...many environmental campaigners, including the former U.S. vice president, Al Gore, and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.
Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.
A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.
They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.
So far, so good. But then,
"Climate change presents a very real risk," said Carl Wunsch, a climate expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios."
How large?
"Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid," he said.
So again, how large the premium?
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