When I am proven right, the
Climate Change Department will be swept away; Britain's annual deficit will fall by a fifth; the bat - blatting, bird - blending windmills that scar our green and pleasant land will go; the world will refocus on real environmental problems like deforestation on land, overfishing at sea and pollution of the air; the U.N.'s ambition to turn itself into a grim, global dictatorship with overriding powers of taxation and
economic and environmental intervention will be thwarted; and the aim of science to supplant true religion as the world's new,
dismal, cheerless credo will be deservedly, decisively, definitively defeated.
In both cases, there is substantial uncertainty about the things we most care about and in fact, in the case of
climate change, Martin Weitzman's
Dismal Theorem concludes that calculations of the expected
economic cost of
climate change are dominated by the mathematical details of the low - probability / catastrophic - consequence tail of the probability distribution.