Talk:Copenhagen Consensus

[Untitled]
Someone might add content to this page from 

Criticism on climate change
Re climate change measures being rated 'poor', I've deleted the words 'however this is only a relative measure; it still had a net positive benefit over costs' - if I recall rightly from reading the conference papers I don't think this is correct - at most discount rates there was no net benefit. Ben Finn 16:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)


 * The Clime paper gets a B/C ratio of 2:1 for optimal carbon; 1.7:1 for Kyoto & 3+:1 for value-at-risk.: see http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Default.aspx?ID=165, first link William M. Connolley 17:20, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

we shall block the ip adress that modifies this article all the time


 * POV Statements like "This is seen by the green that, they are anti environment, though the economics as a dicipline, never take such stance" belong, if anywhere, in a criticisms section for an article such as Green Economics. It's not appropriate to include your own arguments as a response to criticisms reported in the article. If you can find published responses, by all means include them.JQ 06:16, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Criticism on discount rates
I've deleted a criticism on discount rates, moved from the Lomborg article because it's invalid (the discount rate is not equal to the rate of growth of income) and also appears to be Original Research. There is probably room, though, for more discussion of the dispute between Cline (propponent for the GW measures) and the panel members over discount rates, which was a major factor in the negative evaluation of GW measures and contributed to suspicions of a setup by Lomborg. JQ 22:42, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

"In addition, the members of the panel, selected by Lomborg, were seen as a likeminded group of free-market economists, not likely to be supportive of government intervention to protect the environment. To deflect this likely criticism, the organizers convened a parallel panel of young people to hear the arguments presented in the challenge papers and by the discussants, and to give their own list of recommendations (which was largely aligned with the experts' ranking)."

Any information on the sample of these young people? I hope they weren't all similar as well. In other cases this has been just US college/university students. That is a limited group. There are still many poor youth who do not attend college/university, considering the US's unusually high poverty and dropout rates for many groups within the population as a whole.

I looked for it in the linked readings and could not find mention. Does anyone know?


 * I read in Lomborg's book Global Crises, Global Solutions about the conference, that the students were (deliberately) drawn from many countries, particularly developing countries. I don't recall if they were economics students or from multiple disciplines. Ben Finn 17:00, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Who said what
I deleted all unsourced criticism. Use of weasle words, "some criticised" or peakok word "widely criticised" are against the guideline. Plus "Sachs 2004" is not an acceptable level of reference. Need full name and proper title name of the reference source. Vapour


 * This is bad practice. Unsourced claims should be noted with a cite tag, not deleted. To delete a sourced criticism because the reference is inadequate is very poor, particularly when the cited reference is given in full at the bottom of the article. In any case, I've now added several cites, so the article has been improved. JQ 23:31, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

"The Copenhagen Consensus project has been widely criticised. " Typical use of peacock terms. Likely effect is to discredit the project in the eyes of the readers. Vapour

I don't have objection about referencing Jeffery Sach. Problem is that his reference is used to include what appear to be personal and unsourced criticism of the project. Please limit the reference to Jeffery Sach's opinion. "So some economist criticised, including Sach" is not kosher. Please restore it with "Jeffery Sach criticised the project for such and such reason". That assume that you read his writing. Lastly, you cannot complain if someone delete unsourced claim. Please read verification policy. Vapour

"Lomborg had argued in his controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues." Original article do not make direct allegation that that the project is prejudged because of Lomborg. Rather it implied. However, it contain claim by the guy that CBA is a junk science. So I restore it in this context. Vapour

I'm very sceptical of J Sachs reference. Though the uncertaintity of economic modelling is voiced by all economist, it is highly unlikely that any economist would disown CBA. Similar analogy can be seen by the climatologist and the climate modelling. Both economists and climatologists accept that model contain uncertaintity. But neither would claim that attempt at estimation is pointless. After all, the economics is about modeling and analysis. I highly suspect that the J Sachs's opinion is taken out of context. Please provide actual quote from Sachs. I leave Sachs for a while. Vapour


