roman’s blog

The argument being made in this video about global climate change is that the risks associated with taking no action against global warming (whether it is human caused or not) far outweighs the risks of taking action. Therefore, we as humans should do the responsible thing and do all we can to counter global warming, since we don’t want to suffer the worst case scenario, because that would mean political, social, economic, and catastrophes of all kinds, unless we desire those, we should take action now.

Relating especially to global warming, the argument made is really sound and its claim is also appropriate. I do however find some questionable assertions in the logic used which don’t necessarily hurt this argument, but couldn’t logically be applied to others. Maybe the reason why it works so well in global climate change is because it’s such a huge issue in our world today. It affects everyone and has the potential to change our life on the planet. Not to mention, almost everyone has read, seen, or heard about global warming. Greg, (the man in the video) says in the event that human global climate change turns out to be real, we who choose not to take any action can expect absolute devastations that we’re, “well aware of by now.” Those are everything from flooded cities, global warfare, to widespread famine. Surely people are familiar with these consequences and I’m guessing by now they would like to eliminate some of them. 

The process in which the conclusion was arrived at in the video was fairly simple and divided the “uncertain future,” into four categories representing extreme outcomes. In the end only one stood out as a favorable outcome because it eliminated the extreme negative out come. Let’s take a problem in our world today that doesn’t necessarily affect the entire world or even have potential to, but let’s say we take a different scenario and using previous logic apply it to a different situation. One in which Americans learn that Iran has finally achieved nuclear capability and could have numerous nuclear weapons at its disposal. What’s the worst case scenario? How about Iran nuking Israel then proceeding to nuke the United States to eliminate us as a threat? According to the plan, we have two choices, act or not to act. If we sit back we run the risks, but could very well end up fine because as it turned out Iran simply doesn’t have any such weapons. Or we could sit back and never sit back again. If we do decide to take action to eliminate the consequences, that would require the United States to nuke Iran first before they destroyed someone else or us. We could even invade their country and start a war. So to avoid the negative consequences we bomb and invade them starting a decade long war that brings death tolls to hundreds of thousands only to learn Iran never had any such weapons. Doesn’t make to much sense does it?