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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400880768
Publisert
2016
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter