catastrophic climate change

Dr. Martin Weitzman is considered one of the world's top economists. He has degrees in Math, Physics, Statistics and Economics from Stanford and MIT, among others places, and is a Professor of Economics at Harvard. His area of expertise is Environmental Economics, and he says there’s a chance, roughly around 1%, that the temperature of the Earth will rise by 36 degrees fahrenheit in around 200 years.

In other words, there’s a small chance that global warming will lead to a mass extinction comparable to others that have happened before on Earth. For context, the "small chance" is 10,000 times more likely than the asteroid strike which wiped out the dinosaurs, a once in a hundred million year occurrence.

Dr. Weitzman is not an alarmist by any stretch of the imagination. Look at his paper -- On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change -- and you'll see for yourself. It's light reading only if you have an advanced degree in Economics or Statistics. He talks a lot about "fat-tailed probability distributions" and calculus. He also spells out the worst case in plainer English:

Because these hypothetical temperature changes would be geologically instantaneous, they would effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.

The point of the paper is to explore an important question: given that the probability of catastrophic climate change might be about 1% in 200 years, what's the most rational way to place our bets?