You may want to read, for example thework of Bjørn Lomborg. First because he believes AGW is happening and is dangerous and second because his background is in economics/social sciences.
Why would you suggest him? I am familiar with Bjorn Lomborg, and unless his spiel has changed recently, he doesn't deny the science behind AGW theory, but instead makes a ludicrous argument that the solution should be based solely on adaptation. He doesn't present clear answers to deal with costs of adaptation, which will inevitably increase as greenhouse gas levels rise. So, someone like Lomborg is the card the oil lobby plays to try to influence people who don't buy the argument that CO2 levels will stop increasing on their own for reasons unknown, or that rising greenhouse gas levels have no connection to rising temperatures.
Many climate scientists lack the background or ability to propose "cures" other than very general ones, let alone weigh costs. To do that requires a whole different background, and dialogue. Economists and social scientists have to rely on the work of climate scientists to identify the problems, and both have to work with the more applied environmental scientists to first develop possible solutions, and then weigh the costs and benefits.
There are so many unknowns in understanding ecological processes that it's likely no one can speak with authority about how to solve the problems. It may be just a matter of toss up some ideas and see what works. I follow what James Hansen says very closely, but I notice of late that many experts in the earth sciences are dumping cold water on a carbon sequestration method he was getting enthusiastic about a year or two ago -- Biochar. But, the problem is that natural carbon sequestration moves very slowly compared to the processes that cause periodic spikes in carbon levels...like us! So, we won't be out of the woods until or unless someone comes up with a feasible carbon sequestration idea that doesn't cause more harm than good....as many proposed so far do.
The climate scientists are in the best position to talk about the cost of inaction, and they are essential for understanding how effective this or that action will be, but aren't really in a position to say what the effects will be on the global economy, 3rd world (areas of high poverty rates may be greatly effected by some of the proposed soluations), etc.
Yes, but the evidence is consistent that rising temperatures in the hot zones will lead to massive crop failure, and eventually impossible to grow food completely. The economists who are up to speed on this issue, are very much in agreement that adaptation depends on a nation's wealth to try to adapt to climate change. So, in the Tropics, Australia may be able to carry on in spite of droughts and floods and agricultural devastation, but East Africa and Sub-Sahara Africa will not be able to handle the shock.
But when it comes to fear tactics and emotional appeals, I think the environmentalists have the skeptics/deniers beat. I've corresponded with Christy once or twice to ask about certain things. Despite not knowing me or knowing whether I was looking to twist his words, he was cordial and helpful. I've written to several other climate scientists, and I never heard back from most (including Spencer). I think this is probably a reflection of the political climate (pun intended).
My first thought is that the most prominent climatologists who receive frequent death threats - like Phil Jones and Hansen, probably are going to be the most difficult to contact for security reasons alone.
When it comes to fear tactics -- after I learned a little about this issue, I was thinking the exact opposite -- that most of them sugarcoat their message, following some doctrine that Al Gore came up with several years ago -- that the message should not appear too scary, and there has to be easy solutions provided or people will tune out. Gore may be right, but liberal solutions can easily be taken apart by the skeptics because of their costs and limited value. Also, if you notice, almost none of the prominent climatologists have even bothered making projections past 2100. Why not? I know that, just like forecasting the weather, predicting climate change further into the future will become less accurate; but the general trend of today is almost certain to make the World ice-free by 2300...depending mostly on just how much carbon is presently sequestered in permafrost and the Arctic Ocean. If we include that huge scale of sea level rise with loss of our productive land, and a continued increase in greenhouse gas levels, the dire conclusions of James Lovelock and E.O. Wilson, that humanity only has 200 years or so before extinction, have to be taken seriously. And that certainly is a road that Hansen, Jones and others don't want to take their audience along.
I began writing to professors to ask about things I was researching before I began my undergrad studies, and I still do. The vast majority are very helpful, or at least will respond that they don't know the answer and point me elsewhere. I think it's sad that climate science has, thanks to all sides (political and ideological), become such a battlefield where one's source code and data has to be hidden for fear mistakes might be found in one's work.
I don't have the book:"Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes, but I've listened to a few of her interviews and lectures about the history of climate change denial, and her conclusion is that climate change wasn't a controversial issue until the oil industry hired the lobbyists for the tobacco industry to stall any changes that might reduce the sales of oil (and coal). One of the first places they turned to was the George C. Marshall Institute, which became the hotbed of activity for the kind of science the right wing wanted after Marshall enlisted the bomb builders and nuclear scientists of the Cold War to lobby on behalf of Ronald Reagan's star wars initiative. Some of those scientists, like the late Fred Singer, went from lobbying on behalf of SDI to smoking to denying global warming. I don't know if Spencer goes back to SDI, but he is on the board at the Marshall Institute.
A child would, but an expert might realize the possible fallacy in assuming a malthusian stance on resources. Since Malthus, there have always been those who argue that we will run out of resources by X date. And so far, they've all been wrong, mainly for one reason: they underestimate human technological adaptivity and ingenuity. The population on earth today would be dying out on every continent en masse in Malthus' day. But humans have an amazing ability to make resources out of things which weren't, from wind to sun to rocks in the ground (uranium).
The way I see it, Malthus's basic theory may still be sound and we haven't proven it wrong yet because the predicted dates of resource depletion have fallen short. If we use the concept of
ecological footprint as a guide, we have to somehow calculate our land and resource use, along with our impact on nature, to determine whether our economic aspirations can be sustained by what the nature's economy can provide for us. No need saying that's a hard calculation to make; and that's what most of the critics hone in on -- but I think the basic principle should be the foundation for policy making, not an afterthought as it is now, since it appears that
we are 1.5 times the global carrying capacity, and because of environment degradation and both renewable and non-renewable resource overconsumption, that number can only increase over time until it reaches the level predicted by Malthus. Robert Malthus's predictions mostly focused on England, and he may have been right about England's and Europe's collapse and disintegration into cannibalism, if it wasn't for mass migration to the New World, and the importing of large quantities of grains from the colonies. These were circumstances not factored in by Malthus.
Now, let's look at the present. There are at least 2 billion people now in the world who are living below the daily recommended level of calorie-consumption (twice as many as 10 years ago); so all of the bloviating about how the wonderful Green Revolution saved the World is largely hot air. The agribusiness that got started in the 60's, under the label of saving poor nations from starvation, has ended subsistence agriculture and replaced it with growing cash crops for export...even in Africa now. I came across an online lecture by economist Raj Patel, who is a vocal critic of globalism and agribusiness, and takes apart a lot of the myths of the Green Revolution in his essay:
Can The World Feed 10 Billion?
The biggest problem of modern agriculture is that its monocroping and intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers degrades the land, so that in a matter of decades, the topsoil will be used up and blown away; and the generation of farmers who know how to rotate crops and live within the limits of what the land is able to provide, are mostly gone -- so we have burned that bridge behind us! I'm afraid Malthusian dire predictions are not wrong, they have merely been delayed by human efforts to extract more from the land than previous generations were capable of doing.
