Imagine that instead of belief in God, the wager now considers the utility of a belief in climate change. Then, imagine the payouts are thus:
- if climate change exists, and you live according to this principle, you gain life everlasting (through your progeny having a livable environment), an infinite payoff.
- If climate change does not exist, and you live according to this principle, you lose some finite amount of comfort. A bounded and relatively small loss.
- If climate change exists and you do not live according to this principle, the environment will be ruined and your progeny will suffer greatly, an infinite loss.
- If climate change does not exist and you do not live according to this principle, there is no loss whatsoever.
The largest payoff is infinite. The largest loss is also infinite. The obvious choice here, for reasonable individuals, ought to be the first, as it would minimize the overall risk to future generations. Of course, if you only care about yourself then doing nothing may be a more optimal choice.
Constructing false arguments which rely on putative scientific findings that don't exist for your audience of 3 readers is something else entirely and it's difficult for me to see why someone would pour so many hours into writing out such lazy indefensible ideas.
The message of your little blog here could be summed up as "Ken doesn't want to do anything he's told". In that sense, it's about as entertaining and informative as reading your own kid's journal. I just do it at this point so that your local authorities can be contacted the moment you cross the line of appearing to present a risk of harm to yourself or others.
There’s a lot to be angry about, as they say, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”.
Where I and others disagree with you is about the object of that anger, or what exactly the “important issues” are.
You probably believe that climate change is not an “important issue”, that it’s silly to be angry about climate change and our continued investment in fossil fuel projects, subsidies etc.
Maybe you believe that we’re tricked by what you believe to be exaggeration or scare-mongering in the media.
As you can probably guess, we think that gendered bathrooms are not an important issue, that it’s silly to be angry about bathrooms, and you’re tricked by the media’s exaggeration and scare mongering.
Maybe we should think about what people in 100 years from now will think when they look back on this period of time. How will they judge us, and what would their perspective be on these issues? I find it difficult to imagine that culture war stuff will be significant. On the other hand, climate change has the potential to alter the trajectory of life on earth.
It’s also hard to imagine what can be achieved by being angry about culture war stuff, but anger about climate change can translate into action, limiting the very real damage being done.
Well, at present, the "very real damage" caused by climate change has resulted in higher crop yields and a smaller death toll from non-optimal ambient temperatures. So it seems a little ridiculous to be actively shutting down the fuel source that has made 1st world life possible and lifted millions out of poverty. Especially when doing so will impact (as always) the less fortunate. So, I think more people should be angry about that.
Gendered bathrooms are an issue that at best, distract from the real issue, which is the slippery slope we've discussed.
Most the issues in the culture war that people get angry about aren't the real issues anyway.
Yes, just like the Covid example, the supporters of the official narrative refuse to debate the skeptics, with the flimsy excuse that to do so would only lend them undeserved credibility. Yet climate change alarmism proceeds without even identification of what optimum global average temperature is. Geologic history designates several periods (of different durations) as being 'climate optimums' with higher temperatures and more abundant and diverse biota than at present. The most recent climate optimum was the Holocene Optimum, around 8,000 years ago, a relatively short time period after the peak 20,000 yrs ago, of the last ice age, the Quaternary, which we are still officially in (in an interstitial). Sea levels at that glaciation peak were 140 meters (400 ft) lower than they are now. Sea level changes follow climate changes with a considerable delay. The Holocene Highstand, the peak ocean level in these last 20,000 years was about 5,000 years ago, with levels between one and two meters higher than current levels. The fear about a tipping point caused by permafrost melt and methane release is entirely defused if one recognizes that most permafrost present 20,000 years ago has already melted, along with 98% plus of that continental ice.
The Romans grew grapes in Britain during the Roman Age 2000 years ago. Iceland and Greenland were colonized during the Medieval Warm Period. Poplar trees grew and the colonists were able to grow barley and raise livestock in southern Greenland. Neither is possible today, following the Little Ice Age which caused the total collapse of those Greenland colonies and decimation of the Icelandic population by the early 15th century.
People think that wildfires of recent years are unprecedented. They are unaware of century long drought and massive wildfires in California and the American west, evidence for which shows up in the presence of particular xerophytic pollens and in layers rich in ash and char in estuarial sediments along the coast.
Far too many just go along with concepts which have minimal scientific backing but are just complicated enough that it is easier to go with what the official sources say. Yes, CO2 absorbs (and emits) long wave infrared radiation, but that is a completely insufficient basis to extrapolate to catastrophe. Yes, the government, and the behind the scenes funders of election campaigns, and other beneficiaries, will and do lie to you, whenever it serves their purposes. Those who demand answers and justification for promoted policies are deplatformed but never debated.
It’s been interesting to watch the climate change deniers alter the narrative from ‘there’s no major climate change occurring’ to ‘well, there is a major change happening but the climate has ALWAYS changed, we’ll be fine’.
I could point to every piece of research, all the climate models and predictions made by the thousands of experts on the subject, but it’s quite clear that evidence alone is not going to sway someone who’s so invested, ideologically, that they can continue the denial.
But for any others reading this, I feel a duty to rebut the nonsense, so here goes…
The alarm/concern over human-caused climate change is based on it being well outside of the ‘normal’ cycles of warming and cooling which occur over millennia, and as such, will have completely unpredictable knock-on effects. The earth is indeed used to slow warming and cooling events, and these occur within a system of relative equilibrium (and very slowly).
