This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 26th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A change in how the International Panel on Climate Change

evaluates its own data, indicates that the gloom and doom scenarios associated with

climate change may appear worse than before. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry

Taylor says that while science is very good at giving us raw data to evaluate, it should leave the cost-benefit

analysis to other disciplines. Well, the change would have the IPCC consider the possibility of speculative risks that have great impact.

For instance, what might happen if the jet stream were to shift or it even shut down altogether.

Now of course we don't even know how the jet stream works much less whether climate change would

have any impact on it whatsoever but it's plausible that a change in climate could have some impact on the jet stream.

Now up to this point the IPCC has not spent a great deal of time incorporating

those considerations in its scientific reports.

Nor of economists who looked at climate change

go on to any great extent to try to figure out

how to account for these low probability high impact events

because they are low probability probability but they are possible.

But if you start including those sorts of things of your calculations about what public policy

be out to be towards climate change, you're going to wait the discussion heavily in the direction of doing something about temperature increases.

Now that's reasonable enough on its face, but that raises the question, how do you feel about the Bush foreign policy?

Because George Bush's foreign policy is all about heading off low probability but high risk

or high impact events. So for instance there was a worry that

Saddam Hussein was close to getting a nuclear weapon or some sort of weapon

...