The answer is forty-two but what was the question?
Benny Peiser isn’t the only person who continues to believe his conclusions even after the “research” supporting them has been thoroughly discredited, and after finally conceding that there were indeed errors in how he reached those conclusions. Now I’ll concede that, prior to the election, with climate denialists in control of key congressional committees and being given airtime disproportionate to the merits of their arguments, I gave higher priority to commenting on bad arguments for bad causes than to bad arguments for good causes. Roger Pielke has commented extensively on the latter and this paper by Steve Rayner that he links to is absolutely worth reading. I don’t have anything more to add to what I have already said on climate change and hurricanes.
Now I want to draw attention to some of the nonsense that has been circulating about the value of ecosystem services, and a paper that just won’t die, no matter how thoroughly discredited. I really hate to give it yet another citation but that paper would be the infamous one by Costanza et al (1997) on The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital, that was a cover story in Nature, and that tallied up the value of ecosystem services to an average of $33 trillion. If you don’t know why this is impossible as well as meaningless for purposes of decision-making, see the Environmental Economics and the Ecological Economics blogs, which both agree on this point (here, here, and here). And the full paper by Nancy Bockstael et al, which can be found here (in prepublication form). The main argument being that this is in excess of ability to pay, since total GNP that year was estimated at $18 trillion. As they point out:
While no doubt well intentioned, this estimate is, on one level, absurd; it suggests that the peoples of the world would be willing to sacrifice more than global gross national product (GNP) for these services. If interpreted literally, it suggests that a family earning $30,000 annually would pay $40,000 each year for ecosystem protection.
I could add more arguments to this but the point is that it still gets cited by those who don’t know any better, or who think it is useful to waive big numbers around just to bring attention to how important ecosystem services are. And the lead author, who generally claims it is just a starting point, continues to get funding to build on this baseless approach to valuation. What those
who cite it fail to understand is that values reflect trade-offs people are willing to make among choices that they actually have. Or as Al Gore illustrated in An Inconvenient Truth, without the earth, you can’t choose the gold ingots.
And yes, it is very unfortunate that, as Dave Iverson points out, those in the field of ecological economics are often dismissed as guilty by association when there are many different perspectives and approaches within that field. Full disclosure: I started graduate school in that field, and the lead author of that infamous paper was my first advisor but I switched programs after a number of irreconcileable differences that had nothing to do with that paper, that I also had nothing to do with. I give Costanza credit for creating that big tent, which allowed for some collaboration across fields that might not have otherwise occurred. But I’m much happier calling myself a geographer and note that, Gilbert White began to question deterministic approaches to economics and cost benefit analysis in 1945, in his work on human adjustment to floods, which was regarded as a major break from the deterministic school of thought often found in economics. It also addresses a major lacuna in science as well as in economics, i.e., context.
Addendum: and sometimes it takes a flood, or some other form of “learning opportunity” for people to consider or reconsider what their values are – i.e., what trade-offs they are willing to make, particularly for those things not normally traded in markets, like, say, maintaining a cherished way of life, or say, having to choose between soylent blue and Soylent Green. In the movie Soylent Green, even that was no longer a choice… For now, we have more choices than that but, 2022 isn’t that far away.
(edited 9-25-06)