Not sure, but here’s what I think roughly. This is basically from an earlier post here, https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/can-the-free-market-solve-the-problems-posed-by-climate-change/935.
I think the problem of damage caused to property (assuming it exists) by anthropogenic warming is basically the same as that of air or water pollution.
If there is only a small amount of pollution, property owners will not even notice it, and have no right to complain, since any aggression would have to be noticeable. Some of the pollutants are absorbed by the environment as well. No aggression can take place unless the polluter releases more pollutant than can be absorbed and that will make a noticeable negative impact on the victim’s property. We can call the limit below which not aggression takes place, the threshold of aggression.
I would claim that everyone has a right to produce as much CO2 as they please so long as they do not cross the threshold of aggression. The first person to dump CO2 into the air homesteads the right to do so at the same rate indefinitely into the future. The pollution right becomes their property, and they can sell it, trade it, or pass it on to their children.
The first person to cross the threshold of aggression is a criminal no matter how little he contributed. Everyone who polluted before him is entirely innocent. Anyone who contributes new pollution is beyond the first criminal is guilty of any new damage which is caused. Any new CO2 source producing beyond the threshold of aggression would also have to be match by a carbon sink which absorbs at least an equivalent rate.
One of the upshots of this is that insurance and legal firms would have incentives to actually figure out the actual extent of anthropogenic climate change. And they would want to figure it out quickly and accurately. Insurance companies would want to know what the chances are that they would have to pay for their client’s pollution if it should happen to cause a rise in sea levels flooding someone’s home, or making someone’s farm arid and useless. Other insurance firms would want to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that damage to their client’s property was caused by some definite polluter to reduce the amount they would have to pay up. The pricing of risks will allow for economic calculation. The incentive for such firms would be to fund reasearch which would prove a causal relationship beyond a reasonable doubt so they could prove their case in a court of law.
This is almost the exact opposite to the way current research is done. The IPCC is an inefficient bureaucracy. Assuming only self-interest, all members of the IPCC have an interest in the growth of their organization. If they were to say that the risks of anthropogenic climate change were small, their organization would receive less funding due to the decrease in perceived importance of their work. If they were to produce conclusive and final research quickly, there would be no more need for their services in the future and they would lose funding. They have no incentive to be fair in their assessment, and every incentive to continue dragging their feet, when it comes to producing indisputable conclusions.
The current results produced by the IPCC are completely useless when it comes to matters of justice. They could not prove any aggression in any reasonable court of law.
Now there are many secondary arguments and debates surrounding the issue. Will warming be good or bad? Do CO2 concentrations lead or lag behind temperature over the last 400 000 years? Are the oceans warming or cooling? These tend to be fruitless discussions. One guy says one thing. The other guy says, “No, you’re wrong.” The first guy responds with the same and no one changes their mind.
But, I think the main argument from the IPCC runs like this (Correct me if I am wrong): We (the scientists) model the earth by dividing up the planet’s surface into a large grid. Each square of the grid approximates the equivilent section of the earth’s surface with average values. Then they subsystems for each grid to simulate things like the thermal energy transfer for land surface, oceans, atmosphere, and simulate changes in chemical compositions in systems like the carbon cycle, water cycle, ect. Many of the relationships are governed by physical, thermodynamic, and chemical relationships. Some of the relationships are unknown however, like the radiative forcing of various GH gases. So the scientists use their expert opinion to estimate parameters in the model. When the scientist finish their model a simulation is run. The simulations is recursive. The values for square of the grid are updated depending on the values in adjacent squares. Because these values are only approximate and any error only increases each iteration, simulation tends not to match past observations very well. So, the scientists start playing around with their parameters until the model closely matches past observations.
Once the scientists have produced their climate model, they make their forecasts. Based on this estimate of radiative forcing, the earth’s temperature will rise such and such an amount. Based on another estimate, it will rise that amount. And by creating a sample of temperature rises based on a range of parameter estimations, we come up with a statistical distribution. From this statistical distribution we conclude that the likelihood of the earth’s temperature rising 2 or 3 degrees over the next century is 90%.
What are the obvious methodological problems with the method? The method for producing the model isn’t really much different in principle than if I where to gather a bunch of past data in the form of points, and interpolate the data points in Excel.
While the science (if it should even be considered that) is uncertain it is inadmissible in a court of law. Anthropogenic GW damage (if it can be proven to exist) should not be treated as a regulatory issue. It should be handled by civil courts.
No. A person is innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, it is impossible to prove that someone will commit a crime in the future.