I don't ever expect my house to burn down but I buy fire insurance nonetheless.
Not an applicable analogy at all.
We
know that houses
do burn down. We have a reasonable assurance that the insurance company will pay for the damage if we pay out premiums and are not fraudulent. We have evidence and a history of this.
When it comes to climate change, we don't know:
A) How much is natural (IPCC says some/most is man-made over X time period... what does that really mean?)....
B) Of the amount that is man-made, how much is "that train left the station", and cutting back now has no/little effect?
C) What will be the effect of changes we make now? And as shown in other posts, how many of those changes will actually be counter-productive, creating more emissions world-wide?
D) What will be the effect of NOT making changes (related to B above)?
Has the IPCC updated it's predictions on sea level rise for the various scenarios? The last time I posted on that topic, they predicted a 16.5" rise if we do nothing, and a 13" rise if we take extreme measures. If either scenario comes to pass, we need to adapt - to either 13" or 16.5". BTW, their predictions had so much unknown in them, that the ranges for the scenarios over-lapped - so we might take extreme measures and get 18" of sea level rise, and that fits their model. So we won't even know if those actions really helped. It's a little like doing a rain dance when there is a 75% chance of rain predicted - when it starts raining, did the rain dance help?
Seems that instead of flying around the country telling other people to plug in a CFL, we ought to make plans to move people out of places like NOLA over the next 50-100 years. We can do that without massive evacuations, just start doing a build out now. That seems to get ignored, like plug in a CFL and the problem goes away, but that is NOT what the IPCC says.
So "just do something, just in case" is a poor answer, IMO, and in the opinion of these scientists that speak on the matter.
-ERD50