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We, as a society, are really bad a planning for these things collective/non-pressing problems, and the data being hard to come by just adds to this. Your thinki

We, as a society, are really bad a planning for these things collective/non-pressing problems, and the data being hard to come by just adds to this. Your thinking is pragmatic only in a short term sense. Do you really need fire insurance? Only 1:1000 homes ever burn - I guess not then... The risk for very bad global warming problems (mass despeciation or crop loss, etc. in 100 years) even at 10% is a really bad consequence that requires some form of insurance. The risk for rock impact in 100 years is about 0.0002%, and we've got people tracking a ton of near earth objects and even some NASA work on how to deflect them. That's probably about $20M in insurance - probably too low, but yes we should care about these things. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98208&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98208&page=1

glenra 14y ago
It's possible to spend too much on "insurance" and we almost certainly do that when it comes to climate. The general scientific consensus is that the next half-century of warming generally makes humanity better off. So this risk you presumably think we need to be actively trying to mitigate - as opposed to just doing the sort of stuff we do for asteroids - is predicated on the idea that current trends continue for a century. But 50-60 years is quite a long time when it comes to technology. Even if the models are right, by the time global warming starts to be a net negative rather than a net positive, our grandkids will have a lot better options to deal with it then than we do today. Our kids and grandkids will be richer, smarter, better fed (due to longer growing seasons and CO2 fertilization), and MUCH better informed than we are today. The best thing we can do for them is give them an economy that hasn't been crippled due to paranoia that any one PARTICULAR threat we can foresee today will doom their world. There are an infinite number of potential threats that aren't hurting us now but that we can imagine might hurt our grandkids. Only some of them will actually turn out to be a serious problem. Spending trillions or even billions of dollars of resources combatting any one such threat reduces their potential ability to address all the others. There's nothing wrong with caring about things like global warming, but there's quite a lot wrong with trying to "fix" it now. To put it in programming terms: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  This is a thoughtful response, and shows that we're actually pretty close. The science is mixed on whether humanity is better off I think - there are winners and losers for sure. However, despeciation gets me most as it seems most irreversible, that and whether or not there are other feedback loops that we're not thinking about. I agree that it's overhyped, but the question here in on the margin. If we could take the insurance payment and put it towards alt./nuclear energy research we'd be killing a few birds. I don't see how our economy would be crippled by the "insurance" even at $1T in debt funding (remember how big TARP and the Treasury's loans were). Currently, we're putting far far more than this into overspend on the military ($1.5T/year) - which is defending resource and shipping interests far more than anything else. Couldn't we just solve those problems with similar funding?

glenra 14y ago

It's possible to spend too much on "insurance" and we almost certainly do that when it comes to climate. The general scientific consensus is that the next half-century of warming generally makes humanity better off. So this risk you presumably think we need to be actively trying to mitigate - as opposed to just doing the sort of stuff we do for asteroids - is predicated on the idea that current trends continue for a century. But 50-60 years is quite a long time when it comes to technology. Even if the models are right, by the time global warming starts to be a net negative rather than a net positive, our grandkids will have a lot better options to deal with it then than we do today. Our kids and grandkids will be richer, smarter, better fed (due to longer growing seasons and CO2 fertilization), and MUCH better informed than we are today. The best thing we can do for them is give them an economy that hasn't been crippled due to paranoia that any one PARTICULAR threat we can foresee today will doom their world. There are an infinite number of potential threats that aren't hurting us now but that we can imagine might hurt our grandkids. Only some of them will actually turn out to be a serious problem. Spending trillions or even billions of dollars of resources combatting any one such threat reduces their potential ability to address all the others. There's nothing wrong with caring about things like global warming, but there's quite a lot wrong with trying to "fix" it now. To put it in programming terms: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

nickpinkston 14y ago
This is a thoughtful response, and shows that we're actually pretty close. The science is mixed on whether humanity is better off I think - there are winners and losers for sure. However, despeciation gets me most as it seems most irreversible, that and whether or not there are other feedback loops that we're not thinking about. I agree that it's overhyped, but the question here in on the margin. If we could take the insurance payment and put it towards alt./nuclear energy research we'd be killing a few birds. I don't see how our economy would be crippled by the "insurance" even at $1T in debt funding (remember how big TARP and the Treasury's loans were). Currently, we're putting far far more than this into overspend on the military ($1.5T/year) - which is defending resource and shipping interests far more than anything else. Couldn't we just solve those problems with similar funding?