Seeing that as not being part of the proper role of politics is exactly what I am complaining about. Amazingly, people bring pre-existing convictions and self-understandings to their attempts, even their good-willed attempts, to decide what to do about climate change. Not everyone agrees about that, so you’re going to get disagreement. That disagreement has to be negotiated. And as for the invocation of dispassion, a) thinking that a technocratic, dispassionate perspective in the right one to assess these things from is a pre-existing doctrine like any other and b) it is a pre-existing doctrine whose content is up for grabs, just like any other.

While it might be technically possible to create a dispassionate assessment of things like the costs of mitigation and adaptation, it is hard to do so within a political realm.

Agreeing with (a) non-political facts and (b) non-political hypotheses about the physical world bolstered by one or another degree of evidence is vital for beginning the political conversation about climate change. Otherwise, we have no way to arbitrate between the uninformed minority who assert that it is likely to be beneficial overall and the majority who think that extremely improbable.

There is inevitably lots of disagreement in something like climate policy. Should an especially dirty industry have to face very heavy carbon prices, in keeping with the polluter pays principle, or do they deserve more lenient treatment because their business model is most threatened by carbon pricing?

That being said, I do think people are too willing to intepret the physical realities of climate chage on the basis of ongoing disagreements between ‘experts’ of various calibers. Even in areas where there is absolutely no scientific disagreement (say, the fact that greenhouse gasses absorb outgoing infrared and heat the planet), too many politicians think the science is ‘unsettled.’

The second sentence is not talking about the same phenomenon as the first, and the first is false anyway. The first sentence talks about getting people to agree on what the facts are; the second talks about getting them to agree on what the relevant facts are. We can agree that being waterboarded, for example, is an unpleasant experience, but disagree about whether that is relevant for whether or not it’s torture. And that’s what lawyers try and do usually anyway: they argue about relevance against a pretty fixed background of facts. Scientists and policy wonks may not like the fact of disagreement, and not just being able to implement the technocratic solution they favour, but it is a fact, and politics has to happen. Being snide about it doesn’t help.