Global warming, Copenhagen, and risk management

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The Copenhagen Summit is happening right now. In view of the controversy over whether or not human activity is responsible for global warming, or if they’re is in fact a global warming, both controversies having been raised by scare tactics orchestrated the conservatives, I thought it would be a good time to talk about Greg Craven, that high school science teacher who put up a video on YouTube about three years ago asking the question “What’s the worst that could happen?“.

In the video, Greg basically set up a risk management grid. In later videos, he improved on that risk management grid based on the  feedback he had received from his original video. In total, he put up about seven hours of videos and even wrote a book to further explain the content of those videos.

With all that controversy about whether or not there is a human caused global warming, he figured that the issue should be analyzed by way of risk management, which is a very sound method used by insurance companies but also by businesses.

The technique is simple: draw a grid with four cells and to the left, write “false” and below it “true”. At the top of the grid to the left, write “yes”, for taking action, and to the right, write “no”, as in not taking action. Then, write up scenarios for what’s the worst that could happen if global warming is for real, we act accordingly, and the problem is solved. Then, write the consequences for if we act and spend money on something that turned out to be false versus the consequences of not doing anything and witnessing the apocalyptic disaster that happens if human caused global warming turns out to be true.

The risk of not acting if human caused global warming is true far outweighs the risk of doing something if global warming is not for real. If we do spend a lot of money to try to resolve the non-issue, we may risk an economic collapse due to overspending, from which we could get out of. But if we do not act, the global disasters that would befall upon us would be far worse than a simple economic collapse. The world economies have seen many economic collapses over the past century and the economy has always been able to get out of those crises. On the other hand, the compounding effect of all those disasters, as predicted from the effect of global warming, would destroy a lot of infrastructures which would make the world economies to take a far longer period to recover from.

Even those who do not believe in human caused global warming know that throughout the planet’s history there have been periods of ice age and global warming. They know what happens to the sea level, the vegetation, and to animal life, in general,  whenever there is a change in climate. They know what the consequences would be to our civilization if any type of global warming, human caused or not, were to occur. The conservative skeptics cannot absolutely deny the possibility that maybe human activity is causing global warming any more than scientists who believe can absolutely affirm that there is in fact 100% absolutely sure guarantee correlation between our activity and global warming. There is always uncertainty in science. Amid all the speculation over the possibility that maybe scientists fudge the data, even if there is the slightest possibility that human activity is actually causing global warming, risk management tells us that we should err on the side of caution.

For the Copenhagen Summit, the real issue is whether or not politicians will take the right measures to actually address the issue of human caused global warming rather than just apply a Band-Aid over the problem, as they often do.

You can purchase Greg Craven’s book at Amazon, simply use the link below:

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