Global Warming Versus The Black Swan

OK, so I'm not immune to reading a trendy book now and again. Right now, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" is the hot book of the moment in my business. I have mixed feelings about the book, but it undeniably has its virtues. Particularly in its discussion of the failure of expertise. Taleb hues to the belief that the world is simply too complex for "expertise" to really exist, and he discusses at length the demonstrable failure of so called experts' predictive efforts. This isn't a new concept, the dismal receord of prediction and forecasting is well known, so much so as to be part of the 'wisdom of the common man'. Still, Taleb arrays the evidence and the argument against expertise impressively, and as he demolishes economists, securities analysts, CIA intelligence analysts and all manner of forecasters, I can't help but thinking about global warming. The global climate is mind-blowingly complex, just the sort of system for which expertise is essentially unattainable. The implications of this are that it is a near certainty that current consensus predictions of global warming and the damage it will cause will be proved wrong. The current forecasts of what temperatures and climate conditions will be 50 years hence may be too pessimistic or even too optimistic, but they are all but certain to be wrong. We may indeed be in life threatening climatological danger, but it won't be because of excessive man-made greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, or we may be in no danger whatsoever. We are simply unable to know. (Of course, scientific absolutists will vociferously disagree but that doesn't mean their predictions will be any good.) If that sounds too fatalistic, it is. That is proably why humankind has had a fatalistic outlook for much of its existence, and much of the world still does. What are the policy implications? We should probably encourage smart things that reduce pollution at the margin, but mostly we should not inhibit spontaneous technological discovery (which, for example, could yield a 'Black Swan' advancement in fuel technology) by picking winners today (i.e. ethanol) and we should maintain a level of flexibility just in case the consensus is dead wrong. Certainly what we should not do, is elevate global warming prevention to the central organizing principle of society as Al Gore suggests.