Low Impact

One thing I’ve never been able to understand is the argument that some people make that “climate change isn’t proven, so its premature to take action”. The obvious flaw is that the risk that climate change represents, in the form of ecosystem collapse, famines and disease is so great that we can’t afford to take that chance.

Its exactly the reason why we get our houses insured. The chance of your house burning down any given year may be only 1 in 100 (probably even less!), but we can’t afford to take the risk of losing all our possessions. So, we take action (get insurance) to protect against that possibility.

A friend recently sent me a link to a video, where a guy makes this point in relation to acting on global warming pretty well. You can check it out below:

This is actually this guy’s second pass at this video - he actively requested criticisms and feedback from his first video, and incorporated this feedback to strengthen his argument. He’s taking the same tack with this version too: if you go to the original YouTube website for the video, you can leave critiques of his logic, as well as download supporting videos that address various aspects of the argument.

End of the day, its 9 minutes of your life well spent. And it makes a very clear point: we don’t need to be 100% sure that man-made climate change is happening. We don’t need to be 50% or even 10% sure. The impact of doing nothing and turning out to be wrong is just too great.

Tie that up with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of 2500 scientific expert reviewers, 850 contributing authors and 450 lead authors concluding that there is a 95% chance that man-made climate change is occurring, and taking no action becomes pretty difficult to defend.

Categories: environment, green, media

Tags: climate change, global warming, IPCC, risk management, video