IPCC, economic expertise and dissent
Clive Crook has an interesting article in today’s FT about the absence of non-scientific expertise, and the dismissal of dissenting views, by the panjandrums of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
“For the rest of us, however, this is a pity - because to put it bluntly the IPCC deserves the [US] administration’s disdain. It is a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom. That needs to change and the IPCC itself must be reformed.
. . .
The IPCC may be right: climate change may indeed be mankind’s biggest and most urgent challenge. It would be wrong to demand certainty before doing more. The scientific consensus, though not quite as strong as usually claimed, is surely strong enough to warrant a carbon tax or equivalent.
But if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source - or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for “more serious action” that go well beyond the science.”