this is an important video that really banished all disagreement on the subject, and I can’t believe that it hadn’t been posted already. Good post indeed.

The reasoning is faulty here on several counts. It reminds me of the famously flawed logic of Pascal’s Wager. Essentially the argument is summarised as “The risk of not acting outweighs the risk of acting” (just as, in the logic of Pascal’s Wager, the risk of not worshipping God outweighs the risk of worshipping a God that doesn’t exist). In other words, ‘better safer than sorrier’.

The decision to go for column “Yes” rests on the fact that proponents of AGW happen to have come up with a worse hypothetical worst-case scenario than the worst-case scenario of the sceptics. But this is part of what many sceptics are objecting to: doom-and-gloom visions are fuelled by a culture titillated by threats of apocalypse. It is not helpful to weigh up the risks in two science-fiction scenarios (utter economic breakdown vs utter global catastrophe) if neither is likely. Somebody else could draw a diagram and write, as a potential risk of capping carbon emissions, “Two billion people in Asia denied the benefits of using coal and many hundreds of thousands continuing to die as a consequence of the resulting poverty and of the inhalation of wood-fire smoke”, and other such claims. Suddenly the table could be tilted the other way.

The idea of granting a 50/50 likelihood to either extreme scenario may seem like a generous concession to the sceptics, but in fact nobody in their right mind would argue that it is 50% likely that climate change will kill everyone and everything, and 50% likely that it is all a load of bull. Most sensible people will grant at least a degree of validity to the IPCC’s latest report, which makes substantial but far less grandiose claims for what is likely to happen in the future.

The effects of those more likely scenarios need not, I would suggest, be disastrous for developing countries if they have, in the meantime, been allowed to sufficiently develop. The table falsifies into a binary opposition (‘Yes’ or ‘No’) the choices available to deal with whatever threats exist. But surely there is a choice, for instance, between vast resources being used to slow or curb temperature rises, or vast resources being used of offset or counteract the future problems that are likely to be caused by the rise in temperature. After all, the city of Las Vegas manages to survive an inhospitable climate because it is rich and therefore equipped to deal with extreme heat. Efforts and resources ploughed into Third World development may well save more lives, and achieve a greater increase in the quality of human lives, than efforts and resources ploughed into reducing the temperature by one degree or so. Should we build massive state-of-the-art sea defences for Bangladesh or use that money to raise an awareness-raising campaign to turn off light bulbs so that the carbon emissions generated by those light bulbs do not contribute to temperature increases and thus potential sea-level rises which may be experienced in the future by a Bangladesh without sufficient sea defences? Whatever the relative merits here, this is one choice of many hundreds not acknowledged by the facile table drawn in the video.