Dear Senator,

I work in risk analysis, particularly environmental risk analysis. I’m a mathematician, and one of my roles is to communicate science and risk to policy makers like yourself.

So, I applaude your efforts to understand the background to the issue of climate change from a range of perpectives (Fielding talks to Wong on Climate Change).

However, with all due respect, I’d like to ask you to consider the issue from a slightly different frame - namely that of risk.

In many instances we are making decisions based on an uncertain future - a standard approach to this is to consider a risk matrix. Rather than arguing about whether global warming (or whatever) will happen, consider the relative risks of acting, or not acting. After all, this is the bit we have control of.

There is a cost with making the wrong decision. If we act and we are wrong about climate change, than we waste money and jobs. However if we don’t act, and we are wrong, the cost are much greater and broader.  This YouTube video is one of the simplest and best examples of this.

Just a thought from the numbers girl.