And besides that, the real problems are the Black Swans we cannot even see or imagine.
To the extent this is true it can reasonably be considered an argument against massive and expensive government intervention to combat global warming. One of those black swans could be global cooling (which few people expect), or it could be something else unconnected to global temperature change, that we will need lots of wealth to prevent, mitigate, or live with.
When one is screwing around with nuclear power that can destroy the world
If we tried to set up a nuclear plant deliberately to destroy the world it still wouldn't do so. Obviously not in a literal sense (the gravitational binding energy of the planet, or alternatively the amount of energy needed to melt the planet, is many orders of magnitude larger than all the human released energy in any form, power plant or bombs or anything else throughout history). Even if you take a broad non-literal interpretation of destroy (where wiping out life on Earth, or even just humans is enough) it would be hard to do so. I guess the best possibility would be a huge cobalt and other material salted reactor that you deliberately set up to melt down, or worse yet run without any containment vessel, still operating in terms of having fission occur while exposed to the open air, but even this falls far short of what you would need. It would tend to provide overkill in the area around the reactor and immediately downwind but it would sufficiently contaminate the world. Cobalt bombs would distribute the fallout more, but they aren't reactors, and are still somewhat questionable as doomsday weapons, at least for a single bomb, and for anything but the more mild definitions of doomsday. A thousand cobalt salted bombs might do the trick, but that's a pretty serious effort to wipe ourselves out.
And as far a GW goes, if 99% of the top scientist say it could possibly destroy the world
But they don't. |