 * I've added direct quotes from Sachs. The article is readily available in libraries, so statements like "I highly suspect that the J Sachs's opinion is taken out of context" are pointless as well as unhelpful. Also, your edits are ungrammatical and badly spelt. Please take the trouble to put your text through a spelling/grammar checker before making edits to text that is currently in good shape. It's unfair to expect other editors to fix your errors. JQ 13:08, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
 * The article before i edited it made it looks like Sachs, an economist himself, is disowning CBA. I simply find it hard to believe that a professiona economist would do something like that. Now the edit make it clear that Sachs criticisms are centered around the speclaities of the panellist as well as the context of the question which the panellists are asked (50 billion fund issue). This I can understand.  It is a green activist (and non economist), Tim Burke, who is claiming that CBA is a junk economics. Well, it is quite funny that members of the right calling climate modelling a "junk science" while one member from the left is calling economic modelling a "junk economics".  I delted the claim attributed to Q that the panell consisted of free marketieer are unlikely to support government intervention to the environmental issue. I run "find" function but could not find quote from the reference. Q does claim that these panellist are unlikely to support Kyoto. This is not same as blaket rejection to government intervention. I would say almost all economist who specialise in the public choise theory, in which the cost benefit analysis is a branch of, would support the energy tax because it is such an efficient government intervention. The entire premiss of the cost benefit analysis is that different government intervention have different overall benefit/cost. To claim that economist who advocate free trade are against the government intervention is being ignorance of the subject.  Vapour

Trade Liberalisation
I think most people agree that the project view on the climate policies is the main focus of the controversy. While the benefit of the trade liberalisation is contested, this is done elsewhere. I edited the section to reflect this relevance. Vapour

O.K. I deleted the mention of trade liberalisation. Though I agree that the issue of trade liberalisation is highly contested, this happened outsid of this project. The controversy of the project was solely about it's ranking of climate change. So far, no specific criticism of the project in regard to the trade liberalisation is cited. Moreover, given the size of the Climate controversy, the trade liberalisation is somewhat out of place. I propose that the section of the title should be changed to "Climate Change". If someone want to set up the separate section titled "Trade liberalisation", fine. Just that, at this point, there isn't a (sourced) content in this topic. Vapour

"climate change was set up to fail"
This paragraph has bit of doggy spining. Firstly, Mendelsohn say "climate change was set up to fail". Then Lomborg follow this by accepting that "more modest proposals (such as a small carbon tax or investments in research) would have ranked higher on the list." Firstly, investment in research is not part of the project. So what the research investment doing. Secondly,if Lomborg responded to the panellist critcism, the reference is clealy about high requirement (either stopping or reversing the climate change). In such case, the discount rate has very little to do with this. The requirement aspect would produce the policy's cost/benefit for each year while discount rate deal with how each year's result should be calculated (discounted) for the present value. I will separate the part about discount rate unless someone give better reference to explain this confusion. Vapour

I've read mendelsohn's paper. His critics of the project is based on premise that project's model adopt ridiculously low (in fact, one actually assume zero discount rate). And this actually inflate the expected damage caused from global warming. Moreover, he argue that the project's literature survey is based on slightly dated studies and newer studies, according to Mendelsohn, indicate significantly lower damge from the global warming. His argument is that the damage from the global warming is lower, hence the policy to conbat it can be less sever. This in turn make the cost of implimenting carbon tax to be significantly less, which in turn raise the ranking of the policy. The current state of this article is highly misleading. Vapour


 * I've reverted the last lot of changes, which contained the claim that little attention had been paid to cost-benefit analysis of climate change before Lomborg. This claim is unsourced, incorrect and out of place in a section on criticism. eqally importantly, your edits remain ungrammatical and badly spelt, greatly detracting from the quality standards of Wikipedia.
 * The para above, beginning "This paragraph has bit of doggy spining." is an extreme example of the problem I'm complaining about. How is anyone supposed to respond to this, or to the rest of the para? I repeat, please check everything you submit to this article or talk page for grammar and spelling.I'm going to revert anything that contains such errors from now on. I'll go back later and clean up the errors that are still there from your recent edits.JQ 05:41, 11 June 2006 (UTC)


 * The wikipedia policy/guideline spelt out that English written by non native speaker should be corrected rather than deleted unless it is incomprehensible. There is no difference, as far as wikipedia is concerned, between people with imperfect grammar and people with imperfect (i.e. non neutral) POV. Please do not use my Engrish as an excuse for delete given that this is somewhat of POV edit dispute as well. Oh, another one of my background is that I haven't got a wordprocessor with spelling check on my computer. Why don't you give me money so I can buy one. (^^)


 * Secondly, I have checked some related links. Large portion of criticism appear to originate from you. Someone of public figure getting involved in related articles is a wikipedia policy minefileld. Just by inserting/deleting your own quote, it may be consider as the violation of soapbox ban as well as NPOV. You deleted your own quote which somewhat put the project in a good light. Whatever the intent of such delete, I can't see how this is justified. I'm not saying you can't get involved in editing for being who you are. However, could you be bit more careful? If you want to know, I do "try" to write in proper English.


