Writing about climate change in the New York Times, Ross Douthat describes “lukewarmers” as those who:
accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.
Douthat placed himself among the lukewarmers and very graciously referred his readers to some of my recent work for a longer discussion of those themes. But his column was also quite gracious in conceding two problems with lukewarmism, which instead deserve rebuttal.
Douthat’s Problem #1: “No less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, reaching for any piece of evidence — and when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from — that supports its non-catastrophic assumptions, even if the bulk of the data starts to point the other way.”
This is a generic critique that might apply to any position on any issue. School-choice advocacy is vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, as is support for universal pre-K. So are the claims that Scandinavian-style welfare states are good or bad for innovation and economic growth. And the claims that an interventionist U.S. foreign policy promotes or harms our national interest. Highlighting such a complaint about lukewarmism would make sense only if the position were uniquely reliant on such bad behavior.
To the contrary, the key hypothesis (of my work, anyway) is that even working from the mainstream scientific and economic studies advanced by alarmists, the data do not support a conclusion of catastrophe. That is, the effects identified by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are serious but manageable. The economic costs identified by the Obama administration’s Social Cost of Carbon analysis are no larger than those associated with a variety of other policy issues.
Of course, plenty of people cherry-pick this or that study in an effort to undermine the mainstream conclusions of climate science. But such analysis is unnecessary to a moderate view of climate change and, I would argue, often counterproductive. Lukewarmism is, or should be, about describing accurately the mainstream of climate research and then assessing how well human society’s resilience and capacity for adaptation will allow it to cope with the challenges we might face.
