Part of being a responsible adult, or a responsible society, is the ability to manage risk. Houses have fire insurance despite the fact that the odds of your house burning down are less than 0.3 percent.
Trump tries to justify this war with alarming proclamations regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions, even after claiming that their program was "completely obliterated" last year. The problem is that there is almost no confidence in information coming from the White House because they have repeatedly undermined their credibility.
My main point about risk assessment is the fact that the risk of major negative impacts of ongoing global warming is 100%. The effects and costs are already being felt all around the world.
We've found that global systems respond to rising CO2 much faster than had been predicted. But that also means that these trends can be slowed more quickly than we used to think, if we reverse emissions trends.
The war in Iran has dramatically highlighted the fact that we still find ourselves in thrall of fossil fuels, the driving force behind the climate crisis.
Risk assessment involves defining imminence and implications of diverse threats. Low probability threats with catastrophic outcomes, like nuclear war, do exist, but there are also proven threats with broad, long-term implications, like global warming. Imagine what we could do to stem the latter threat with an investment of a billion dollars a day?
I'm Reed Scherer and that's my Perspective.
