This week’s Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3 entry is from Dr. Ken Green, who holds a doctorate in environmental science and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver BC. Green notes that when the global warming scare burst on the scene in 1988, cool-headed observers quickly came to the conclusion that trying to stop it through “mitigation” or greenhouse gas emission reduction would not only be infeasible but would require excessive government control of all aspects of life, so all pain and no gain. But adopting strategies to be more resilient to climate and weather changes would be effective, efficient and non-toxic to liberty. So you can guess which path the climate lobby chose.

Green quotes at some length the work of UC Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky who, in the 1980s, studied risk management challenges and developed a system for identifying when prevention is preferred to adaptation, and when adaptation is likely to be better. And essentially it comes down to the complexity of the system at risk.

Trying to prevent an adverse outcome in a complex system with many moving parts may well become prohibitively costly due in large part to unanticipated consequences of well-meaning actions. Whereas having sound response strategies in place to deal with potential problems as they arise reacts to the unanticipated and helps fix it instead of causing it and making it worse.

Indeed, Wildavsky commented early on that global warming fell into the category where adaptation made more sense, an argument Green accepted and has concurred with ever since:

“As a climate policy canary, this has been my song as well. Adaptation to a variable climate, not efforts to take control of that climate via greenhouse gas manipulation is humanity’s only rational response to manage the potential risks of climate change.”

That so many alarmists, in science, advocacy, politics and journalism persistently choose the other path suggests not conspiracy but a fundamental weakness in their thinking on a great many topics including this one.

And speaking of irrational responses, next week we look at lawyer Andrew Roman’s analysis of the fatal flaws in climate litigation.