Ext User(Booozoo)
16-02-2007, 03:23 PM
The Institute of Public Affairs, Review 58(4), pp. 33-35, Dec., 2006.
When science fails,
just use the precautionary principle
Bob Carter
The precautionary principle has been much in the news lately in connection
with climate change.
The principle is intended to assist governments and peoples with risk
analysis of environmental issues. First formulated at a United Nations
environment conference at Rio de Janiero in 1992, it stated that "Where
there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific
certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective
measures to prevent environmental degradation". Heavy campaigning from
environmental pressure groups since then has caused many governments to use
the principle as a tool for policy development, and that generally under a
more restrictive wording that says something like "where there is a
potential for harm from a technology, then use of that technology should be
restricted until and unless it is demonstrated or proved to be safe".
That there is a disturbing lack of intellectual rigor, not to mention the
presence of ambiguity, in these and other definitions has not prevented the
precautionary principle from being incorporated into law in several
countries. For instance, the EU Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (January,
2000) asserts the principle in its operational text as a binding
environmental requirement. In Australia, the Commonwealth Fisheries
Management Act 1991 (Section 516A) requires the regulatory authority "to
pursue the objective of ensuring that the exploitation of fisheries
resources and the carrying on of any related activities are conducted in a
manner consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable
development and the exercise of the precautionary principle". Most of
concern, perhaps, is that experience shows that the adoption of the
precautionary principle as a policy guideline is inevitably followed later
by the development of legally binding precautionary rules.
Returning to climate change, those who give public talks on the issue are
well used to vigorous questioning, the topic being a polarized one.
Inevitably, and often quickly, after a talk comes the relaxing question -
"but surely because there is a risk of damage from human-caused climate
change, we must apply the precautionary principle to try to prevent the
change".
Relaxing? Yes, because the question is an acknowledgement that the audience,
or at least the questioner, has run out of scientific arguments. It has
become clear to him or her that the scientific evidence for human-caused
climate harm is at best ambiguous. So having exhausted the science at no
avail to the cause, refuge is sought in sociology.
There are, of course, numerous other solecisms implicit in our questioners'
plea. They include: that there is a 100% risk of damage from natural climate
events, which happen every day; that no amount of precaution is going stop
natural climate change; that we cannot measure, much less isolate, any
presumed human climate signal globally; that extra atmospheric carbon
dioxide causes mild warming only, and is at least as likely to be beneficial
as harmful; and that the causes of climate change are many, various and very
incompletely understood. These being largely scientific arguments, they will
of course never carry the day against a warmaholic, because such persons are
afflicted not by science but by faith.
Driven by their addiction to alarmism, and a false belief that the causes of
climate change are understood, environmental lobby groups worldwide urge the
adoption of the precautionary principle to solve the "global warming
problem". They argue that the world needs to move to a "post-carbon"
economy as soon as possible, in order to curtail drastically the carbon
dioxide emissions that they allege are causing warming. Yet it is only
unvalidated computer models that suggest dangerous warming will occur, the
observable facts being quite implacable that additional carbon dioxide
brings mild warming only, most of which has already occurred because of the
logarithmic nature of the relationship between increased carbon dioxide and
increasing temperature.
Believing, as they do, that carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous, warming
zealots assert under the precautionary principle that it is better to be
safe than sorry - so give up driving your SUV now, and get ready to pay
swingeing carbon taxes as well. In the climate and energy context, however,
it is not clear what is safe and what is sorry. For to destroy the energy
economy of the modern industrialized world, with the certainty of at least a
doubling in energy prices, could scarcely be termed "safe". And "sorry"
might well turn out to be too gentle a word for our feelings should we do
just that in return for what transpires to be an unmeasurable difference in
future temperature and climate.
Astonishingly, business groups appear to have absorbed the global warming
chicanery of the environmental NGOs in one swallow, for they are now urging
government to introduce what they see as a necessary carbon tax. A necessary
carbon tax, you say? Necessary for what? Well, to make money, of course.
