re: Climate sensitivity – must-read paper in Science
by David Steven | Oct 28, 2007
One addendum to Alex’s discussion of the new paper from Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker, which argues that we will never really know how much warming we are letting ourselves in for…
Isn’t that exactly why climate change is frightening? We’re poking a complex and poorly understood system with a very big stick – and we don’t know how it’s going to react (although there are plenty of reasons to believe it could be ugly).
Yet we insist in framing this as a problem of certain consequences rather than uncertain ones. It’s a big mistake in my book.
Update: Cf this quote from the Stern Review (chapter 13):
Uncertainty is an argument for setting a more demanding long-term policy, not less, because of the asymmetry between unexpectedly fortunate outcomes and unexpectedly bad ones.
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David Steven is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation and at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.
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