EcoWatch: One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the climate change problem is the so-called "fat tail" of risk. In short, the likelihood of very large impacts is greater than we would expect under typical statistical assumptions.
We are used to thinking about likelihoods and probabilities in terms of the familiar "normal" distribution--otherwise known as the "bell curve." It looks like this:
Roughly 68 percent of the area falls within the region bounded by 1 standard deviation below (-1 sigma)...