> It's genuinely difficult to get meaningful personal probabilities of
> highly unlikely (but poorly understood) events. Considering it as odds
> on a fair bet gets tangled up with risk-aversion (ie they might prefer
> the unlikelier side even with an expected loss, thus understating the
> odds that they really think are fair).
>
> It's doubly difficult now that many people have learnt how politically
> powerful the "can't rule it out" appeal to risk-aversion can be.
I accept that it may be difficult to get good values for
probabilities, but, if the possibility of 5m in 50 years is a
realistic event to fear, having a better understanding of ice sheet
dynamics is surely worth quite a lot? And rather than demand that
trillions be spent based on poorly understood science (possibly
science that has no more than a few hundred scientists working on it
with a budget of a few hundred million), I ask, whether that
uncertainty could be substantially reduced with a by comparison modest
expenditure (say a few billion, or even tens of billions)?
Incidentally, insurance against low likelihood catastrophic events is
a great argument, but global warming would tend to help against some
low likelihood catastrophic events (in particular anything related to
more aerosols in the air, from limited regional nuclear warfare to
asteroid swarms and an unexpected upsurge in volcanic activity).
It does not seem a priori clear to me that a little global warming
pushes the system towards a state, where "catastrophe" is more likely.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated
venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of
global environmental change.
Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the
submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not
gratuitously rude.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