An estimated 6,000 persons have just attended a United Nations climate
meeting in Nairobi that focused on carbon taxes and related issues (just
contemplate the carbon footprint of the delegates' travel alone). Despite
all the moral posturing and frisbee science on show in Nairobi, most
participants were there to make money or achieve power as part of the
biggest Baptists and Bootleggers coalition that the world has ever seen.
Prime amongst the Baptists were managers from the environmental NGOs,
government bureaucrats and national politicians, whose actions were intended
to deliver membership subscriptions, departmental budgets, and votes,
respectively - all justified by the presumed moral worthiness of their
climate cause. Leading the Bootleggers were the merchant bankers and other
financiers who can sense the rich plunderings that lie just over the
horizon, and who were egged on by the science managers whose research
budgets now depend so strongly on warming alarmism and the media
representatives for whom such alarmism sells product.
The real economic needs and the actual - as opposed to imaginary -
environmental problems that today beset under-developed nations were swamped
during this guilt-laden jamboree of western self-interest. Bjorn Lomborg is
entirely right to point out that if the West has environmental or aid money
to spend, then it should use it to solve real, high priority problems rather
than frittering it away ineffectually on the chimera of "stopping" global
warming.
There is such a thing as relative risk analysis, and it is missing from
virtually all the public bleatings about climate change. Sensibly managing
environmental issues is not about combating every single threat that can be
dreamed up in the vivid imaginations of environmentally concerned citizens.
As Lord Nigel Lawson has recently written "As a general rule, rationality
suggests that we concentrate on present crises, and on future ones where the
probability of disaster if we do not act appears significant - usually
because the signs of its emergence are already incontrovertible. The fact
that a theoretical danger would be devastating is not enough to justify
substantial expenditure". Risk analysis, then, is about judging the balance
of risk on a wide scale of possible misadventures, and about paying most
attention to demonstrable, near-horizon threats.
The risk of climate change is, of course, not small. In fact the risk is
100%, because climate has always changed and always will. The last seven
years of climate stasis, during which global average temperature has not
changed significantly since 1998, is unusual. Nothing seems surer than that
cooling or warming will reassert itself shortly, but regrettably we don't
know which. The deterministic computer models used by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict warming (but then they predicted
warming, wrongly, for 1998-2005 too), whereas other computer models based on
the forward projection of natural climate rhythms predict cooling for the
next few decades. Which leads us right back to the precautionary principle
again.
In order to take precautions, it is necessary to understand what one is
taking them against. "Well, the risk of climate change is near enough to
100%", say the experts, "so take precautions against that". "Yes, but what
will the direction of change be?" you reply. "About a 50% chance of warming
and 50% of cooling" comes the answer. At this point, a pause is needed to
reflect on how we might apply the precautionary principle to two alternative
yet equally likely outcomes.
The answer lies, one supposes, in assessing which outcome would be the more
damaging. At the level of a full glaciation, it is obvious that cooling will
be more damaging to human interests than warming - for the novelty of an
ice-cap developing over most of northern North America and Scandinavia would
soon wear off, and the economic damage would be horrendous. But even at the
level of another Little Ice Age, it is likely that the costs and damages of
cooling would greatly exceed those of warming. Precaution would say that
perhaps the best, non-polluting way to help avert such cooling - which,
note, has recently been predicted to occur over the next few decades by both
American and Russian scientists - would be to inject extra carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere. After all, one of the things that global warming
zealots and skeptics alike agree about is that carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas that causes mild warming. And, while we're at it, instead of
a carbon tax to penalize emitters, perhaps governments could stimulate
emissions by removing subsidies from uneconomic and environmentally damaging
"alternative" sources of power, such as wind farms, thus favouring coal or
gas-fired power stations.
