Can someone please watch this video and help spread it around?

Question

people need to know this stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

Answer 1

This video represents a completely flawed argument about risk management. If I gave you the choice between building a $100 trillion foolproof defense system against hostile space aliens, and not building such a system, would you choose to build it? What if I told you that the risk at hand was the total annihilation of the Earth? OK, how about just a $100 billion defense system against nuclear missiles launched from hostile countries? The risk may be the deaths of tens of millions of people. How about $200 billion for a tsunami shield? Or $10 billion on a bird flu vaccine? It goes on and on, until all funds are exhausted.

Every possible outcome in the world has benefits and costs. The fact of the matter is that you have to determine the net outcome of each event (the benefits minus the penalties, including money, health, safety, etc. translated into a common currency) and multiply by the probability of that event happening. The problem with the argument in the video is that it doesn't account for those probabilities. You can always invent ever more apocalyptic outcomes, but the fact is that the probability of those outcomes may be pretty darn small (or not). It's not worth spending all your resources on a negligible-probability event.

This is why it's important to study both the causes and the consequences of global warming -- to understand what the *likely* outcomes are (not just the *possible* outcomes, because virtually everything is possible with some probability), what the costs of those outcomes are, and what the costs of preventing those outcomes are. It's not a very smart proposition to say "Anything can happen, so let me spend all my money to make sure it doesn't." It's not possible to make a positive policy out of the absence of information. Only the presence of information can inform a policy.

Futhermore, this fuzzy logic glosses over a lot of other details, such as, "How much money should be spent to prevent global warming?" By the logic of the video, I can always construct a case where I can spend ever larger sums of money in order to prevent an apocalyptic outcome. So, how much regulation should we have to prevent global warming? How much should we spend? What if it turns out that if we spend our entire budget we still can't eliminate it entirely? Is reducing global warming 50% enough if we spend our entire budget? How about spending only half our budget and reducing it 25%? Is that enough?

If you pay attention to the video, the choice is between "economic depression" if we try to eliminate global warming (incidentally, that outcome holds whether or not global warming is real) and "the apocalypse" if global warming is real and we don't do anything about it. But what if I drew I matrix that was between "total economic collapse leading to global war and famine" in the first column and "tropical paradise" in the second column? You might argue that those outcomes aren't very likely. And I would say, "My point exactly." The matrix drawn in the video already makes some assumptions about probabilities (by not making the consequences of spending to eliminate global warming more severe, and by making the consequences of global warming quite severe), and those assumptions could be flawed. The argument in the video is that the stated results hold even if you insert columns between the two columns . . . but they don't hold if you start adding columns to the outside. You can add whatever columns you want, but it's a mistake to treat them all as if the probabilities of the outcomes are unimportant (implicitly, you're treating them as the same).

Like I said, all you can do is try to estimate probabilities and consequences, and the costs of eliminating those consequences. Without having reasonable estimates for all those things, you're just guessing.

Answer 2

But if people are unwilling to spend the nearly 10 minutes to watch it, whatever it contains will fall on deaf ears

Answer 3

thank you for showing the video. i assumed Bush sounded very properly-spoken. inspite of the ulterior schedule of the video, i got here upon the message got here upon clean and that Bush rather meant what he reported on the time. issues are very diverse now than they have been in 2000. i'm going to be chuffed to bypass the video on, yet I hate to tell you, it is going to not extra your schedule (i.e. Bush bashing).

Answer 4

go ahead and close it with her answer as ur favorite. I'll watch it and try to spread it around. PEACE OUT!!!!!

Answer 5

.... its 9:39 ... that's too long. What's the thumbnail sketch of what happens?

Answer 6

I will if you close this question so this is voted best answer.