Mick Hulme

Nearly there. Mick Hulme of the Tyndall Centre has an interesting piece in The Guardian, looking at what science can and cannot tell us about climate change. He's missing one part of the argument though:

Climate change is happening, but it appears that science is split on what to do about it. One of the central reasons why there is disagreement about how to tackle climate change is because we have different conceptions of what science is, and with what authority it speaks - in other words, how scientific "knowledge" interacts with those other realms of understanding brought to us by politics, ethics and spirituality.

Let's say that the IPCC reading of it is largely correct (roughly my opinion, with a few minor reservations). What we should do is not in fact the province of climate change scientists at all.  It is rather the province of another group of scientists. Those who study trade offs, incentives, discount rates and the like. That is, economists. Let us for the sake of argument accept that people's incentives do indeed need to change. OK, who are you going to listen to as you try and work out how to do that? People who study how people react to incentives? Or people who study physical processes? Quite.

And as an added extra bonus for those who insist that Governments must do something big right now. There's a whole sub-field of the subject that shows that such big things almost always get side tracked into being what's good for politicians and their acolytes, not what's good for solving whatever the problem is. The US ethanol program for example, helps Iowa corn farmers more than any other group and it's certainly not a viable solution to climate change or oil dependency. It is not a coincidence that American Presidential campaigns kick off in Iowa.

Asking the government to "do something" will simply create more of this. Yes, it really is known as the dismal science.