But all of this analysis leaves unmentioned what is perhaps the biggest
problem with the precautionary principle, which is that it is a moral
precept masquerading under a scientific cloak.
In science, the term "principle" refers to a relationship that has been
derived from experimental data or observation, and that can usually be
expressed mathematically. Thus Le Châtelier's Principle states that
introducing a change into a chemical system at equilibrium will cause the
system to shift in a way that minimizes the change; for example, increasing
the concentration of an ingredient in a chemical reaction will cause an
increase in amount of the product of the reaction, as has been confirmed by
countless numbers of chemical experimenters since 1884. In contrast, the
term "principle" in everyday life generally refers to the assumption of one
moral rule or another, as manifest in the phrase "she stuck to her principle
of doing no harm to another".
These two usages could not be more different, for where scientific
principles acknowledge the supremacy of experiment and observation, everyday
principles adhere instead to untestable moral propositions. Adhering to a
moral principle through thick and thin is certainly a part of the
precautionary principle as practiced by environmentalists, and as such it is
a principle of the wrong type to be used for the formulation of public
environmental policy.
After comprehensive analysis, the Science and Technology Committee of the
U.K. House of Commons recently came to a similar conclusion, commenting that
"we can confirm our initial view that the term "precautionary principle"
should not be used, and recommend that it cease to be included in policy
guidance". The committee added that "In our view, the terms "precautionary
principle" and "precautionary approach" in isolation from .. clarification
have been the subject of such confusion and different interpretations as to
be devalued and of little practical help, particularly in public debate".
Put another way, all that is needed to fix the precautionary principle is a
little more rigor. Rigor mortis, that is.
Professor Bob Carter is an experienced geologist and environmental
scientist. His website is at:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2006 Scientific Advice,
Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making. Seventh Report of Session 2005-06.
(http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/900/900-i.pdf).
Marchant, G. & Mossman, K. 2005 Arbitrary and Capricious. The Precautionary
Principle in the European Union Courts. International Policy Network,
London, 104 pp.
(http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/Arbitrary-web.pdf).
Regards
Bonzo
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L Mencken
When science fails,
just use the precautionary principle
Bob Carter
The precautionary principle has been much in the news lately in connection
with climate change.
The principle is intended to assist governments and peoples with risk
analysis of environmental issues. First formulated at a United Nations
environment conference at Rio de Janiero in 1992, it stated that "Where
there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific
certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective
measures to prevent environmental degradation". Heavy campaigning from
environmental pressure groups since then has caused many governments to use
the principle as a tool for policy development, and that generally under a
more restrictive wording that says something like "where there is a
potential for harm from a technology, then use of that technology should be
restricted until and unless it is demonstrated or proved to be safe".
That there is a disturbing lack of intellectual rigor, not to mention the
presence of ambiguity, in these and other definitions has not prevented the
precautionary principle from being incorporated into law in several
countries. For instance, the EU Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (January,
2000) asserts the principle in its operational text as a binding
environmental requirement. In Australia, the Commonwealth Fisheries
Management Act 1991 (Section 516A) requires the regulatory authority "to
pursue the objective of ensuring that the exploitation of fisheries
resources and the carrying on of any related activities are conducted in a
manner consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable
development and the exercise of the precautionary principle". Most of
concern, perhaps, is that experience shows that the adoption of the
precautionary principle as a policy guideline is inevitably followed later
by the development of legally binding precautionary rules.
Returning to climate change, those who give public talks on the issue are
well used to vigorous questioning, the topic being a polarized one.
Inevitably, and often quickly, after a talk comes the relaxing question -
"but surely because there is a risk of damage from human-caused climate
change, we must apply the precautionary principle to try to prevent the
change".
Relaxing? Yes, because the question is an acknowledgement that the audience,
or at least the questioner, has run out of scientific arguments. It has
become clear to him or her that the scientific evidence for human-caused
climate harm is at best ambiguous. So having exhausted the science at no
avail to the cause, refuge is sought in sociology.
