My posting Manzi On Money wrongly attributed an article by Jim J Manzi to my former college friend Jim P Manzi.

Thanks to Jim J himself for pointing that out.

Anyway both Jim J and Jim P (and for all know many other Jim Manzis) are smart people.

Here is a nice article about Jim P Manzi and his larger than life success in running with Lotus Notes in the early days of the Internet.

And here is Jim J Manzi from August this year on why those demanding Action Now on climate change may be just wrong:

The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative … Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.

But to force massive change in the economy based on such a fear is to get lost in the hothouse world of single-issue advocates, and become myopic about risk. We face lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity. A regional nuclear war in Central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of HIV, or a rogue state weaponizing genetic engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.

In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options…

The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.

Hard to argue with that?