 * Thirdly, I have never claimed that "little attention had been paid to cost-benefit analysis of climate change before Lomborg." It certainly has in the academia. I said it has not received much public attention. Not the same thing. Switch "BL's book" with, say, "Carson's Silent Spring". If verification is invoked for every sentence or phrase, it's just damb. For example, I could also invoke verification for the sentence "(combating AIDS and malnutrition) were widely agreed to be of critical importance". I'm not saying you can't invoke verification. But are you really not sure that the book was the first to popularise the idea of CBA of global warming and related policies? Anyway, why not change this section's title to "Climate Change".


 * Lastly, "dodgey spining" is merely an another way of saying it is not NPOV. I can't see how this is problematic. I have read the M's criticism. He is arguing that the latest economic litaratures (including his) indicate significantly less damage from the global warming. Moreover, he is arguing that low discount rate for the sake of long forsight is a circular logic, not to mention the fact that this adjustment increase the present discounted cost of global warming. His view is far more unfavouralbe to the green POV than the project is. Given the content of the controversy, the current state of this article is very misleading about M's criticism and Lombarg's response to it. Neutralising one side of debate would be considered as "dodgey spining".


 * I will revert my edit. Feel flee to collect my Engrish (or POV). V(^^) Vapour

Criticism reinstated
I've reinstated the criticism section, and distinguished it from the discussion of climate change, since the criticism covered a range of issues. As you say, neutralising one side of the debate is not a good thing, so I suggest that you continue to work on a section explaining how climate change was treated in the CC process, and don't attempt to include rebuttals within the criticism section. JQ 20:46, 11 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hmm, I don't think there is nothing non-NPOV about including rebuttals within the criticism section as long as approriate attributions are made. In fact, it is bit counter productive if there are two section, one dealing with the criticisms while other dealing with rebuttals to such criticism. These two should be in the same section. I would say the title "Criticism" should be changed to "Controversy".


 * Because the content of controversy is dominated by the issue of the climate change, the current arrangement is not ideal. I would shift M's criticism to the controversy section. The Climate Change section is now strictly about the methodology of C. Because his original paper is avialable, we should be able to put enough content in the Climate Change section.  I think clear understanding of C's paper would help put the criticism in a better content, Vapour

The members of the panel anti government intervention
"Quiggin argued that the members of the panel, selected by Lomborg, were seen as a likeminded group of free-market economists, not likely to support government intervention to protect the environment. ."

I have read the reference. I could not find such claim. (correct me if I'm wrong here). Only thing which come close to such claim in the blog is.
 * "Comparing the two lists, the omissions are, broadly speaking, towards the left of the economics profession and those who have commented on climate change have supported policy initiatives such as Kyoto. Conversely, the members of the Copenhagen panel were generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto."

Unless, someone can show a quote which say otherwise, "the government interpention to protect the environment" should be changed to "Kyoto protocoal". Vapour


 * Vapour, it's clear that you are not a native English speaker and from your comments I doubt that you are an economist. So I think you may be missing implications that are evident to native speakers familiar with economic discussion. For example, in discussion of economists, those "towards the right" are generally supposed to be "free-market economists, not likely to support government intervention to protect the environment".
 * Once again, I urge you not to insert rebuttals into the criticism section. The result is to make the whole thing unreadable. I've added a subsection for Lomborg's response JQ 04:00, 12 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Can I infer from your "toward right" statement that you think the panelists are tilted toward anti abortion, anti poor, anti immigration, pro God, anti-gay, anti gambling, anti drug, anti U.N., pro gun and anti foreign aid as well as anti environment? Hey, they must hate hippie too and must be closet racists. Where can I draw a line in your stereotype of right wing? The meaning of the word and the intent behind the word is not exactly the same thing. I or anyone else has no idea what you consider as typtical right especially right wing economist. It's just not NPOV in wikipedia to second guess the true intention of someone' else's statement, then present it as such. Of course, you are in an unique position to second guess what JQ implied. But that means you are using this page as your own soapbox. That would be an another policy violation.


