AGW, wouldst thou have false positive or false negative?

Anthropogenic global warming, let me add my bit of hot air to the problem, literally in this case because this is the first post in which I shall use DragonDictate dictation software.

There is little question that global warming is real, the real issue is whether it is caused by human actions, or is just part of the natural climatic cycle. Notwithstanding the University of East Anglia debacle, scientific consensus is that global warming is in fact anthropogenic, caused by humans. I suspect that most AGW deniers are motivated by greed and self-interest, but it can also not be denied that there are credible scientists who question whether humans are the cause of global warming.

A graph with an excellent summary of the different points of view can be found at Information is Beautiful. Hat tip to Sean from Cosmic Variance for alerting me to the chart, which he has checked and believes to be accurate.

In previous posts I explored views that false positives (believing something to be true when it is not) have survival value. In this case less harm will be done if we wrongly believe and act as if global warming is caused by humans, than if believing and acting that it's not. Some corporate AGW deniers would have us believe that economic disaster will befall us if we acted to limit human influence on the environment. They often point to job losses as a likely consequence, yet whenever there is an economic downturn they are the first to retrench staff, citing all kinds of spurious reasons, when all they are interested in are profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value. In the case of AGW I suspect that's all they're interested in as well.

Someone has also mentioned Pascal's Wager in this regard. I believe it has some relevance, if in doubt play safe. If it turns out we were wrong about the anthropogenic part, less harm would have been done than the other way around. The physicist, Robert Park, made the same point about the population explosion, safer to all be Malthusians now.