There are, of course, numerous other solecisms implicit in our questioners'
plea. They include: that there is a 100% risk of damage from natural climate
events, which happen every day; that no amount of precaution is going stop
natural climate change; that we cannot measure, much less isolate, any
presumed human climate signal globally; that extra atmospheric carbon
dioxide causes mild warming only, and is at least as likely to be beneficial
as harmful; and that the causes of climate change are many, various and very
incompletely understood. These being largely scientific arguments, they will
of course never carry the day against a warmaholic, because such persons are
afflicted not by science but by faith.
Driven by their addiction to alarmism, and a false belief that the causes of
climate change are understood, environmental lobby groups worldwide urge the
adoption of the precautionary principle to solve the "global warming
problem". They argue that the world needs to move to a "post-carbon"
economy as soon as possible, in order to curtail drastically the carbon
dioxide emissions that they allege are causing warming. Yet it is only
unvalidated computer models that suggest dangerous warming will occur, the
observable facts being quite implacable that additional carbon dioxide
brings mild warming only, most of which has already occurred because of the
logarithmic nature of the relationship between increased carbon dioxide and
increasing temperature.
Believing, as they do, that carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous, warming
zealots assert under the precautionary principle that it is better to be
safe than sorry - so give up driving your SUV now, and get ready to pay
swingeing carbon taxes as well. In the climate and energy context, however,
it is not clear what is safe and what is sorry. For to destroy the energy
economy of the modern industrialized world, with the certainty of at least a
doubling in energy prices, could scarcely be termed "safe". And "sorry"
might well turn out to be too gentle a word for our feelings should we do
just that in return for what transpires to be an unmeasurable difference in
future temperature and climate.
Astonishingly, business groups appear to have absorbed the global warming
chicanery of the environmental NGOs in one swallow, for they are now urging
government to introduce what they see as a necessary carbon tax. A necessary
carbon tax, you say? Necessary for what? Well, to make money, of course.
An estimated 6,000 persons have just attended a United Nations climate
meeting in Nairobi that focused on carbon taxes and related issues (just
contemplate the carbon footprint of the delegates' travel alone). Despite
all the moral posturing and frisbee science on show in Nairobi, most
participants were there to make money or achieve power as part of the
biggest Baptists and Bootleggers coalition that the world has ever seen.
Prime amongst the Baptists were managers from the environmental NGOs,
government bureaucrats and national politicians, whose actions were intended
to deliver membership subscriptions, departmental budgets, and votes,
respectively - all justified by the presumed moral worthiness of their
climate cause. Leading the Bootleggers were the merchant bankers and other
financiers who can sense the rich plunderings that lie just over the
horizon, and who were egged on by the science managers whose research
budgets now depend so strongly on warming alarmism and the media
representatives for whom such alarmism sells product.
The real economic needs and the actual - as opposed to imaginary -
environmental problems that today beset under-developed nations were swamped
during this guilt-laden jamboree of western self-interest. Bjorn Lomborg is
entirely right to point out that if the West has environmental or aid money
to spend, then it should use it to solve real, high priority problems rather
than frittering it away ineffectually on the chimera of "stopping" global
warming.
There is such a thing as relative risk analysis, and it is missing from
virtually all the public bleatings about climate change. Sensibly managing
environmental issues is not about combating every single threat that can be
dreamed up in the vivid imaginations of environmentally concerned citizens.
As Lord Nigel Lawson has recently written "As a general rule, rationality
suggests that we concentrate on present crises, and on future ones where the
probability of disaster if we do not act appears significant - usually
because the signs of its emergence are already incontrovertible. The fact
that a theoretical danger would be devastating is not enough to justify
substantial expenditure". Risk analysis, then, is about judging the balance
of risk on a wide scale of possible misadventures, and about paying most
attention to demonstrable, near-horizon threats.
