How knowing the extreme risks of climate change can help us prepare
for an uncertain future
If you had a 10 percent chance of having a fatal car accident, you'd
take necessary precautions. If your finances had a 10 percent chance of
suffering a severe loss, you'd reevaluate your assets. So if we know the
world is warming and there's a 10 percent chance this might eventually
lead to a catastrophe beyond anything we could imagine, why aren't we
doing more about climate change right now? We insure our lives against
an uncertain future--why not our planet?
In Climate Shock, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively,
clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and
expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They
show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event
will happen. A city might go underwater. A rogue nation might shoot
particles into the Earth's atmosphere, geoengineering cooler
temperatures. Zeroing in on the unknown extreme risks that may yet dwarf
all else, the authors look at how economic forces that make sensible
climate policies difficult to enact, make radical would-be fixes like
geoengineering all the more probable. What we know about climate change
is alarming enough. What we don't know about the extreme risks could be
far more dangerous. Wagner and Weitzman help readers understand that we
need to think about climate change in the same way that we think about
insurance--as a risk management problem, only here on a global scale.
With a new preface addressing recent developments Wagner and Weitzman
demonstrate that climate change can and should be dealt with--and what
could happen if we don't do so--tackling the defining environmental and
public policy issue of our time.
