Well.

The point of the powerful Climate Change arguments is to bring about a massive re-engineering of society now so as to help deal with significant risks in the future.

The practical effects of these risks coming about (warmer air, less Arctic ice etc) are predicted on the basis of reliable science research (at least, many serious people claim that).

The costs of those risks coming about are mainly calculated using economic analysis. Plus there are some benefits too – some changes will be ‘bad’ as currently valued, some ‘good’.

Then we have to work out what the smart way is to invest now to reduce at least some of the likelihood of worst-case scenarios happening far down the road – hence the Stern Report.

Which, of course, is still taking heavy hits for the untransparent way it included key assumptions on the ‘future discount rate’ – how we put a cost today on the value of avoiding much bigger costs in the future (or something like that).

It does not seem to me to be unwise that we all look very hard at all the data and assumptions going in to these fearsomely complicated policy areas. Since the financial and human cost implications of getting it wrong – either not investing enough in the right areas, or investing too much in the worng areas – look to be truly vast, if the worst Climate Change predictions are true but also if they are not.

The usual angry reply to any attempt to call into question current policy is, "But simple science proves the greenhouse effect global warming case!"

Alas, science is just not that simple.

This is an elegant piece of work by Willis Eschenbach about the complexity of different systems.:

For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.

So that’s the problem with “simple physics” and the climate. For example, simple physics predicts a simple linear relationship between the climate forcings and the temperature. People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature.

This is called the “climate sensitivity”, and is a fundamental assumption in the climate models. The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models. But the models assume this relationship, so they cannot be used to establish the relationship

And check out the wonders of Constructal Theory while you are at it.

Will anything we do now head off the next Ice Age grinding its way in our general direction in 2000 years’ time? Lawks:

For the last couple million years of the Quaternary Period you can see by looking at long term temperature graphs that the interglacial periods have been shorter than the glacial periods. Our civilization is very much a product of the current Holocene/Anthropocene interglacial period. We should try to make this period last.

I would prefer we didn’t burn up all the limited supply of fossil fuels now so that we could burn them later when we really need to heat up the planet. But the average human discount rate precludes that sort of restraint and long term planning.

We effectively can’t even plan for 50 years from now. 2000 years is out of the question.

Am I kidding myself (and my myriad readers) in linking to gripping work such as this?

Or am I doing what any prudent consumer does, and reading up on a wide number of reviews before I buy an expensive product?