The risk of climate change is, of course, not small. In fact the risk is
100%, because climate has always changed and always will. The last seven
years of climate stasis, during which global average temperature has not
changed significantly since 1998, is unusual. Nothing seems surer than that
cooling or warming will reassert itself shortly, but regrettably we don't
know which. The deterministic computer models used by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict warming (but then they predicted
warming, wrongly, for 1998-2005 too), whereas other computer models based on
the forward projection of natural climate rhythms predict cooling for the
next few decades. Which leads us right back to the precautionary principle
again.
In order to take precautions, it is necessary to understand what one is
taking them against. "Well, the risk of climate change is near enough to
100%", say the experts, "so take precautions against that". "Yes, but what
will the direction of change be?" you reply. "About a 50% chance of warming
and 50% of cooling" comes the answer. At this point, a pause is needed to
reflect on how we might apply the precautionary principle to two alternative
yet equally likely outcomes.
The answer lies, one supposes, in assessing which outcome would be the more
damaging. At the level of a full glaciation, it is obvious that cooling will
be more damaging to human interests than warming - for the novelty of an
ice-cap developing over most of northern North America and Scandinavia would
soon wear off, and the economic damage would be horrendous. But even at the
level of another Little Ice Age, it is likely that the costs and damages of
cooling would greatly exceed those of warming. Precaution would say that
perhaps the best, non-polluting way to help avert such cooling - which,
note, has recently been predicted to occur over the next few decades by both
American and Russian scientists - would be to inject extra carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere. After all, one of the things that global warming
zealots and skeptics alike agree about is that carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas that causes mild warming. And, while we're at it, instead of
a carbon tax to penalize emitters, perhaps governments could stimulate
emissions by removing subsidies from uneconomic and environmentally damaging
"alternative" sources of power, such as wind farms, thus favouring coal or
gas-fired power stations.
But all of this analysis leaves unmentioned what is perhaps the biggest
problem with the precautionary principle, which is that it is a moral
precept masquerading under a scientific cloak.
In science, the term "principle" refers to a relationship that has been
derived from experimental data or observation, and that can usually be
expressed mathematically. Thus Le Châtelier's Principle states that
introducing a change into a chemical system at equilibrium will cause the
system to shift in a way that minimizes the change; for example, increasing
the concentration of an ingredient in a chemical reaction will cause an
increase in amount of the product of the reaction, as has been confirmed by
countless numbers of chemical experimenters since 1884. In contrast, the
term "principle" in everyday life generally refers to the assumption of one
moral rule or another, as manifest in the phrase "she stuck to her principle
of doing no harm to another".
These two usages could not be more different, for where scientific
principles acknowledge the supremacy of experiment and observation, everyday
principles adhere instead to untestable moral propositions. Adhering to a
moral principle through thick and thin is certainly a part of the
precautionary principle as practiced by environmentalists, and as such it is
a principle of the wrong type to be used for the formulation of public
environmental policy.
After comprehensive analysis, the Science and Technology Committee of the
U.K. House of Commons recently came to a similar conclusion, commenting that
"we can confirm our initial view that the term "precautionary principle"
should not be used, and recommend that it cease to be included in policy
guidance". The committee added that "In our view, the terms "precautionary
principle" and "precautionary approach" in isolation from .. clarification
have been the subject of such confusion and different interpretations as to
be devalued and of little practical help, particularly in public debate".
Put another way, all that is needed to fix the precautionary principle is a
little more rigor. Rigor mortis, that is.
Professor Bob Carter is an experienced geologist and environmental
scientist. His website is at:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2006 Scientific Advice,
Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making. Seventh Report of Session 2005-06.
(http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/900/900-i.pdf).
Marchant, G. & Mossman, K. 2005 Arbitrary and Capricious. The Precautionary
Principle in the European Union Courts. International Policy Network,
London, 104 pp.
(http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/Arbitrary-web.pdf).
Regards
Bonzo
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L Mencken