 * As of your snip at my background in economic, are you baiting me to engage in my-CV-is-better-than-your-CV-argument? That what felit like being implied but hey, I'm not you so I don't know. Previous edit had very obvious attribution problems. So when you took the opposing side in this edit dispute, I, too, thought you don't know much about economics. Silly me.


 * Lastly, what you are doing amount to a form of POV content forking, not to mention the fact that you deleted significant portion of BL's response outright. The readers of this page should be allowed to read the corresponding arguments according to its relevance. Moreover, M's criticism appear to be forked out from the ciriticism section for not being coming from the green perspective. It appear that your ideal criticism section consist only of pro green criticism of the project. That is not NPOV. Vapour

On "right wing", in economics this does not carry any implication of the kind you mention - you are making it even clearer here that you are not an economist. Lots of economists who would be classed by themselves and their colleagues as being "on the right" are libertarians. Obviously, I haven't seen your CV, but you're welcome to look at [mine|http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/CV.html]. If you feel you're better qualified than I am to comment on the topic, feel free to waive anonymity privately and point this out. Since my work on this topic is published, there is no policy problem in citing it: in fact, the guideline on Original_research specifically encourages this. If I cut any of Lomborg's response, it was unintentional. Feel free to add it back in. This is the kind of problem that arises when you attempt to include rebuttals in a criticism section. Again, I suggest that you leave the criticism section alone, and concentrate on the sections where you have a JQ 08:44, 12 June 2006 (UTC)


 * My list of right wing stereotypes are suppose to be irrelevant and out of context. It is to demonstrate that the meaning of the term "right" depends on different POV. You appear to hold a belief that economist who tilt toward right are against government intervention to protect the environment. You might hold such understanding to be self evident and some economist may share your understanding. But I do hope that the majority of economists do not share this kind of partisan bias. And I would say most of economist who you consider to belong to the right would not share your stereotype. Economist who may be informally described as tilting toward right tend to favour government invervention/regulation which they consider to be in accordance with the principle of utilitarianism. That is, they tend to have much stronger adherence to neo classical framework. In policy term, this means that they tend to favour such policies like internal markets within public services (eg. school voucher), or supervision of market, or global carbon tax instead of global carbon quota (which Kyoto is an example).  I highly doubt there is any academic economist who is against the government regulation/intervention per se. Modern (neo classical) economics is a study of choise both private and collective. It is more appropriate to understand the academic debate of economics policy in term of type of, or quality of government intervention. Your failiure to show the grasp of the nuiance of the debate is one reason, I mitakenly thought you may not have a background in economics. Of course, my characterisation of "economist who tilt toward right" is also a POV. Just that I can appreciate that other people hold different POVs. To second guess the true intention of someone else's writing would amount to covert violation of no original research policy. In this instance, you are expressing your personal stereotype of right wing economist (which is not universally shared) using the writing which you published in your own blog. So you are also in violation of no soapbox policy. Please understand that what you are doing is very much frawned upon in wikipedia. It is just not o.k. for someone to clarify his or her own statement or opinion in wikipedia article. Vapour

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this statement "the members of the Copenhagen panel were generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto." appear to be the source of your edit that "Quiggin argued that the members of the panel, selected by Lomborg, were seen as a likeminded group of free-market economists, not likely to support government intervention to protect the environment, and in particular initiatives on climate change such as the Kyoto Protocol." In the first sentence, it is you who is claiming that the panel is tilted toward right and that their stated view is in opposition to Kyoto. In the second sentence you are now claiming that the members of the panel are seen to be toward right. Moreover, instead of being in opposition to Kyoto, they are now "perceived" to be in opposition to environmental policy in general. You are in unique position to state what yourself meant. So help me out here because I find it hard to see the process in which this reinterpretation has occured. You appear to express a belief in this talk page that these members are toward right and this would automatically mean that they are anti government regulation/intervention and in particular anti green. But I thought these panelists are participating in the project in which almost all the policy options are about supporting collective regulation/intervention with price tag of 50 billions dollars. And giving back 50 billions dollars to hard working tax payer is not an opition here. So It looks like they are setting themselves up to support government intervention almost by default. Moreover, please explain to me why being right wing economist would compell someone to rank environmental policy lower than public education, public health, conflict resolution, financial market regulation, anti corruption drive, fight against hunger and unclean water. I thought right-wing economists are supposed to be equally against these things. I found your logic very hard to grasp. Moreover, in this edit, you are now claiming that other unspecified people share your POV. Who are these people? The Green? Other economists? Public? Me? It appear to me that only way your reinterpretation of your own statement works is to presume that your peculiar POV is universally shared by everyone else. This assumption seems to be in direct opposition to the philosophy of this site. And please explain to me why the reinterpretation of the quote is prefered over the quote itself especially when the quote itself is shorter? Vapour


