Neither hot nor cold on climate; what’s just right?

Like a lot of conservatives who write about public policy, my views on climate change place me in the ranks of what the British writer Matt Ridley once dubbed the “lukewarmers.”

Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that this represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that global regulatory schemes will work as advertised.

More specifically, lukewarmers look at the official projections and see a strong likelihood that rising temperatures will drag on gross domestic product without leading to catastrophe. They look at the substance of the Paris accord, and see little to justify all the anguish and despair over Donald Trump’s decision to abandon it.

I recommend two recent essays by Oren Cass, of the Manhattan Institute: First, “The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing,” from Foreign Affairs, and second, “How to Worry About Climate Change,” from National Affairs.

But while inviting readers to ease their pain over Paris with the balm of lukewarmism, I also want to concede two problems with this approach. The first is that no less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias.

This means that every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus.

I’ll answer that challenge myself: My own alarm has gone up modestly since the Obama-era cap-and-trade debates, as the decade or more in which observed warming was slow or even flat — the much-contested warming “pause” — has given way to a clearer rise in global temperatures.

Maybe that will be temporary. But the closer the real trend gets to the worst-case projections, the more my lukewarmism will require reassessment.

But this is where the second objection to lukewarmism comes in, which is that such reassessment might happen on op-ed pages but not in actual right-wing politics, because in actual rightwing politics no serious assessment of the science and the risks is taking place to begin with.

A party that was really shaped by lukewarmism would be actively debating and budgeting for the two arenas — innovation and mitigation — where the smartest skeptics of regulatory solutions tend to place their faith.

This is not what the GOP seems inclined to do.

I recommended Cass’ essays; now I’ll quote his tweet when Trump pulled out of the Paris accord. “Hopefully someday,” he wrote, “we’ll get a reality-based climate agreement that helps prepare for and adapt to whatever climate change brings.”

The problem is that while Paris was not sufficiently rooted in reality, the anti-Paris sentiments that moved Trump weren’t either. And a clear Republican plan for how to “prepare for and adapt to whatever climate change brings” does not actually exist.

In its absence, lukewarmism is a critique without an affirmative agenda, a theory of the case without a party that’s prepared to ever act on it. So its claim to offer a fully-credible policy alternative to climate alarmism awaits a different president, and a very different GOP.