The climate change debate

This is my attempt to analyse what a logical climate change debate should look like. I'm not going to use any references, but try to stick to what ordinary people know to be true self-evidently.

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(1) Is climate change happening?

I don't have an informed opinion on whether or not climate change is happening: from my own experience as a normal person I don't have evidence either way. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the facts. I'm fairly sure that the climate is changing, because from what I know of history and geology the climate has always changed. There have been warmer and cooler periods in the past (before humans existed even). The climate always will change until I guess the sun burns out. It seems odd to dispute this.

(2) Are humans causing climate change?

Chaos theory and the butterfly effect tell us that small actions can have big consequences. (I often see this in my own life.) So of course humans do have some influence on climate change. All actions have reactions and all causes have consequences. Humans have always influenced the climate, just by simply existing. We always will do, there is no way we can stop it. Again, this one doesn't seem controversial to me.

(3) What is the extent of human influence on the climate?

Paragraphs (1) and (2) show that we can divide the causes of climate change into two: (x) non-human causes; and (y) human causes. The climate tends to be treated as a single complex system, as no part of it can really be completely removed from the other parts: all parts are interlinked. We can denote this single system as (z).

In summary, (x) and (y) both change (z), and on this all right-thinking people can agree.

There is much argument and debate, though, about the relative reasons for the change: is (x) the main cause or is it (y)? (I don't propose to address this question: I have nothing to add to to that debate. For me it isn't really the most important question.)

(4) In what ways are humans affected by climate change?

This question is important. For most humans consequences of climate change are hugely more interesting and relevant than causes. (Of course, it is important whether we think that the main cause of climate change is (y) humans or whether we think that the main cause of climate change is (x) other things.) 

Climate change may be for the better, it may benefit all humans. Conversely it may be for the worse, it may harm all humans; or perhaps it may be neutral. Or perhaps, like a lot of changes, it may be more mixed than that: beneficial in some respects to some humans, but harmful in other respects to other humans. And if this last possibility is correct it might be worth doing an audit and a balancing act, a sort of utilitarian exercise, just so that we have this information. It will be difficult to do this exercise and different people will no doubt have different conclusions. I'm not sure this exercise has been done to any satisfaction and I don't have the answer myself.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that this exercise has been done to satisfaction and that we have quantified the net harm to humans as a result of climate change and denoted it as (H).

(5) What should we do about climate change?

We can take action and there are a range of possible actions available to us. Possible actions include:

(A) carrying on as we are doing at the moment, better known as "in-action" (this might be sensible if humans are mainly benefitted by climate change);

(B) taking action so as to alter the way we impact climate change, by adjusting (y) above, which we can call "mitigating action". (There are many alternatives available to us here, such as emitting more carbon, emitting less carbon etc, although of course unless we get rid of all humans we can't get rid of (y) completely.); and

(C) taking action to alleviate the harm that climate change causes, which we can call "adaptation action". (Again, there are many alternatives to us available to us here, we could move populations from one part of the globe to another so they were further away from the harm or we could build walls and change our living circumstances where we currently live.)

All actions of course have both costs and opportunity costs and because we don't have infinite amounts of money these costs should be added up, to ensure that costs aren't incurred unnecessarily. This is another audit exercise and balancing act that needs to be undertaken. After doing the balancing act we may conclude that the cost of reducing carbon emissions meant lower economic growth, causing millions of people in the developing world to remain in poverty. (Perhaps (B) > (H).) Or we might conclude that the cost of adapting to climate change was lower than the cost of mitigating our effects on climate change. (Perhaps (C) < (B).) Or we might even conclude that the harm caused by climate change was actually less than other harm which humans already suffer (for example from malaria) and so it would make more sense to put our money towards those causes rather than taking action against harm caused by climate change.

(6) To conclude

Mostly I hear (1), (2) and (3) being debated and while those things are interesting they are academic. The bigger and more important debates are the balancing acts in (4) and (5) and the role of scientists in those debates is limited, because those questions are much more political in nature than they are scientific. It is senseless to incur costs without doing the balancing acts first. I've not yet been convinced that they have been done.
       

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To the extent that my logic is wrong, please use logic to correct me.