Don’t be fooled by the post-Paris fanfare. The climate change movement faces major trouble ahead:
Its principal propositions contain two major fallacies that can only become more glaring with time. First, in stark contrast to popular belief and to the public statements of government officials and many scientists, the science on which the dire predictions of manmade climate change is based is nowhere near the level of understanding or certainty that popular discourse commonly ascribes to it. Second, and relatedly, the movement’s embrace of an absolute form of the precautionary principle distorts rational cost-benefit analysis, or throws it out the window altogether.
That’s the argument of my new feature on climate change, at The American Interest magazine. I try to put the swirling academic debate over climate change in the context of our current 2.6 million-year-long Pleistocene Ice Age, in order to suggest what the evidence actually shows and what a rational cost-benefit analysis might look like.