David Wojick, you said:
The goal is to inform the public about the debate, including which policy is good. You do know there is a great debate, right?
Yes, David, I do realise there is a great debate.
However, what I don’t see is how to focus it on a useful output – i.e. how to redirect it from a general chat about peoples’ areas of interest and belief into a directed, purposeful debate about the particular issues that are most relevant to making a decision about policy. So far, I am underwhelmed about the potential value of the ‘Issue Tree’ approach. I get the impression it may be of interest for a philosophical discussion. But it would require an enormous amount of resources and not produce a useful result.
Therefore, I would like to urge you to consider how you could modify your method to make it valuable for informing policy. I’d like you to make it clear, to people like me, it can be valuable. You won’t do that unless it can be focused on helping to get us to the decisions we need to make.
I’ll post a few links I hope you and others who are interest in pursuing this may find helpful to better understand what I am suggesting.
The first is to a letter written to the Australian Prime Minister by an experienced, senior, engineer. He argues we need ‘due diligence’ into CAGW before we commit large amount of public funding to try to mitigate it.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/07/spending-billions-why-not-do-a-due-diligence-study/
I suggest that it would be valuable to modify the ‘Issue Tree’ approach to enable ‘due diligence’ into CAGW and policy to mitigate it. Due diligence is directed at what is relevant to making the decisions.
My second link is to my submission to the Australian Parliament “Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation”
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/07/06/carbon-tax-australia-2011/#comment-136435
And Addendum:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/07/06/carbon-tax-australia-2011/#comment-136436
Third, Yale Professor William Nordhaus has done some excellent work to evaluate the costs and benefits of CO2-eq pricing. They provide many insights such as (in my words):
• AGW is net beneficial to about 2 C of warming, so to about 2070 on “best estimate” projections
• Costs of mitigation greatly exceed benefits to 2050 and probably to 2100.
• The “best estimates” of AGW damages are not catastrophic, not dangerous, not extremely costly, possibly beneficial for early stages of warming (most of this century).
• Only the ‘fat tail’ of high consequence, low probability catastrophic climate change is potentially scary. But there is no “loaded gun” suggesting these are realistic (see Nordhaus: “Economic policy in the face of severe tail events”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9779.2011.01544.x/full
• Delaying global mitigation action (i.e. CO2 pricing) to 2050 would cost about $3.5 trillion for the whole world (that is insignificant).
Nordhaus “In the Climate Casino: And Exchange”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/26/climate-casino-exchange/?pagination=false
Fourth, For Australia the benefit/cost = 0.11 for our legislated CO2 tax and ETS (Cap and Trade) to 2050:
Benefit = $41 billion
Cost = $390 billion
Refer to the last two comments here:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/4/4/nordhaus-and-the-sixteen.html
Fifth, “Why the decision to tackle climate change isn’t as easy as Al Gore” says “In the face of massive uncertainty, hedging your bets and keeping your options open is almost always the right strategy” (read especially the three paragraphs towards the end of page 2 of this article”:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/critics/75757/why-the-decision-tackle-climate-change-isn%E2%80%99t-simple-al-gore-says
Sixth, Bjorn Lomborg has been making the same point for a long time.
Seventh, World Economic Forum does not rate AGW amongst the highest risks currently facing us.
http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-2012-seventh-edition
David, can you modify the “Issue Tree” process to work top down instead of bottom up? By top down I mean the top node would be the result we want. The branches would drill down to get only the information we need to make the decision.
