mroman1’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Wait and see approach flawed

  Let's place any discussion about the science of global warming to the side for just a moment and merely look at a rational policy approach to this issue.  The current administration claims that more data is needed and that their strategy(lack of) will evolve with new information (just play along for a second here).   A wait-and-see approach would be the correct course of action on a particular policy issue if you were looking at a simple system that had very short lags in between the detection of a problem, the implementation of a solution, and the impact of whatever corrective actions you took on the system.  The short time frames are well suited to a wait-and-see policy approach, providing for fairly quick design, implementation, and feedback once it is decided that action will be taken.  For climate change, none of these conditions hold true.  There are long delays in between every step of this process.  Think about how long existing stocks of industrial buildings, housing and the like remain in use once built.  These things will continue to generate GHG at whatever level they are at even long after we decide to change policy, so there is inertia of perhaps decades built into the system.  The longest delay of course is from the response of the climate system itself.  It takes many years for the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere to manifest itself.  There are actually some pretty good studies that demonstrate that our current climate patterns are the impacts felt from C02 concentration levels as of the early 1970's.  That means that we are currently experiencing the climate effects of the early portion of the exponential curve of C02 concentrations that you see published everywhere.  So how does one explain the rationality of a wait-and-see approach even if you tried to ignore the science?  Even if you assume the science is incomplete or somewhat inaccurate rational policy would still promote activity now and changes as new data is received in.  On A new series posted 3 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses