Posts tagged…Precaution
A whiff of luddism
Wed, Jun 02 2010Ken Rogoff—the Cassandra of the financial markets crisis—insinuates a moral lesson from a another technical disaster without, however, actually defining one.
"If ever there were a wake-up call for Western society to rethink its dependence on ever-accelerating technological innovation for ever-expanding fuel consumption, surely the BP oil spill should be it. Even China, with its ‘boom now, deal…
Read more…Business and precaution
Tue, Apr 14 2009The difference between private and public reaction to uncertainty (as opposed to risk) is that firms aren't tempted to take outlandish steps in the name of the 'precautionary principle'.
"[A] famous distinction that the economist Frank Knight made between risk and uncertainty. Risk describes a situation where you have a sense of the range and likelihood of possible outcomes. Uncertainty describes…
Precautionary principle, misleading and undemocratic
Fri, Sep 05 2008The "precautionary principle" makes a dishonest claim (I don't say that people who invoke it are dishonest) because it pretends to be one thing—a justification—while being, in fact, a very different thing—an explanation.
I say that precaution justifies, at best, a wager and that wagers should not be the basis of public policy in democracies, certainly not when we are debating a decision that will…
You need a model?
Fri, Jul 04 2008I can't get a response out of the Garnaut Review website—probably overloaded—to download the Review report. But here's an extract from Prof Garnaut's address to the Press Club on a 'curious turn' in AGW 'dissent':
"The dissent took a curious turn in Australia in 2008, with much prominence being given to assertions that a warming trend had ended over the last decade. This is a question that is…
Climate models do not justify even precautionary action
Sun, May 11 2008In an article that is itself a model of its kind, Patrick Frank shows that the documented uncertainties in General Circulation Models (GCMs) are so large that it is impossible they could make falsifiable predictions of the climate, even over the next few years. Illusory precision in the IPCC's trend lines, he points out, does not amount to accuracy and does not support the sort of precautionary…
The Garnaut Climate Review Interim Report—I’m not convinced
Fri, Feb 22 2008
My difficulty with the Interim report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review is that it is headed toward a recommendation that looks disproportionate to the climate risk.
Publicly available data on climate change does not seem to call for extreme measures such as a 70% to 90% cut in Australia's carbon emissions. This data has not been examined by the Garnaut team because it's not their business to…