 * I think all this is moot, in view of the changes that have been made. If you want, I can point to papers where Mendelsohn, Schelling and others have written in opposition to Kyoto, and we can have a lengthy summary of their political views, and those of other CC members. But, as you say, I'm pretty well placed to summarise my own published work, and I think what is in the article as it now stands is a good summary. JQ 07:22, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Your edit interpreting your own statement, which equate someone's opposition to Kyoto to the blaket opposition to the government intervention to protect environment is in violation of number of core wikipedia policies (verification, NPOV, no original research and no soapbox). I personally find it distastefull for an academic economist to make this kind of argument. But if you hold this kind of POV and express it in your own blog, that is your business. However, it is not fine to use wikipedia to clarify your statement made in your personal blog. What you believe such statement supposed to means is still your POV. Others may not find such clarification to be justified in term of logic or their understanding of economics. Please do not add edit which is based on unsourced, unverified personal POV even if it it is about the statement you, yourself, have made. Make a clarification in your new blog entry. Then someone who is not JQ may be justified in referencing this new blog entry in this article. Wikipedia is not your personal soapbox. Vapour

As of the position of the panel members' opinion in regard to economic efficiency of collective action including Kyoto, if you can cite their papers, please do so. That would be a welcoming addition to this page. What is not justified is for you to spin the presentation to support your personal POV about them. It may be the case that many of them are indeed anti environnment, right wing economst as you descirbe it. But I highly doubt that such partisan characterisation is sustainable. Vapour

Content Forking
Please stop forking out the contents according to your partisanship. Mendelsohn's criticism was originally in criticism section. Why is that when more detailed clarification of his position are made, which turn out to be something which green lobby probably won't like, then M's criticism are to be qurantined elsewhere? If the title of the section is "Criticism", then Mendelsohn, Mann and Schelling's criticism of the low ranking of climate policy belong to the 'criticism' section. Afterall, the ranking of the climate change is the focus of the controversy. Why is it difficult for you to accept that critics from different perspective have their say without being forked out to other section by none other than John Quiggin. Why not change the title of the criticism section to "Criticism from the left wing economist and the green lobbies" instead. Vapour

And can you stop forking out BL's rebuttal as well. You may not like the idea of BL's opinion sharing section space with you and your commrades' opinions. But may I point out that Clien has his own counter rebuttal to Mendelsohn and Mann's criticism. So does Clien counter rebuttal deserve it's own subsection? In that case, Sachs criticis should also be forked out to a separate subsection titled "Sachs criticism". And what if others from conservative or right wing or libetarian sources wrote their counter rebuttal of the critics? Partisan content forking is no different from what dog do to mark its territory. We know the topic is controvercial. Good way to present the controversy is to identify different issues involved. If there is a perceived bias of the composition of the members of the panel, then we should present summary of for and against opinions for that issue. If there is a percieved bias in regard to the project framework (such as 50 billions issue, discount rate, or wholesale objection to the cost benefit anaysis), the we should present for and aganst opinions of such issues. That is why "Controversy" is more appropriate title than "Criticism" for this section. Vapour


 * We need to distinguish between debates within the process and criticism of the process as a whole. It's perfectly appropriate to have a section stating the views of critics. Attempts to mix in rebuttals, as you've done, are inevitably disastrous. Also, you've ignored my repeated requests to pay attention to quality. You haven't even bothered to spell Cline's name correctly. I'm not going to try and fix your contributions, but I don't want you messing up sections I've worked on, which is why I'm "forking" JQ 01:08, 14 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Your effort=ownership argument has some sentimental logic (as well as Lockean credential) but wikipedia is very communist about this thing. If you don't want anyone "messing" with your writing, then wikipedia is not for you. Openness to diverse background {POV as well as mother tongue) is main strenght of Wikipedia. I didn't deliberately misspelt Clien just so I can force you to correct it. I've told you I make effort to correct my Engrish. And to be honest, I'm bit tired of your irritation about my Engrish. What about my repeated request to "quality" in term of NPOV? Did I POV fork your edit simply because of your left wing economics (or social democrat, or liberal or pro green or whatever you like to refer yourself)? I objected to your RightWingEconomist=AntiEnvironmentalIntervention edit primaly on the basis of wikipedia policy violations. I'm currently suspending editing only because revert war is unnecessaly hussle.


