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6 Responses to “It’s Long. Watch it.”

• Emma B
  October 23rd, 2007 11:50
  1

  Well, I like that the guy is taking a game-theory approach — it appeals to the logician in me. However, he hasn’t got his matrix constructed right, and so the choice isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as he thinks it is.

  The basic problem is that he’s got “cost + smiley face” in the TRUE/ACTION square at the lower left, which obscures the fact that there will still be serious economic consequences in a world with no climate change. If you expand the matrix like this, it makes more sense:

  ACTION NO ACTION
  FALSE Economy Economy
  Climate Climate

  TRUE Economy Economy
  Climate Climate

  If we choose the ACTION column, the overall outcome will be the same regardless of whether human-caused climate change is true or false. Even if we avert the putative climate catastrophes, we still have to face a global economic catastrophe. It might have been worth spending the money on the climate, but that doesn’t change the fact that now we’re bankrupt.

  By choosing column A, we are choosing a certainty of an economic crisis against the possibility of a climate crisis. When we’re talking about odds, we should keep two variables in mind: how bad the consequence is, and the possibility it will occur. The standard practice in dealing with probability is to multiply the two together to come up with an overall weight for each choice.

  To illustrate, let’s assign an arbitrary world badness level, on a scale of 1-10, to each outcome: economic crisis is badness 5, climate is badness 10. However, there is only a 50% chance that the climate change will occur, so the overall “cost” of the NO ACTION column is 10 * 50% = 5. Now, the ACTION column has a 100% chance of incurring a badness of 5, so its overall cost is also 5. If those badness levels are correct, one world is not, mathematically speaking, worse than the other.

  Of course, this leads us right back to wrangling about the badness levels of each alternative, which is the crux of the whole public policy debate, and I don’t particularly want to talk about that aspect of it. However, the math behind it is pretty clear. ACTION is only logically the right choice if it’s more than 50% certain that climate change is true, or if the badness of climate change is twice that of global economic depression.

  I applaud the way the guy tried to go about investigating the problem, but unfortunately it doesn’t lead to the simple answer he thinks it does.

• Stacie
  October 23rd, 2007 12:16
  2

  Emma - I love you. Smart is so hot.

  Hmm….maybe calling something “hot” in a debate on global warming isn’t the best word choice.

  A basic flaw is the assumption that addressing the issue of global warming will cause an economic crisis, which may well not be the case. Certainly Toyota discovered with its hybrid cars that a “green” product (and just how green hybrid cars are is a debate for abother time) can make a lot of money. Innovations can and do lead to both improved environmental standards and a robust economy. Some have argued (and I can’t find cites, sorry, and am trying to feed toddlers as I type this) that green innovations will be the next Internet boom of our economy.

• Casey
  October 23rd, 2007 12:42
  3

  I am not trying to be all statistically correct and smart by any means, but I think what hit it home for me is that if we do take action and we were wrong (Action/False), then having a world in which to even have an economic crisis is preferable to having a devastated and decimated world and economy. Lesser of two (wildly oversimplified, I’ll grant you that) evils?

• Emma B
  October 23rd, 2007 12:56
  4

  I’m glad you still love me after I spilled a few Ks’ worth of pixels all over your comments :).

  The problem with the green-consumerism argument is that there is legitimate room for debate about what kind of impact those sorts of budget-friendly innovations will really have. I’ve seen people on both sides of the argument deride those sorts of personal choices as lipstick, and I’m inclined to agree, if only because we are talking about an unbelievably complex system. At some point, the Law of Unintended Consequences has got to enter into the picture; it’s not reasonable to expect that we can fix any problem with no negative costs at all, even if it’s only a question of what else we could have done with the money.

  I didn’t mention this above, because I was just tackling the video’s game theory arguments, but there is another probability matrix to consider: what if the climate catastrophe is not reversible or avoidable? My personal suspicion is that there is potentially some amount of non-human-generated climate change occurring, as has happened at other points in history. Let’s say we spend a ton of money reducing carbon emissions, only to find out that, say, increased solar flares have caused enough warming to kick off all the Day After Tomorrow-style problems anyway. If we’d spent no money on averting climate change, we’d still have financial reserves to offset the consequences to some degree. However, if we do send ourselves into a financial crisis, now we’re broke AND the planet has gone to hell. By definition, that is worse than if we take no action at all — if the Earth is going to self-destruct anyway, better to be rich when it does.

• Pann
  October 23rd, 2007 22:46
  5

  One point of the video was to have us not think about (for a while) whether GCC is really happening, whether it’s caused by humans, or what. But my understanding is that there has been massive, unequivocal evidence already demonstrated that it’s not only real and happening, but that humans are making it happen, via CO2.

  So I’m kind of ignoring the GCC false row anyway.

  The debate needs to move in the direction of which actions we need to take and when and how rather than whether to take actions or not.

  Not a pretty thing to think about, is it?

• Chris
  October 24th, 2007 00:31
  6

  The movie makes an interesting point however it is largely a “better safe than sorry” approach. I agree that the gamble is very risky however i think he underestimates the costs of action. It seems as though he is largely alluding to the Western world while conveniently ignoring the huge costs to developing countries. In many countries in Africa, for example, there is an obvious lack of sustainable energy. The governments obviously can not afford nuclear energy and petrol and coal based energy companies have yet to enter the market largely due to the social and economic climates. Proponents of green energy (solar, wind, etc.) have jumped on this opportunity to pressure African consumers especially medical industries, into using these energy sources in favor of petrol generators. This is all well and good except for the fact that green energy has yet to be as reliable and inexpensive has any carbon based energy source. Often local clinics are forced to decide whether to refrigerate the vaccines or have fluorescent light. It is relatively absurd to think that African communities should be forced to use energy that Americans and indeed most of the developed world are reluctant to adopt. Large strides in green energy need to be made quickly if anything is to be done. I also have seen a lot of data regarding global warming and their are logical and verifiable evidence to bolster both non-anthropogenic and anthropogenic warming. I simply believe the “costs” of action in a non-anthropogenic world could be much more devastating than relative economic depression and higher taxes for westerners.