“Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?”

• James Henderson
• 11 years ago
• Categories: climate change

Lord Nicolas Stern, who wrote a ground-breaking report on the economic costs of climate change against the costs of stopping it (conclusion: stopping it is cheap compared to the cost of not), has changed his mind. Climate change is getting worse, faster, and heading to worse results than he thought. It’s no longer a matter of avoiding disaster, but how bad it gets.

Stern’s quote in the title – “Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?” – really hits me. He’s referring to the odds of catastrophic runaway climate change. This is the situation that we’ve put ourselves in: there’s a good chance it will happen, the only question now is how big we let the risk get.

If we care at all for our futures, and our descendents, we’ve got to act.