Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Solar Energy

Risk = Probability of Something Happening x Consequences

There are public policy guidelines for "allowable risk" based on the number of lives lost in an event, which then leads to an acceptable probability of "failure" for design criteria (remember failure can't be 0, there's always some possibility of an event however unlikely). These guidelines are surprisingly consistent and used around the world to guide decision making for aviation safety, nuclear safety, dam safety, automobile safety, building safety etc. I happen to work with these principles and methods every day to deal with uncertainty in a logical manner. For example, the probability of a nuclear plant failure or other disaster causing hundreds of deaths should be well below 1 in 1 million per year. The landing gear subsystem on airplanes strives for even higher reliability numbers (1 in 1 billion) because there are so many landings per year and landing is just one way that a plane can fail.

If you apply these principles to the climate change debate, with risks such as those in the video above, the justification for taking action to reduce those risks becomes obvious. It's easy to be a skeptic because science is never 100% certain. But if you want to make the case for NOT taking action to lower the risk, you have to be VERY sure this is all an elaborate hoax with conspirators in every major agency and university around the globe. In mathematical terms, a skeptic has to show that roughly 95% of climate scientists have less than roughly 1 in 1 million chance of being right to take on a risk like this without doing something to address it.

So as skeptics look at the mounting body of scientific evidence and search the corners of the internet for someone who will tell them it's all baloney, they need to ask themselves honestly if they're THAT certain all these experts are THAT wrong. They need to be 99.9999% sure that the climate scientists are wrong. As Clint Eastwood said in Dirty Harry, "Do you feel lucky?"

Looking at this from a risk perspective, providing subsidies for renewable energy is extremely well justified to help reduce risk. Subsidies are really just a drop in the bucket for justified action to reduce the risk, given the potential consequences of burning fossil fuels on this scale. When you consider the $4 billion tax credits that the oil companies are getting every year, it seems like a very good idea indeed to help the renewable energy sector gain momentum as fast as possible in as many ways as possible.

Looking at this from a political perspective, we'll probably debate ourselves to death.

edited and reedited to try and make this as clear as I can.