Global Warming Risk Management

Funny enough, it wasn’t a noble lauriate or some intricately detailed report written by a bunch of egg heads from some think tank that clarified the climate change debate for me, but instead it was a high school science teacher in Oregon named Greg Craven and his video on You Tube titled How It All Ends...

Greg takes a slightly different approach to addressing the squable over the possible realities of Global Warming. He doesn’t sweat the nitty-gritty details, but instead applies the basic principals of risk managment to the debate. Over-simplifying matters - there are two possibilites, the theory of Global Warming is true or it is false. In response we have two options available to us, we can take action to effect change, or we can do nothing.

The truth or the falicy behind Global Warming is a variable we can’t control, our choice as to whether or not to take action is the variable we can control. So Greg asks us to look at the problem rationally. I’ve used a simple chart to illustrate the scenario’s and outcomes.

If we do nothing and Global Warming is real (D) - we’re in a lot of trouble, famine, drought, floods, disease - coastal cities are wiped out, politcal chaos, refugees. While human-kind may survive as a species, we’ll pretty much be back in the pre-industrial dark ages. Unless you’re an evil scientist bent on world domination, I think we can all agree this is a pretty bad scenario. In scenario (B) we lose nothing, but we gain nothing either.

If we are pro-active in addressing the possibility of Global Warming, and it turns out not to be a problem then worst case scenario we spend a lot of time, effort and money on solving a problem that didn’t really exisit to begin with. If Global Warming is real, by taking action we’ve solved the problem and all is well, so while we might have spent a lot of time and money to solve the problem it turns out that it was a problem worth solving - so good for us.

While we may think there are varying degrees to these outcomes, and therefore putting all of our eggs in one basket by making one choice may not seem the wisest decision, there is increasing evidence that there is a tipping point to Global Warming - basic example, there’s lots of methane gas trapped in the arctic permafrost, methane gas is a really powerful greenhouse gas, permafrost melts it releases centuries of methane gas really quickly into the atmosphere and the process of Global Warming speeds up. So by not addressing the problem and not addressing it quickly, we could find ourselves in a really big mess, really quickly thanks to the effect of compound interest...

Something that Greg doesn’t really touch on however in scenario (A) he’s kind of treating it like a total wash, the money is lost and we’re still faced with all the old problems of disease in the third world, education, global conflict (war), malnutrition, population, sanitation, etc, etc… but hey, we’ve actually sort of dealt with some of those problems - there’s less money going to petro-dictators, our natural environment is less polluted (allowing for healthier fish and livestock and farmland). Hmmmm, so scenario (A) isn’t a total wash after all. Adressing climate change will cost us more money now, but will pay us huge dividends in the future.

So in the whole debate as to who is right and who is wrong and what should we do the only scenario where we are just completely screwed is the one in where we do nothing.
If we do nothing there’s a better than even chance that we’re all in big trouble.

If we do nothing, and Global Warming turns out to be a total falacy, as a society we still at some point have to address the concerns of disease, education, global conflict, blah, blah, blah... so by doing nothing we’re pretty much going to lose no matter what.

By doing something and doing it quickly we can lead happier, healthier, longer lives. The sooner we take action the less money it’s going to cost in the long run and the greater the return on our investment.