I'll have last bite at this for now (it is the Copenhagen Conference, after all!).
I'll cover two things in this last post:
1) I shall explain more about form (3) scepticism, and why it is a genuine position that should get more airtime.
2) I shall reflect a little more on why there is so little interest in or discussion of form (3) scepticism.
First, a little more on the question of whether it is worth doing the kinds of things suggested in recent discussions of how to prevent climate change. Many on each side of the climate scepticism debate appear to believe that the scientific question is the crucial one - that if there is a material human-induced element to climate change, then it would follow automatically that we should try to prevent climate change.
The world's foremost authority on assessing the costs and benefits of climate change is William D. Nordhaus of Yale. Nordhaus has been studying issues of sustainability since the early 1970s. Nordhaus accepts the science of climate change, and has been modelling optimal policy responses to such change for decades.
He is an advocate of policy action in respect of climate change, but an outspoken opponent of the schemes of Stern and Gore (which he describes as "ambitious"). His favoured policy is a universal, internationally-harmonized carbon tax, the effect of which would be to slow climate change, ultimately achieving the optimal degree of such change. He also believes that the policies agreed at Kyoto would, if the US had been involved, have just about been positive. He considers the schemes of Gore and Stern to be disastrous, and wrote a book, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, to explain why. (You can read a criticial review here, and Nordhaus' response here.)
Far from it being "blindingly obvious", as some would have it, that the negative effects of permitting global warming would outweigh the cost of preventing it, almost every serious study of the costs and benefits of action that might prevent climate change has found (as Nordhouas did) that such measures are worse than simply permitting climate change, and much worse than measures designed to create mechanisms whereby the degree of such change will face some natural upper limit (e.g. a carbon tax) or to encourage more rapid adaptation to climate change, or measures to encourage technical solutions that might one day reverse climate change.
Indeed, matters go further than this. For not only is the overall climate-change-prevention strategy of Western governments found to be wanting by almost every serious study, but also almost every specific climate-change-prevention measure introduced by the British government and subject to cost-benefit analysis by the government's own criteria has been assessed as involving costs much greater than benefits (e.g. see here).
But although the near-consensus view of the cost-benefit analysis literature is that adaptation, reversal-encouraging and natural upper limit measures are far superior, according to the standard ways of assessing policies, to measures to try to prevent climate change, almost none of you reading this article has even heard of this - including those many of you that are climate change sceptics, and take great interest in this area.
Why not? For two reasons. First, because the media does not discuss form (3) scepticism. It is much simpler to put up form (1) sceptics as token objects of debate and ridicule.
But I think there is another reason as well. I think we see it in the fact that form (3) sceptics are not regarded by form (1) sceptics as allies (you only have to look at the vituperation of the attacks on my previous posts). Why would that be? Why don't form (1) sceptics make common cause with their form (3) allies against action to prevent climate change? I am coming to believe the reason is that for many form (1) sceptics, the policy issue (should we try to prevent climate change?) is of only tangential interest. Very often, form (1) sceptics appear to regard themselves as involved in a debate to preserve the integrity of science from a grand conspiracy.
Now, far be it from me to object to lofty goals, but in this particular area my concern is much more limited and mundane. I don't see the integrity of science as under serious threat, but if it is, then I'll have to leave that really big and important issue to be dealt with by others. I have a narrower, petty concern. I know it's parochial, but what I'm interested in is whether we should spend 5% of world GDP, and at the same time reduce the growth rate of the world considerably, greatly impoverishing the world's poor and limiting human progress over the next century.
Since I have this concern, and since the policy community is totally convinced on the scientific question, strange and petty though it might seem, I am inclined to offer arguments to the policy community that it might actually listen to and that might actually make a difference to what happens. If you are a form (1) sceptic of the "integrity of science" type, then I know that makes me as much your enemy as climate action advocates. As I've said before, I don't consider the scientific question closed, and I wish you luck with your endeavours. But in the meantime, I have a policy debate to engage in, and whilst the public is told (as it is) that the only way to oppose climate prevention action is by arguing that climate change is not occurring or is not the result of human action, then my arguments (the only arguments policy-makers are likely to listen to) get no airtime and the argument is going all the climate action advocates' way.