 * As of pro/anti sectioning, in fact, it is your arrangement which is "inevibably" disastarous. You are failing to take account of the fact that the controversy is dynamic. For example, where do you put Cline's counter rebuttals to Mendelsohn with your arrangement?  And what happen if Mendelsohn counter that?  Are we going to make separate criticism section and counter-criticism sub section and counter-counter-critcism sub-sub section? It is far more appropriate to tag each corresponding response so people can identify the corresponding debate. Mixing criticism and rebuttals is inevitably disastrous only if it lack clear POV attribution. And when we have more inputs from various POV, then it may become more appropriate to section different POVs according to the issues such as discount rate, 50 billions budget, estimated damage from global warming and so on. Moreover, have you ever consider that pro/anti sectioning prejudice the whole presentation to us-against-them perspective, and hence it is inherently NPOV? Have you consider that some people might have more nuanced view? As I said, partisan sectioning is same as what dog do to mark its territory. Vapour

O.K. I guess it is important to see how the project arrived at its conclusion. So the exchange between panellists and experts should be dealt separately from the controversies the project has generated. I will integrate Mendelsohn and Mann's criticism in the project section. On the other hand, I do believe that exchange among the participants of the controversy should be in the same section with appropriate POV attribution. I have already explained why pro/anti split arrangement is untenable. I will restore BL's rebuttal and tag it to Sachs criticism. Vapour


 * I don't think this is a good idea, but if you want to go ahead and do it, we will need more subsection headings. The worst thing in these criticism/controversy sections is to have criticisms and responses run together in the same para, with no clear division between statements and editorial endorsements JQ 02:33, 15 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I cannot see the validity of your argument. What is so wrong with a pra which say "X asserted 'brabrabra'", "Y responded by saying 'brabrabra'", "X countered Y with "BBB"", "Z countred X's rebuttal with "BBB"" while "Q produced view supporting part of both X and Y's arguments saying "BBB""? When a controversy involve multiple participants, partisan sectioning is untennable. It is far more reader-friendly to categorise multiple POV under clearly identified issues and present it in a bundle (section, subsection, paragraph). The worst thing is to have no POV attribution. Vapour


 * I find the kind of article that has a sequence of "he said, she said" statements to be unreadable. I don't think I'm alone in this. JQ 07:07, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I could see how that could be the case. For example Sachs make multiple criticism of CP, in which BL respond to each criticism. I'm quite sure the Economist have some defence to Sachs criticism. If this "he said, she said" goes on, it will become unreadable. As I have stated, the best way to section the controversy is according to the issues involved rather than pro/anti sectioning or "he said, she said" sectioning.  Vapour

JQ, you have stop debating the issue of POV sectioning while somewhat silently reverting the edit. Moreover, you are making multiple violations of wikipedia policies when you content forking BL's opinion(s) which you oppose publically, not to mention the fact that your POVs are part of the section. I can't see how you can justify this kind of POV forking. Please stop this idiocy.
 * PS. This is where you are heading. Vapour


