Comments on Ian!: Pascal and Global Warming

Oh man, I've tried this argument on so many people...

2009-03-02T08:08:00.000-06:00

Oh man, I've tried this argument on so many people. I think the last time I fully typed it up was on Warbucket, trying to get people to realize that the costs of even a 1% chance of global warming being real and doing nothing outweigh the costs of it being false and doing something.

If global warming really does drown most cities, that's like what, couple hundred trillion in damages? I seem to recall the government calculates the value of a human life around 14 million dollars per to decide whether or not environmental protections are useful, so I assume we can calculate the human cost as well.

Those are pretty big numbers though. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the general value of a human is less than the value of an American, roughly 1/14 less, and worst-case scenario global warming, which kills via drowning and starvation 1/3 of the global population, 2 billion people. 1,000,000*2,000,000,000.

Let's say there's only a 1% chance of redonkulus global warming happening. That places the theoretical costs of global warming (highly simplified, of course) at 2*(10^13), which I'm going to go ahead and assume is more than the costs of fighting carbon emissions.

Since you specifically solicited blog comments on ...

2009-02-28T18:11:00.000-06:00

Since you specifically solicited blog comments on plans I figured I'd give you some feedback. Plus, I have this really creepy habit of reading the blogs of everyone I know who links to theirs on plans, but never comment or you know, admit that I read them.

It was a little long - I didn't read like the last 3 paragraphs or so. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, on average I probably read about 3 sentences out of every blog post I see. Maybe I just have blog ADD or something. It's an interesting topic - but I probably read less than I would otherwise just because I share exactly the same view on global warming and I figured out what you were getting to after a couple of sentences. I had no idea (or rather, had never even considered) how Pascal related to it though, so that was really cool. Normally I explain my view on this to people as: "Imagine that the entire concept of global warming had never been brought up by anybody. Nothing's changed! You still have thousands of good reasons to 'clean up' and not a single good reason not to." (So shut up and stop complaining).

That's all. Write more. There's even a chance I'll discontinue the creepiness.