re: #329 KSK

He makes the assumption on the base that we don’t need to know whether it’s true. There’s the fallacy.

He puts the 4 different options at 25% probability each.
He also puts AGW or no AGW at 50% each.

And actually he omits two more possibilities:

5. GW is happening, but despite spending trillions the catastrophic event will happen anyway because it wasn’t man-made
6. In 20 years the Earth will start to cool (there may be events that we cannot foresee) and our actions will actually have contributed to that cooling

I would rather make a different case. At least some actions which are proposed to stop the presumed AGW are actually good for different reasons. Clean air, clean water, who’s against it? Clean water for everyone will actually be the major challenge in the next decades.

How if we spent our trillions to achieve tangible benefits for the 4 bn underprivileged people on Earth instead of wasting them on things that will make life for those 4 billions even harder?

He doesn’t assign probabilities. Rather, he argues that the bad payoff in the do-nothing column in the event of real AGW is so bad that even if the probability is low, a prudent bet is to cover act, just in case.

We can do this clean-water-for-all thing en passant. It’ll be like wiping out smallpox. An obvious good thing, accomplished, and cheaply. It’s not like we cannot address AGW and still chew gum.

Oh, and most of the world’s poor live in climates that are already too hot for comfort. Addressing AGW is relevant to their lives. Letting it run won’t hit us nearly as soon or as hard as it will hit them. But they cannot do anything to stop it, because they haven’t our mighty scientific establishment, and they hardly produce any greenhouse gases as it is.

The job falls to the U.S., China, Europe, Japan, and maybe India and Brazil.