 * Your description of WP:Content forking is inaccurate. This refers to the creation of new articles, not to the presentation of alternative points of view within the same article. But my main reason for separating your contributions is the fact that, as you write them, they detract from the readability of the sections in which they are included. I just spent a fair bit of time fixing errors in the section on Climate Change. If you put a bit more effort into writing your contributions grammatically and with correct spelling and less into this kind of argument, things would go a lot better. JQ 22:37, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * When someone invoke a policy or a guideline, it is the argument/principle behind such policy/guideline which is invoked, not the letters of policy/guideline. Afterall, Wikipedia is not a Bureaucracy. My reference to Content fork has no legal authority to begin with. And the fact that the guideline refers only to creation of new article does not mean you are now free to partition criticism section into for and against. I have repeatedly stressed that partitioning the article according to "For and Against" is inferior to partitioning the article according to the issues (neutrality of panel, fairness of 50 billion framework, validity of applying CBA in environmental policy and so on). The debates are often dynamic (i.e. one counter argument lead to another counter argument(s)), and diverse (one POV can be countered by different perspectives). Moreover, not all POV takes "With-us or Against-us" stance. Moreover, subsectioning tend to have an effect of sidelining opposing argument. It is in this context that I have refered to "Content Forking". Additionally, this essay may be more appopriate to our debate. Ideally, the content of criticism section should be shifted to each relevant section, so each issues are summarised concisely according to its relevance. Creating "criticism of criticism" subsection is to move further away from what is ideal. Btw, it is true that my grammar and spelling is less than desirable (though my experience generally indicate that my Engrish is just about readable). But given that you are a partisan in this debate, your POV grammar is bound to be less than desirable too. :-) Vapour

Climate policy net benefit/cost positive or negative?
O.K. I'm bit confused here. Clien clearly state that all three climate policies has net benefit in his paper. But then the summary state that all three climate policy to have "costs that were likely to exceed the benefits".  What is going on? Vapour


 * The panel disagreed with Cline (note spelling). As noted by Mendelsohn and Schelling later, Lomborg selected Cline as someone whose views on discounting were known to be extreme, relative to the profession as a whole, and very likely to be rejected. By the way, I fixed up a heap of grammatical errors in this section.JQ 22:31, 11 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Yeah, I noticed my mistake after reading the process of the CC. Btw, Cline's view/assumption on discount rate is exactly what green movement would advocate. To be honest, I thought Cline might have took such minority stance on discount rate just to placate green argument. I'm rather suprised that you described such perspective to be "extrem". Vapour


 * You're right that Cline's position is the same as that of the green movement. It's not extreme relative to society at large - lots of people like low or zero discount rates in lots of contexts. But it is extreme relative to the economics profession, where nearly all economists favour positive discount rates, and certainly relative to the views of the people on Lomborg's panel. There's some evidence that views closer to Cline's are gaining some ground, but still very much a minority within the economics profession. JQ 23:02, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, after all, the study of economics is about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. It makes little sense to assign different discount rates to different options in the cost benefit analysis. In a way, one is asserting from the outset that particular choise is more worthwhile/damaging than the others. Then, what is the point of doing the analysis in the first place? Given that Clien was assesing global warming policy options in comparison to other options, his decision to adopt different discount rate just for his options was plain wrong IMO.
 * Obiviously, the choise of discount rate for the whole policy options is a different matter. If the discount rate is zero for all the policy options, it is consistent at least from the modeling point of view. But this still won't resolve the question about why public investment project should have built in advantage over market/private investment project. Personally, I would advocate the (hypothetical) market rate for a loan which is guranteed by the whole International community (which would be pretty low but not zero). In practical policy term, that would probably be the interest rate which the World Bank have to pay to raise 50 billion dollar. Afterall, the framework of Copenhargen Consensus presupose the collective action of the international community. Vapour

Issues Not Considered
"The Copenhagen Consensus did not consider some issues, such as a cost-benefit analysis of the War on Terrorism. The direct financial spending on this issue dwarfs the money that the panels were allocated." - It seems to me that this is sort of a useless anti-war plug. Why not use examples from other issues not considered?


 * What other issues would you like? TWOT is the most obvious really expensive and really useless thing going on right now. Why do you think Lomborg omitted it? William M. Connolley 19:25, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Technocracy?
The idea of having economists directing disposal of other people's wealth sounds very much like technocracy to me. - MSTCrow 03:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

POV tag on "Approach and Alleged Bias" section
I just added this tag, and here's why: In the 4th and 5th paragraphs (beginning with "One should not overestimate...", there is a sudden shift in tone where the article is no longer presenting the alleged biases as if coming from other sources, but instead the article now seems to be alleging the biases itself.  There is even a sentence in the 5th paragraph in which the reader ("you") is addressed directly, a big Wikipedia no-no.

I don't want to delete these paragraphs, though, because I think it contains some good info about the perils of discounting analysis. It just needs a re-write. And I'm not particularly well-informed enough to do it myself...

