Donald Trump's $10 Trillion Climate Mistake
View on The Week website"To understand the vital importance of the mission, says Roger Cooke, a member of the CLARREO team, one must look at the numbers and work out what we don't know, what we could know with CLARREO, and the price of inaction if we let inexplicably partisan politics prevent scientific progress. Cooke is a risk mathematician at Resources for the Future, an independent, nonpartisan research and analysis organization. He is perhaps the world's foremost expert in the mathematical modeling of risk and uncertainty. 'If the Earth's temperature is set to rise at least 3 degrees centigrade in 100 years,' he says, 'we will need about 40 years to become 95 percent certain of that with the current observing systems. We'll be just as certain of that in 20 years with CLARREO.'
It should go without saying, but if we're fighting to save our planet from catastrophic warming, the difference between achieving undeniable mathematical certainty in 20 years versus 40 years is enormously important — and valuable. How valuable? On the order of $10 trillion, Cooke estimates."
