Re: [Phys-l] Climate change?

["Richard Tarara" <rbtarara@sprynet.com>]

I haven't a clue what Jack is talking about in relationship to laying out 
the possible degrees and consequences of global warming and then providing a 
rough probability (likelihood) of reaching each.  I would think a 2-3 degree 
increase in temperature is much more likely than the melting of the entire 
Antarctic ice sheet.  If nothing else, take the umpteen models and their 
best and worst case predictions and do some statistics on that.  It boils 
down to a matter of finite resources, multiple threats, and distributing 
those resources and our energies in a way that gives us the best chance of 
minimizing or eliminating --the negative effects/dangers of all.  If we take 
all of the threats to humanity--Climate, Disease, Asteroids, (Chemical, 
biological, or Nuclear) War, Starvation, etc. in the worst case forms--then 
we're stuck with trying to solve all of them immediately (or sooner) and 
that just isn't possible.  We have to have a basis for prioritizing and 
allocating effort and resources.  What would you suggest?

Rick

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jack Uretsky" <jlu@hep.anl.gov>


> I have had a long-standing complaint about certain habits of economists.
> I insist that it is nonsensical to put numerical probabilities on the
> occurrence of one time events, as is the habit of inhabitants of the
> University of Chicago economists.
>
> The intellectual support for this category of nonsense is something called
> subjective probability - which is OK, as far as it goes.  But when people
> insist on differentiating subjective probability functions, which cannot
> be subject to any kind of smoothness constraints, they are wandering into
> fantasy land.
>  Regards,
>  Jack
>
>
>
> On Sat, 5 Apr 2008, Richard  Tarara wrote:
>
> > Since this topic has come up and because certain people are assuming that
> > anyone who is even slightly skeptical of the Global Warming
> > science/reports/PR is somehow 'seriously flawed' (to put it kindly), let 
> > me
> > outline a course of action on Global Warming that was presented on 
> > another
> > list but comes from an economist--one with deep Physics roots.  This is 
> > my
> > version of his plan.
> >
> > 1)  Layout the levels of Global Warming and their consequences--from very
> > mild to catastophic.  Do the best we can to determine the relative
> > probablities of these.
> > 2)  Layout a plan of action to that would minimize the adverse effects at
> > each level.
> > 3)  Estimate what is would cost--all types of costs--to do each of these.
> > 4)  Determine where Global Warming ranks with other threats/concerns that
> > will compete for the time/labor/money available. [more on this below].
> > 5)  Now pick an appropriate plan of action--based on the probablities, 
> > the
> > priorities, and the available resources.