This is a good analogy I will use for attempting to explain why it’s worth doing quite a lot about climate change even if you think it’s likely to be no big deal:
If you have one deadly poisoned Smartie hidden in a bowl of 10,000 Smarties, you discard the whole bowl.
— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) December 21, 2018
People appear to have extreme problems not only reasoning about risk when the consequences are remote in time (erroneous future discounting) but when the results will be calamitous beyond the ability to imagine. It’s thus worse when those effects are not only distant in time but distant both chronologically and consequentially from some easily-imagined state (for instance, living in an okay house versus becoming a climate refugee or a child dying due to climate-change induced infrastructure failures). Needless to say, this misprices the risk substantially as even a 1 in 10,000 chance of a hugely negative outcome is worth devoting substantial resources to prevent or to at least ameliorate.