Action of Climate Change is cheap Insurance

Bloomberg.com: News:

"Policy makers, Weitzman argued, should view spending now to slow climate change ``as an issue about how much insurance to buy to offset the small chance of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary saving.''

How high a probability, after all, must one have that global warming might lead to major environmental, refugee, and water and food-supply crises to see some value in taking preventative measures now?

From this perspective, even congressional skeptics who don't believe that global warming is caused by humans might be persuaded to support a carbon cap-and-trade system just on the chance that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are right and the skeptics are wrong. They could see it as simply taking out a little Earth insurance."