According to the BBC, climate change has become more alarming during the 21st century.

What they once called global warming they now call global heating; what they once called climate change they now call the climate crisis.

If it is a crisis, then official estimates of the damage that climate change has done and will do if the models prove accurate should be easy to obtain.

They are not.

The technical term for this damage is “the social cost of carbon,” meaning the net value in dollars of harm done today and in the future by each tonne of extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.

This includes damage to people’s living standards, to infrastructure, to peace of mind, to the natural environment, to everything.

Yet here is a strange thing. The British Government, though obsessed with carbon, no longer estimates or considers the social cost of carbon — at all.

Its official position is that “carbon valuation for policy appraisal no longer uses the social cost of carbon.” It gave up estimating this measure of the net harm from future climate change in 2008.

Why? That’s easy: because scientists and economists just could not get the number up high enough to surpass the cost of reducing emissions.

[A Response to Craig Considine]

There is a particular move in Western academic writing that I have come to recognize on sight.

It arrives whenever a pattern of violence associated with one civilization becomes inconvenient for a certain kind of argument.

The move goes like this: locate a comparable act of violence from a different civilization, describe it with maximum rhetorical force, and present the comparison as analysis. You are not explaining anything. You are manufacturing a tie. And a tie, in this context, is not a draw. It is an acquittal.

When two defendants are declared equally guilty, the one you came to prosecute walks out the side door while everyone is still looking at the other one.

Dr. Craig Considine makes this move in a 2015 piece titled “Why Celebrating Columbus Day is Like Celebrating ISIS Day.”

The core argument is that Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Catholic Monarchy carried out a holy war against indigenous peoples that is morally equivalent to what ISIS was doing in the Levant in 2015, and that critics who point to Islamic violence as a distinctive problem have either forgotten or chosen to ignore the West’s own record of atrocity.

Considine is a sociologist at Rice University with twenty years of published work on Christian-Muslim relations, so this is not a casual social media take. It is a considered academic argument by a credentialed scholar, and it deserves a considered response.

Let me say first that the history Considine describes is not fabricated.

In the late 1990s, before the term 'AI' meant anything to anyone, I built a network of data centers.

We lit up floors in New York and Los Angeles, in St. Louis and Chicago, in Dallas and Miami.

They hummed with the servers that carried the first great wave of the commercial internet. And not one of them consumed a single drop of water to keep those servers cool. Not a gallon.

We rejected heat the way a car rejects heat, with air and with glycol circulating in a sealed loop, the warmth carried out to the rooftop and handed off to the sky.

The water bill for cooling was zero, because there was no water in the cooling.

I tell you this not for nostalgia but because it settles an argument that has lately been dressed up as a crisis.

You have read the headlines. The data centers are coming, the story goes, and they will drink your rivers dry. The artificial intelligence boom will guzzle the reservoirs while families are told to let their lawns go brown.

It is a vivid picture.

It is also, in its central premise, false. And I can say so with confidence because I solved this supposed crisis a quarter century ago, on a budget, with technology that was not even new then.

With the 30th anniversary approaching of the destruction of TWA Flight 800, a look at the application of justice in the Sandy Berger caper might prove useful.

Two-tiered justice is nothing new.

My late partner James Sanders and his wife Elizabeth were arrested and convicted in a federal court of allegedly “stealing airplane parts.”  

By contrast, the late former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger admittedly stole and destroyed classified documents from the National Archives and never went to trial.

An investigative reporter, Sanders tested a pinch of foam rubber sent by an insider to expose the truth about TWA 800. Berger stole the documents to prevent the truth from being exposed. His escape from justice was breathtaking.

Berger was Bill Clinton’s fixer. Like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf, his job was to “solve problems.”