One of the positive legacies of my economics education is a tendency to express public policy discussions using mathematics (actually, pseudo-mathematics) and to characacterize public policy debates as debates about the shape or nature of the mathematical functions involved.
The global warming policy discussion is a quest to "do the right thing". Here is one road towards discovering what the right thing is.
The debate can be characterized with some stylized functions. Note that the functions would not describe outcomes, but probabilities of various outcomes. Note also that the arguments and outputs of all these functions would be time-dependent (technically, vectors of time-series data) rather than scalar.
G(h) - response function of greenhouse gases to human activity (h)
T(G) - response of temperature to greenhouse gases
E(T) - effects of temperature changes (increased storms, higher sea level, etc)
B(E) - net benefit (however "benefit" is defined) of these effects. (which would of course likely be negative.)
Of course, human activity (h) has non climate related benefits B(h). Furthermore, greenhouse gases (G) may have beneficial effects (such as faster plant growth) independent of their effects on temperature, B(G).
The entire problem, then, could be described as:
- Choose h, so as to maximize:
B(E(T(G(h)))) + B(h) + B(G(h))
Of course, this is all nerdy common sense so far: the devil is in the details. What I plan to do in this essay (which will likely take a while, but hey, it's important) is characterize the talking points in "the global warming debate" in the context of the above formulation.
"Choose h"
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