Can you poke a hole in this argument?

Yes.

I came across this in the comments to a Scott Adams blog post. People are awed by it. The author asks people to poke holes in the argument. Everyone who references it implies that holes can't be poked in it. Usually, they are people who don't really want to poke holes in it. It's Taleb's round-trip problem: "no evidence of holes" has become "evidence of no holes".

The argument revolves around this chart:

Warming \ Action	Yes	No
False	Cost & Global Depression	8~)
True	Cost	Catastrophes - Econ - Political - Social - Environmental - Health

The hole: The upper left corner should be identical to the lower right corner, in the generalized sense it is presented.

Argument: Recall what happened during The Great Depression (and other similar experiences).

• Economic: Collapse, 25% unemployment, people selling apples and pencils, people resorting to subsistence farming. In the Soviet Union, millions died during state-imposed famines, while in China and Cambodia, people resorted to cannibalism during the massive shifts of the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge ruralization. As he correctly notes in a follow-up, the Great Depression wasn't triggered by abnormally high government spending (the rest of his comments regarding state involvement in that period strike me as naive). However, note that he changes his own rules of debate at this point: in the beginning, he was inviting us to imagine the *worst* possible outcome. Now, he's saying that we're going to compare the worst possible outcome of that which he would like to avoid (climate change) with the mildest outcome of that which he's willing to accept (unecessary expense incurred when climate change turns out to be false). Also, note the fundamental differences between something like Manhattan or Apollo project to which he is comparing, where the costs were limited to a relatively small scope within the economy, and his proposed project, which is a large scale transformation of the economy. He wants you to think this is a difference of degree when in fact it is so great as to be a difference in kind.
• Political: The Rise of Totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, arguably the era prior to the Supreme Court shoot-down of Roosevelt's corporative NRA). The Vichy French were easily persuaded to become a German satellite. After the war, Eastern Europe easily gave in to the Communist model. States tend to expand during crises, and the people are only too willing to accept or even ask for it.
• Social: Germany, 1933. Italy, 1925. Read Zinn's accounts of the Depression, too. We came this close ---||--- to following the European models, especially the Communist model. Remember, his rule was to imagine the worst that could happen.
  
• Environmental: The Climate Change believers want so badly to believe that they are ready to accept anything whose justification is reducing global warming. They believe that if everyone said, "Yeah, let's do it," the outcome will be wholesale development and acceptance of sustainability laws. Unfortunately, politics is a little more complex. What we are likely to get is laws like those that subsidize ethanol production, followed by the planting of corn on marginal lands, necessarily accompanied by more petroleum-based fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GM crops, and also accompanied by rises in the price of corn, followed by protests and socio-political unrest in places like Mexico. Further, compare the environment in the Communist Bloc to that in Western Europe: despite absolute state control, indeed because of it, they were far more wasteful and polluting. But, you protest, the modern US is different! Go back and read the short summary of our ethanol policy. Additionally, you might look around at the number of dams created during the Depression, or consider how the REA killed the nascent wind generation industry, etc. What seemed like a good idea then has turned out to be an environmental disaster today.
  
• Health: Health and income are closely related. People living in wealthier nations are more healthy than those in poorer nations, and wealthier people in a nation are healthier than poorer people in that nation. The science teacher in the video is willing to give up a little wealth; he just doesn't know or concede that is an implied concession of health.
  

In the general terms and using his own rules, the two blocks should be equal. In more specific terms and using something a little more realistic, we will be intentionally accepting more state intervention but possibly averting a more severe environmental outcome by taking the action he prefers. The question, which rides on discount rates and probabilities, is how much of one should be accepted to avoid the other. I believe the answer cannot be calculated.

There are additional problems which lie outside his argument.

• When should we take action? The theory implicit in his argument (made more explicit in one of the follow-ups) is that if we take action now, we avoid costs later. However, that leaves aside the important point that we will have more resources in the future with which to take action: more wealth, more knowledge, more technology. Thus, action taken later may actually be less costly.
  
• What about actions that are already underway? Some of them are being taken by the state, others by private actors. What he is really demanding is drastic, collective action, taken almost exclusively by the state. He explicitly asks you to support "policies" rather than goals; it is not apparent whether he understands how drastic they need to be.
  
• What is the optimal climate? It may be slightly warmer than the current one.
  

My response to his third installment, is located here. The bottom line: yes, climate scientists seem to be largely in agreement about AGW. But his argument that we are not qualified to judge whether or not climate change is occurring disqualifies the physical scientists from making policy recommendations since those fall to social scientists.

The entire series of videos is very entertaining, I would recommend the original and second response (linked above). I especially like his emphasis on civil debate.