When 1 in 10,000 equals 1 in 100

How's this for a student experiment: Tell half your subjects that you will zap them with a brief, painful, but "non-dangerous" electric shock. Tell the other half that there's a 1% chance that you will shock them. But first ask them to let you know how much money they want in order to endure the pain.

It turns out people focus on the shock and ignore the probability of it occurring. They want little more compensation for the certain shock than the one that's highly unlikely.

In wonk-speak, courtesy of Cass Sunstein and Richard Zeckhauser, "when risks are vivid, people are likely to be insensitive to the probability of harm, particularly when their emotions are activated."

Translate that into a globally warming world and things get scary.

There'll be many high consequence losses. It matters whether their chance of happening is 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100. But it looks like most of us—and most politicians—would treat the two as roughly equivalent.

Prepare to be zapped.