[xyzelement]

This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."

The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.

For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.

In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.

[sparqlittlestar]

> over-protecting from a risk is as bad as under-protecting

How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers?

50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway

[xyzelement]

Happy to explain. We need a few more numbers to make this tangible.

Let's agree that 50c summers are bad. What's the probability that summers will become 50c in the next 100 years and what's the cost of lowering that likelyhood?

Let's say there's a low probability (0.01%) and the cost of action is high. Let's use a ridiculous example: you have the opportunity to lower the risk further by half at the cost of immediately killing your family, any pets you have, and yourself. Would you, sparqlittlestar, kill your family, pets and self to move the risk of 50C summer in the next 100 years from 0.01% to 0.005%? I assume the answer is no because it's obviously and intuitively not worth it

On the other extreme let's say there's a 50% risk of 50c summers and you have a low-cost option (snapping your fingers) to halve it to 25%. You would obviously do that.

To generalize this point, it doesn't make sense to talk about how bad something could be without quantifying how likely that event is and the cost of mitigation. I find that talking about worst case outcomes regardless of likelihood is basically anxiety. Like someone who never gets on a plane because of how horrible a crash could be, separately from the reality that your particular flight is not going to crash, and meanwhile everything you miss out on by not flying is real.

[bulbar]

> Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.

This is not generally true.

> For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house.

The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.

[xyzelement]

I think that's a fair analogy actually. I grew up in Brooklyn in 1990s and it was basically guaranteed that you'd have some criminal encounter in the neighborhood sooner or later. People still left the house because running that risk was better that entombing yourself inside the house.