I know it was a little presumptuous to add the pov tag without any consensus first, but I think the shift in tone will be very clear to most editors. --Jaysweet 20:59, 25 June 2007 (UTC)


 * This text seems to be gone now, so I removed the tag.JQ (talk) 20:55, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Criticism and 2008 Consensus
The Criticism section seems out of date as it seems to relate to the 2004 conference, rather than the 2008 one (which drew somewhat different conclusions). I've made this slightly clearer.

I have also begun a section on the Copenhagen Consensus's recent work specifically on global warming. 93.96.236.8 (talk) 15:37, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Intro
I've updated the intro, as part of which I've cut the following chunk which is somewhat misleading:
 * The project is based on the contention that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on global challenges by the United Nations, the governments of wealthy nations, foundations, charities, and non-governmental organizations, the money spent on problems such as malnutrition and climate change is not sufficient to meet many internationally-agreed targets. This argument is supported by evidence from the World Bank, which estimates that the UN's Millennium Development Goals would cost an additional annual $40–$70 billion on top of the $57 billion already spent ; this increased expenditure would have to continue each year until 2015 in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

It's misleading because the central claim of the Copenhagen Consensus is not that not enough money is spent, it's that it's not spent in the right ways. The project is all about prioritized spending, not increased (but unprioritized) spending. 93.96.236.8 (talk) 16:10, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Added history section
Hello, new Wikipedia editor here. Moved a large chunk of the top section into a "history" bullet. I find this article very strange--44% of its citations are too itself, essentially. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edjamesking (talk • contribs) 16:02, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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Copenhagen Accord and Scientific consensus on climate change
Some people may confuse this with Copenhagen Accord or Scientific consensus on climate change, since all three are about climate change but this one is less legitimate, coming from non-scientists and climate change deniers like Lomborg. Is there a template we could add to the top to link to those two? --Hob Gadling (talk) 18:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Background
I noticed one sentence:"In 2007 looked into which projects would contribute most to welfare in Copenhagen Consensus for Latin America in cooperation with the Inter-American Development Bank."in this article, that seems to have some shortcomings.

I initially read that sentence in the "Latest revision as of 00:31, 14 June 2024" version of this article.

At first I suspected that this sentence -- which was added to this article in 2013 -- had been accidentally damaged during some later edit. Now that does not appear to have happened. I did some checking, and it seems that this sentence has not changed since it was originally added (inserted) into this article, as part of this edit -- (dating from "04:07, 22 July 2013") -- which also included many other changes, including updates to some URLs (mostly in " " tags; ... and, in fact, all or "almost all" of them pointing to web pages within the << Copenhagen consensus dot com >> website.)

What is wrong with this sentence?
For one thing, there seems to be a missing noun (or "noun phrase" ... or "subject") between the first pair of words ("In 2007") at the beginning of this sentence, and the second pair of words ("looked into"), right after that. Actually, the missing "noun phrase" might well be the words "Copenhagen Consensus", which do appear -- (perhaps out of place? so it seems!) -- floating somewhere near the middle of this sentence. In order to fix that part (the middle) of this sentence, it would probably be necessary -- also -- to delete one of the two prepositions ("in" or "for") which currently appear just before and just after the noun phrase "Copenhagen Consensus", in its current [incorrect] place in the middle of this sentence.

What was intended?
Changing the sentence by and would result in the sentence"In 2007 Copenhagen Consensus looked into which projects would contribute most to welfare in Latin America in cooperation with the Inter-American Development Bank."which would be an improvement "grammatically", but this sentence -- even though improved grammatically -- would still be suspiciously unique, since neither Latin America nor the Inter-American Development Bank gets mentioned anywhere else in this article.
 * moving the 'noun phrase' "Copenhagen Consensus" from its current position, in the middle of this sentence, to just after "In 2007" and right before "looked into"
 * deleting one of the two prepositions ("in" or "for") then remaining between "contribute most to welfare" and "Latin America" -- probably keeping "in" and deleting "for" -- [right?]

Determining 'what was intended' (originally) might be difficult. This sentence -- which has survived unchanged for over a decade -- was added during an edit from an IP user with no [extant] 'Talk:' page, and the "Contributions" page for that 'IP' user -- "95.209.181.71" -- also offers limited help, since it includes only two edits, both in 2013 (and less than 10 minutes apart). It might be hard to find that person, in order to try to ask questions about what was intended 'originally'.

Thanks for listening. Mike Schwartz (talk) 03:14, 12 July 2024 (UTC)