My cousin Clive just forwarded this YouTube video to me. I think the author’s name is Greg Craven ((Here’s another video by him.)); the subject is the question of global warming and rational responses to it:
Now this kind of payoff matrix will be familiar to many, and in fact it’s the basis of the notorious argument for belief in God that we know as Pascal’s Wager. And many people (including me) regard Pascal’s Wager as a bullshit argument. So why isn’t this climate change argument equally bullshit?
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is not the structure of the argument; it’s the epistemic status of the propositions that are used. The payoff matrix is a perfectly reasonable and respectable way of organizing one’s thinking about actions and consequences. Ideally, you want to be able to assign probabilities to the various cells, but even if you can’t do that, it’s still useful. ((It might, for example, help you to decide which areas should be researched in order to develop the data needed to refine your probabilities. Row thinking or column thinking, as the video put it.)) For global warming, all of the contingencies, actions, and consequences represent concrete, real-world phenomena. Temperature goes up X, Y million hectares are inundated, Z million people are displaced. We can argue about the values for X, Y, and Z, but there is no serious debate about whether water, land, and people actually exist, nor about the basic physics of how melting polar ice translates into sea level. Pascal’s Wager, on the other hand, is all about belief in an unsupported fiction, one of many competing and mutually incompatible fictions.
Back to the video. The argument that it makes is sound, and modest; there are plenty of other arguments that could have been factored in. Many of the actions that we should take to address global warming are also needed to cope with the actual or impending shortages in oil, potable water, and other resources. One case which he does not consider – but should – is the “catastrophist” view that global warming is real, it’s inevitable, and no human action can mitigate its effects. If this is true, it would be rationally self-interested to consider a different payoff matrix, comparing the costs of futile response to global warming with the costs of small-group survival in the face of catastrophic collapse. Of course this is no longer a public policy debate…