This paper is starting to show up everywhere, so why not the thread?
It's 82 pages, but for those interested it's quite a read.
http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdfHere's the Abstract:
INSTITUTE FOR LAW AND ECONOMICS
A Joint Research Center of the Law School, the Wharton School, and the Department of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
Abstract
Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been
active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global
warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group
of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too
conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from
potentially very high temperature increases.
This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the
picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific
literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic
tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical
techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while
concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key
processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the
size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the
temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases:
while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly
positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback
effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper
reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the
picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th
century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the
possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not
increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate
models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the
methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global
warming impacts such as species loss.
Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such
fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread
misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such
misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of
the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal
scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science
supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas
emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science
away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward
increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against
which existing climate models can be tested.
Wine is sunlight, held together by water - Galileo Galilei
Un jour sans vin est comme un jour sans soleil - Louis Pasteur
Water separates the people of the world; wine unites them - anonymous
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world - Ernest Hemingway
Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance - Benjamin Franklin
