TDB | The Five Percent Doctrine

I'm an environmentally friendly fellow; and I don't really agree with Thomas Firey; nor do I disagree with Paul Krugman. But doesn't Krugman's reasoning about the climate threat seem ridiculously similar to Dick Cheney's reasoning about the terrorist threat (what became known as 'The 1 Percent Doctrine"), which Ron Suskind so brilliantly documented for us? The matched logic behind the two strands of reasoning even leads to the (exact) same place - an insistence that anyone who is not with us in the fight is against us, and consequently should (must?) be branded morally reprehensible (er, um....'evil' perhaps).

Paul Krugman’s column in today’s NYT laments the lack of a national policy to combat global warming. He writes:

It’s true that scientists don’t know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?

He then cites the work of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman, who surveyed the results of a number of recent climate models and found that (in Krugman’s words) “they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that’s enough to ‘effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.’”

Krugman concludes, “It’s sheer irresponsibility not to do whatever we can to eliminate that threat” and he calls for opprobrium against those who might impede global warming legislation: “The only way we’re going to get action, I’d suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral.”

We can't help but be left wondering why the threat of global terrorism should not demand the same stance. I think most would agree that nuclear terrorists (nuclear war, surely) are at least an equal if not a greater threat to the planet (given that the likelihood of terrorist success is much higher than 5%). Surely Krugman has something important to answer - and I admire him enough to hope he would not resort to claiming the distinction lies somewhere in those 4 percentage points.