At 02:24 AM 12/14/01 +0000, Ross Mayhew wrote:
>Extreme left-wing responses
>to the book, typified by the extraordinarily  biased Tom Paine  (aka
>Florence -Schumman foundation) website's fare, are even worse:  they
>bring the very legitimate cause of protecting the earth from humankind's
>abuses and carelessness into disrepute, by mixing political ideology
>with scientific analysis: NOT a happy combination.
>

This is not the first message that has been very critical of the
TomPaine.com responses. I've had a look at the only response I feel
qualified to judge - that of Steve Schneider on climate change - and it
looks pretty good to me.

For instance, Schneider makes this criticism:

>Lomborg does acknowledge an aggregate $5 trillion net benefit of
controlling and > minimizing climate change, but then contrasts this to an
estimated cost of
> controlling global warming of "from $3 to $33 trillion."
>
> Note that Lomborg offers a wide-ranging estimate for how much it would cost
> to control climate change but only one figure for how much it could cost
if we
> fail to do so. In reality, the range of climate damages are generally
> considered -- by the very economists whom Lomborg quotes for costs of
> abatement -- as much more uncertain than mitigation costs. In other words,
> this putative statistician quotes a range of costs when convenient but not a
> range of benefits when inconvenient.

If correct, this is a telling point; there are great uncertainties on both
sides.

On future scenarios, Schneider writes:

>Lomborg asserts that most of the six representative emissions
> scenarios from the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) are
> implausible and that only their lowest emissions scenario is "likely." The
> scenarios Lomborg attacks were prepared in three drafts over the course of
> three years by the SRES team, and were subjected to three rounds of
> reviewers. So how does this statistician who does not do environmental
> research, doesn't even explain subjective versus objective assessment, and
> uses ranges of estimates inconsistently and in a biased manner declare
> specific SRES scenarios with high emissions "fairly implausible" but
those with
> low emissions "much more likely"?

Once again, it's hard to see how Lomborg could be qualified to make this
judgement.

Schneider ends by saying:

>It is incumbent upon those of us who remain committed to sound science and
> good policy to point out the large amount of disinformation in Lomborg's
> pretentious claim to be "measuring the Real State of the World." Those of us
> who have spent decades grappling with the numbing uncertainties involved in
> environmental protection would never claim to know the real state of the
> world, let alone pretend that selective citation to fuzzy historical data
would
> tell us.

A thoroughly reasonable point. Great uncertainties remain, and the
challenge is to make good policy taking the uncertainties into account, not
somehow try to assume them away.

So, those of you who are critical of the TomPaine.com responses, what have
I missed?

Chris

Chris Hope, Judge Institute of Management Studies,
University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK.
Voice: +44 1223 338194.   Fax: +44 1223 339701
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