Very Interesting Article

Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It's a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don't want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.

Unfortunately, allowing the old threat of nuclear war to haunt our anxiety about climate change is not going to help, for the simple reason that the nuclear holocaust never happened. This happy fact tends to foster a blithe optimism about the past: look — nuclear doomsday was a beat-up! This is false logic, of course. The fact that we survived the nuclear threat doesn't mean it was always inevitable that we would. But people believe it, nonetheless, and you can see why they'd want to.

TO COMPARE the threat of climate change with the threat of nuclear war is to make a category error. The nuclear threat was unique. We never formed a proportionate fear response to nuclear weapons, because no level of fear was equal to the sickening intensity of the threat. This is the second reason why our reaction to the Bomb shouldn't guide us on our climate change anxiety: fear didn't get us anywhere.

My wife's admission struck me as a dereliction of her duty to fear.