An Inconvenient Puzzle: Global Warming, Genies and Torture

May 2, 2007 — -- Oklahoma Sen. James M. Inhofe, the former chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has called global warming "the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people," and excoriates former Vice President Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" every chance he gets.

And just recently, presidential aide Karl Rove has clashed sharply with environmental activists Sheryl Crow and Laurie David.

Inhofe and Rove are by no means alone. Skepticism about global warming and its causes is widespread. One overly kind reading of their position is that it is, to an extent, a consequence of the general problem of dealing with very big numbers and very small numbers. Such numbers are outside our familiar mid-size range, and so our intuition about them isn't well-developed.

A somewhat myopic focus on the day's mid-size happenings, although essential to our survival as people, and perhaps as U.S. senators and presidential aides, can nevertheless cause problems for us.

Evolution would point to the enhanced survivability of organisms that respond quickly to local or near-term events. This quick response results in a steep temporal and spatial discount rate for distant or future events. The latter are discounted in the same way that money is. Suffering ordained for 25 years from now is, like a $10 million personal debt due in 2032, considerably easier to bear than is suffering, or bankruptcy, scheduled for tomorrow.

The relevance of this short-sightedness to greenhouse gases and extinct species should be obvious. Environmental despoliation may even be conceived of as a kind of global Ponzi scheme, the early "investors" (that is, us) doing well, the later ones losing everything.

Nevertheless, the "right" discount rates are not so easy to determine and vary from case to case. It's not that we shouldn't prize the here and now, but, as residents of a global village whose actions can reverberate for a long time, we may need a global reserve board to help decide on more rational discount rates to keep us from being our own Ponzis.