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Durban is history, but the debate on global warming can still be calmed down. Activists need to admit that both their scientific analyses and their policy recommendations have been under the spell of this sorcerer’s apprentice-model. Rather than telling a simple tale of good (themselves) and evil (unresponsive industry and anyone who disagrees with them), they should accept that possible man-made climate change is a complex topic which deserves dispassionate study. True, delay might prove dangerous, but so too might hasty action. Besides, in practice, the activists’ current approach has been tried and found wanting.

A call for more careful study is not a counsel of despair. Rather, it is a call for aid from one of the most effective power-groups in the contemporary economy: scientists and engineers working together with politically sensitive regulators. Consider the dark arts of aviation, mobile phone technology and nuclear power (now there’s something with a sorcerer’s apprentice-feel). In all these domains, knowledge has been advancing steadily, accidents are rare and well grounded criticism has helped to make the technologies safer and more acceptable.

Indeed, in the modern economy this technical-regulatory complex — undramatic committees meeting in unbeautiful offices — plays the heroic role of the master sorcerer. It does not permit wild experiments and it eventually changes old practices when new evidence comes along. If climate change is to be taken seriously, the IPCC and U.N. conferences need to have less madness and more method.

Reuters Breakingviews

© Thomson Reuters 2011