I came across a comment from a digg.com user today that sounded remarkably like Pascal's Wager applied to environmentalism. The comment was in response to the new TED.org talk by Al Gore in which he updates his now famous Inconvenient Truth slide deck with more recent data. While the talk itself is definitely worth spending 30 minutes to watch, this commenter on digg.com is, in my opinion, doing a disservice to the scientific community and scientific evidence accumulated to date.
Wikipedia does a good job of explaining what Pascal's Wager is and when it was originally made, so I'll not revisit that. Here is what I think the Environmentalist's Wager might look like:
| Global Warming is Real | Global Warming is Not Real | |
| Live as if Global Warming is Real | You Win Big | You lose very little |
| Live as if Global Warming is not Real | You Lose Big | You lose very little |
What bothers me about such a formulation is that it cheapens the scientific evidence. The findings are quire clear and unambiguous - the earth is getting warmer. In the most recent IPCC report this assertion was assigned a confidence rating of 'Greater than 99%'. So to argue in favor of being environmentally responsible 'on the off chance that there is a problem' seems to be doing a disservice to the movement. An alternative formulation of this could be based on the more conservative (given a 'Greater than 90%' confidence rating in the IPCC report) and controversial claim that humans are the cause of the warming. A Wager version of that might look like:
| Humans Cause Global Warming | Humans Do Not Cause Global Warming | |
| Live as if Humans Cause Global Warming | You Win Big | You lose very little |
| Live as if Humans Do Not Cause Global Warming | You Lose Big | You lose very little |
So what is the cause of the lack of political motivation among American's to do something significant about this? My guess is that for many people, their version of the wager looks like this instead:
| Humans Cause Global Warming | Humans Do Not Cause Global Warming | |
| Live as if Humans Cause Global Warming | You Win Big | You lose very little |
| Live as if Humans Do Not Cause Global Warming | Everyone Else But Me Loses Big | You lose very little |
Seems like wishful thinking to me.
