Paul Kedrosky on The Economics and Emotion of Global Warming

Popular venture-capitalist blogger Paul Kedrosky has more patience than me, slogging through the transcripts of the Supreme Court global warming case, Massachusetts vs. EPA. "I tried to stay balanced while reading this week's Supreme Court oral transcripts from Massachusetts vs. EPA, the global warming case, but it's tough. This feels like instant history, the kind of document that people will look back on in a hundred years and say there was a great example of a missed opportunity, a point where things began to really get away. So much sophistry, so little substance. You can, of course, understand the temptation to wait for more data, to argue lack of standing, or to argue about the costs and consequences of carbon dioxide curbs. But then ... while the global climate is a highly complex system, the science is also more settled than the Appeals Court and the EPA make it sound. Start reading the climate scientists' amicus brief on page 17 to get a sense of how climate research is being warped to serve a political purpose....Go ahead and read the respondent-friendly briefs too, like the AEI's, but even there you see that the arguments are mostly at the margin, about the amount of change, and about humans' ability to cope with those changes -- higher sealevels, more freakish weather, etc. -- than about actions that might be taken now to mitigate those responses.::Infectious Greed