Thought races ahead of events, as it should, speculating about how the recent climate change scandals will affect policies. Some are concerned that momentum will be lost, the dust will settle, and business as usual will resume. The US media is diligently ignoring the subject in hopes that it will blow over soon, though the UK media has pursued the subject with more vigor. Some are drawing paralleles to the Michael Bellesiles scandal, though it looks more like a Kofi Annan scandal to me.

The question then, is "what should we do?"

Nothing. At least, in my opinion, we should continue to try to minimize the use of fossil fuels regardless. Burning coal and oil is filthy, and they’re more valuable as chemical feedstocks anyway. We should be building nuclear plants and pursuing efficiencies in the shorter term, while working on better solar (including orbital solar), wind, etc. power supplies for the longer term. That doesn’t mean “hairshirt” environmentalism, where the goal is for neo-puritans to denounce people for immorality and trumpet their own superiority. It just means good sense.

Others note that there's a worrisome assumption here that we can or should do anything, or nothing: who should decide? The effort to reach consensus on the issue so that some set of policies - any set of policies - can be enacted, will damage society, making it more brittle and ineffective, and so less able to function on a continuing basis, and more vulnerable to emerging threats. It's self destructive, though there are individuals who will profit hugely exploiting the ensuing chaos. Think Al Gore, though he's just a political chump rather than one of the really big monsters.

Long ago in an alternate universe my take on the climate issue was something like the one noted above: Hack the Spew.

It's silly to think that we know what the result of global acts will be. But that is not license to do as we wish with no thought for consequences. Spewing various smokes and stinks into the air is never something we should do when avoidable. Plowing up the land, spewing into rivers and setting off nuclear explosions should also be avoided. They are destructive acts done in bad taste. They fail aesthetic, ethical and biological constraint tests in ways we can immediately perceive whether they perturb major systems such as climate or not. We can't stop spewing wastes or digging the land, not yet, but we shouldn't do such things more than necessary to live and we should seek methods to reduce spew.

That old post played off a comment by Brad DeLong.

It's not my field of expertise, but as a card-carrying economist I can't help but think that Lomborg is probably right when he condemns Kyoto as a worthless waste of the world's wealth--as something that will be ineffective at fighting global warming and so expensive as to foreclose options to do other things that would be more useful. Lomborg's flaw, however, is that he doesn't spell out what the "other things" we should be doing are. And that's what he needs to do if he wants to advance the ball.

Note that this discussion happened almost 7 years ago, and was considered to be somewhat heretical at the time. Since then it has all come to pass. Kyoto didn't achieve anything except distracting society from doing anything useful. That's what bad policies do, but it's also what Kyoto was intended to do. It was a political ruse to give some impression of action while doing nothing, and in this way quell some anxiety and pander to special interests who stood to profit. Any new set of policies that might now be enacted will be the same.

In that sense nothing at all has changed. The recent climate scandals have shamed some and exulted others but the general situation is unaffected. Opportunists will seek to exploit society for power and profit while accomplishing nothing at all pertinent to the claimed threats. There's no superior set of policies that will make things better.

I hope that the lesson that some learn from all of this is that we cannot and should not decide anything. The illusion of political solutions to threats is the mistaken idea that I hope has been severely wounded. As I said way back then:

We know so little. We don't understand the carbon cycle, we don't even know which factors are significant. Carbon is a tiny, tiny fraction of the atmosphere yet it is in extremely high demand by every living thing. Life on earth is made of carbon. We are just beginning to understand how the low concentration of atmospheric carbon inhibits life. . .

Though it would take a library of books to document what we know and an army of scholars to comprehend it all the most important fact of them all is that we only have the vaguest glimmerings of the entities and their relationships in this complex planetary system of complex systems. It is sheer hubris for politicians to make any claims at all about intentional control of climate change. . .

We can't trust our measurements of global temperature. Even if we had reliable temperature data we don't understand natural climate cycles related to cyclical ocean current oscillations such as ENSO and PDO (as well as NAO, AO etc. etc.). Some of these oscillations occur over years, some over decades and it is likely that some occur over centuries but we haven't yet identified them since we are just beginners. There are atmospheric oscillations similar to ocean oscillations that cause large changes in the path of high altitude, high speed air flows (jet streams). The planet as a whole oscillates on its axis. The sun oscillates in many ways, has its own weather cycles which affect its planets in myriad ways. The solar system oscillates as it orbits the galactic core. Which of these factors are important? How important? Are the trends we think we see really trends or are they rises and falls that are part of long wave oscialltions?

There is very good evidence that climate is changing, still, as it has always done, and compelling theories about human effects on this already complex system. But our understanding is vague and partial due to ignorance. The idea that such complexity can be controlled or even mitigated is arrogant nonsense. After all of these years it still looks the same to me: Hack the Spew for all of the obvious reasons, but don't imagine that this will have some dramatic effect on climate, or that we can predict what if any likely small effect it will have.