Climate Change: Do We Know Enough for Policy Action?

The author discusses how the climate change problem must be thought of in terms of risk, not certainty, and how it should be thought of in terms of a risk management problem. He calls upon scientists to look at possible outcomes and the probability of these outcomes coming to pass, and for policymakers to use this information to make value judgments about what is safe, what is dangerous, what is fair. He argues that the climate debate needs to be reframed away from absolute costs--or benefits--into relative delay times to achieve specific caps or to avoid crossing specific agreed "dangerous" climate change thresholds.