A quaint argument now circulating for global-warming preventives creates an analogy with insurance.
It goes like this: Although we can't be certain we won't be stricken by disabling disease or run down by a truck, many of us buy insurance against catastrophes like those. So why not, as a form of insurance, undertake the costs of precaution against the possibly catastrophic results of global warming, about which we can't be certain either?
The analogy possesses a certain charm. Its imperfections, though, make it less than compelling.
When we buy insurance, we know what we're paying and what we're getting in return. This isn't so with global warming.
We don't know how greatly human activity has contributed to the warming evident in surface measurements. Much of the observed warming reflects cycles that would have occurred without human influence.
And most of what is presumed to be the human contributor to warming, a gush of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, came after most of the apparent warming.
The timing discrepancy weakens the assertion that we can significantly affect global average temperature by reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide.
In fact, we probably don't influence temperature on a global scale much. Yet to meaningfully change whatever influence we do have would be costly. We'd have to greatly reduce CO2 emissions, probably through stiff carbon taxation and rearrangement of energy use.
The associated economic costs represent the premium in the insurance analogy. They would be substantial and unpredictable. And the protection they would buy against measurable warming is minuscule.
Some say moderation of the CO2 build-up, a more certain response to emission cuts, alone would warrant the cost of precaution. But CO2 enrichment isn't all bad. It enhances plant growth. It might, in fact, be something we should encourage.
No such potential upside exists for the diseases, accidents, and other risks against which we insure ourselves.
Also with normal insurance, we usually have the choice not to buy.
Global warming "insurance" would be forced upon everybody—at least in the developed world—even upon those of us who think it's unaffordable and unnecessary.
(Online July 3, 2003; author's e-mail: [email protected])
