One of the tricks used by academics is to say cutting things with an oily tongue, as if avoiding direct speech is somehow more civil. Well, perhaps, in some neighborhoods, for very small values of civil, but in others it compounds the insult. It's political behavior - sales speak.

That this is offensive to many isn't the worst bit. By being evasive sloppy arguments are masked, making them more difficult for even the person making the argument to see.

The possibility of a large hurricane wreaking havoc on the Louisiana coast has been known for years. Everything from infrastructure damage to long-term flooding of New Orleans to the enormous refugee problem was foreseen in excruciatingly accurate detail.

We also knew the things we could do to reduce the impact of a killer hurricane. We could shore up the levees, for example, or work to recover the disappearing wetlands and barrier islands that shield New Orleans from storms. But these were deemed "too expensive" and postponed. We rolled the dice.

It's a lot more complicated than that. There is no reason to believe that any or even all of those expensive things we might have done would have reduced risk. This is still so. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that we could actually do them, as was demonstrated in NOLA when structures failed far below their rated capacity. The easy, greasy statement that "we also knew the things we could do to reduce the impact of a killer hurricane" masks compound uncertainties in the rush to get to the predetermined objective: to criticize policy makers who took a more level headed view.

And what of the other places, in that state and others, that face risks? If a grand and expensive project is done in one place then why not all? Even if just wind storms along the coasts are considered there are lots of other places that are at risk too. How does a policy maker justify lavish expenditures in one place and not others?

Early in his first term, President Bush often cited scientific uncertainty as a reason to defer action on climate change. As that argument progressed over the last few years from being merely wrong to patently ridiculous, the president has quietly shifted to the argument that addressing global warming is too expensive.

Would it be expensive? Possibly. But it's also worth noting that opponents of environmental regulations always make this argument, and it almost always turns out to be wrong. For example, prior to the phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons, which deplete the ozone layer, opponents proffered all forms of apocalyptic predictions about the consequences. In the end, the phaseout was essentially unnoticeable.

President Bush's wait-and-see policy on global warming is a titanic roll of the dice. He's betting that future climate change will be modest, and that if it's not, we'll have enough time to reduce emissions enough to head off the impacts.

Reducing emissions won't reduce climate change risk. It might reduce political risk, but even that is unlikely since few if any politicians who have made commitments can actually meet them. Reality is much more difficult than political fantasy.

In reality, stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions at current levels, as suggested by Pacala and Socolow, would result in a continued linear increase in atmospheric concentrations because carbon dioxide emissions would still far exceed their rate of removal by the oceans and land. Upon completion of the seemingly herculean task of reducing projected global emissions by more than 50% by 2054, by successfully avoiding seven wedges, we would still face the challenge of reducing the remaining level of emissions by another 64% over the next 50 years. To put the stabilization challenge in stark terms, under Pacala and Socolow’s most optimistic assumptions for stabilization at 550 p.p.m., the world will need to reduce its projected business-as-usual emissions by about 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon over the next century. Seven stabilization wedges worth would achieve 175 gigatonnes, leaving a considerable gap, even if the total business-asusual emissions have been overestimated by a factor of two or more.

Herculean task after herculean task. At our current technological level it's like trying to fell a forest with a coffee cup and a butter knife.

For global climate change, wait and see is particularly risky. The cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to start soon and do it slowly over the coming century. If we wait a few decades and then begin a crash course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly, the cost will be vastly greater and our ability to head off global warming will be reduced. Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases right now might be expensive, but delaying might be much more expensive.

This is backwards. The risk is haring off without thought and preparation on a political boondoggle. It will get easier and cheaper as time passes and technology improves. And we will be richer as well. Much of the world is developing at a rapid pace after languishing for decades with bad government policies that kept the majority of humanity mired in desperate poverty. That's where the majority of carbon will be emitted and so the lynch pin of any global plans. Seeing climate change as a global issue is mandatory for developing useful views and prescriptions for policy.

What we have here is political speech. It is done by an academic and has the unctuous quality of such writing, but it's merely a political attack that exploits climate change to advance another agenda. You might applaud this if you share his political objectives and don't give a fig about the environment in general or climate change in particular. . . and are not too fussy about ethics. I don't. Politics is stupid, the environment is important and ethics count.