Global warming and the precautionary principle

Despite those logical flaws (not that he has ever been a stranger to illogic), the latest AGW hystericist to employ the concept is Tom Friedman:

“When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is ‘irreversible’ and potentially ‘catastrophic,’ I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.”

Well, I do that, too. But I buy insurance that has a price commensurate with the expected value (i.e., the cost of the disaster times the probability that it will occur). For instance, I’ll pay a few hundred bucks for a million-dollar policy against the small chance that I’ll kick off tomorrow. Presumably, Friedman assumes that the proposed palliatives of cap’n’tax or carbon taxes meet that criterion, but he doesn’t do the calculations for us, because he can’t. Warm mongers like him propose to spend trillions of dollars now to prevent an unknown amount of cost later, in defiance of the basic economic principle of discounting the value of future expenditures…

The big problem here is that what we’re dealing with is not risk, in which the probabilities can be reliably quantified, allowing an expected value to be computed, but uncertainty, in which they cannot.