ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that climate change is a complex phenomenon that functions globally over extremely long time horizons. It explains why economic assessments have a hard time assessing climate change because of uncertainty. The chapter serves as a defense of the precautionary approach to threats of catastrophe, as it specifically applies to the decision-making processes that should guide climate policy. The Catastrophic Precautionary Principle in conjunction with the Catastrophic Precautionary Decision-Making Framework is valuable here in part because it pushes people to see both the importance of genuinely uncertain outcomes and to understand whether or how such outcomes are being treated in economic assessments. Precautionary economic assessments do and should play a crucial role in helping people understand the risks of climate change, but ultimately it is ethics that must guide our understanding of unacceptable climate risk. Climate change does not follow the rules of traditional economic assumptions, which ignore the potential for irreversible changes and thresholds for effective action.
