A science teacher tries to bridge the gap between the scientific agreement and the popular debate on global climate change. Halfway between being a Joe Schmoe and a scientist, wonderingmind42 gives a risk assessment view of climate change for the lay person, arriving at the “undeniable” conclusion that taking immediate and significant action to combat global climate change provides the best “expected value” for our future.
This video is actually just the tip of the argument. At the same time, it both encapsulates the basics of the argument, and points to an index of an “Expansion Pack” of videos providing hours of backup material expanding and justifying the basic argument presented here.
If the video here is choppy, try viewing it directly on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg
Filed under: Blogroll, Global Climate Change, Global Climate Change Videos | Tagged: global warming climate change argument decision analysi
I recognize your argument as an application of the concept from game theory known as a prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is appropriate when there are only two courses of action and only two possible outcomes yielding four permutations. That’s why you can sketch out the argument in a grid with only four squares.
The application of the concept is inappropriate because your of your basic assumption that there only two, possible, final outcomes: either the world will warm or it won’t. There are not just two outcomes and there are not merely four permutations.
Without getting into causality, there are actually, at a minimum, three possible outcomes: the world will warm, the world will cool, or nothing will change.
You assume there are only two courses of action. There are a minimum of three courses of action: do nothing, do something to stop cooling, do something to stop warming. I will restate that more simply: do nothing, make warm the earth, make cool the earth.
So, to do it right you would draw a three by three grid. You could call one axis the outcome axis and label it warmer, cooler and nothing happens. Call the other axis the action axis and label it: do nothing, make warmer, make cooler. The the odds of nullifying climate change are only one in three. There is a two out of three chance you will exacerbate climate change by taking action, instead of not taking action.
The consequences of each outcome, while actually value judgments are, at a minimum, threefold as well: things will be the same, things will be better, things will be worse. I, for one, don’t claim to know who would be the winners and who would be the losers if the world was warmer, cooler or didn’t change at all.
In your presentation, you failed to acknowledge Merrill Flood or Melvin Drescher, who together, in 1950, invented the prisoner’s dillema.