The sharp and accelerated increase in global temperatures (yes, global. Not local, like the Romans growing grapes in England [btw there are hundreds of vineyards in the British Isles today, so..]) mean we’re now experiencing the hottest global temperatures in human history, this is not part of any natural process, but a sudden spike beginning with the industrialization and accelerating.
What the deniers do is gaslight and muddy the waters by bringing up some vaguely plausible-sounding things about permafrost, for example, and this is usually enough for anyone looking for an excuse to be a naysayer. The next thing they do is claim that their narrative is being ‘silenced’ by the powers that be, despite the fact that the most powerful business interests on the planet (and their media arms) are the ones producing the very propaganda they’re repeating.
This issue at its heart is the same as every other major issue today - it's been politicized and used to create cultural division.
Here's the dumbed-down version: There are only two official sides. One side are deniers and on the other side are the catastrophic end-of-days people. And then unofficially there's everyone else (most people) who are pigeonholed into either one of these camps.
There is significant propaganda coming from both sides. Contrary to your claim, the most reasonable people speaking sbout this issue have never "altered their narrative" but have always maintained that sure, the earth may be warming a little bit, but it's hardly life threatening.
The biggest problem any of these so-called "deniers" have with the way this issue is being addressed is NOT that they're being forced to be responsible, but that the legislation being thrust down our throats does much more harm than good, if it does any good at all.
Mr. Smith is the one so invested ideologically that he cannot seriously address any counterarguments to his alarmism. He provides no evidence to counter any of my contentions and is evidently quite blind to the reality of suppression of skeptical opinions by the MSM and social media. He raises the matter of powerful business interests providing talking points for skeptics when we are actually seeing big business adopt foolish politically correct policies of all sorts, including 'carbon footprint' reduction targets and the likes of British Petroleum advertise that their initials now stand for Beyond Petroleum.
William Nordhaus was awarded the 2018 prize in Economics for his analysis of IPCC data and projections (RCP - Representative Concentration Pathways) which modeled the effects of different levels of CO2 emission and resultant increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. He compared the costs attributed to higher temperatures to the economic costs of achieving the different levels of emission reduction. He concluded that the cost of mitigation of adverse effects was lower than the economic losses resulting from curtailing emissions of the probable RCP path. And that was while ignoring the benefits of higher temperatures and higher biological activity.
Mortality from natural disasters and temperature extremes has been going down for decades, and far more people die from cold than from heat.
It’s not for me to “provide .. evidence to counter any of [your] contentions'' because neither you nor I are climate scientists. As such, we can both make appeals to authority, but the onus is firmly on you in this case, not me.
If you ask my opinion on the science of climate change, or if you ask my opinion on the best type of cement to use in bridge foundations, or my opinion on cosmology, or animal husbandry, my answer will be this: “what do the leading experts in that particular field say?” Because whatever they say is probably my opinion.
I’m not taking ice-core samples in the arctic. I’m not studying atmospheric changes and historical weather records. I’m doing my job. Humans specialize. That’s how we achieve such amazing things, we delegate specific fields to study to specialized experts.
The IPCC, World Meteorological Society, American Meteorological Society, the Royal Societies (UK, and Commonwealth), the US Navy, NASA, the list is very long…
Your assertion is that they are all wrong, and you are right. I’m sorry but that’s going to take some rather spectacular reasoning and evidence on your part. A lot more than something an economist wrote about cost analysis (William Nordhaus is by no means a ‘climate skeptic btw, his beliefs on the science are roughly the same as mine, and he believes we should be doing more, not less, to reduce carbon emissions) or about your dislike for energy companies’ greenwashing campaigns (huh?).
There are two separate issues here: the science, and the policy. The science says we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions immediately. The policy is open to debate, William Nordhaus has some ideas on policy, for example. But the policy must be based on the science. What you’re doing is some creative remixing of science-adjacent cherry-picking to make it compatible with your preferred policies.
The science isn’t political. Science is science. It tells us what the problem is, and what we need to do to reverse it in time. I have said it before, but I’ll say it again… watch the film 'Manufacturing Doubt', it goes into great detail about the teams of PR specialists who are not shy to admit they follow the exact playbook of big tobacco, creating narratives to undermine science, to make out as though our scientific bodies are divided, or influenced by some political ideology, specifically so that you guys can say ‘see? It’s all so politicized!’ You are following the script perfectly.
And this is what I keep saying: the issue is not the science, it's the politics. There is no science anywhere that says a catastrophe is imminent. There is no science that says we've reached some kind of "tipping point". This is all politics.
So if someone tells you there's a large asteroid headed toward Earth, you wouldn't care because everything appears to be just fine for now? We're talking about the planet, that's why we err on the cautious side with projections. You want to see the mass die-offs for yourself before you think it's worth worrying about?
Things don't "appear to be fine", they ARE fine. Science deals with facts, and the facts are what Greg and I have laid out above. The only "climate emergency" we are facing at present is an emergency of ifs, ands, and buts. Talk about following a script. Humans have never been doing better than they are right now.
A much more present real emergency is the rise of totalitarian tendencies in democratic governments. That should be much more of a concern to everyone.
You should tell the vast majority of scientists they are wrong, and show them your grade 10 report card to back your authority. I doubt you even know what a hypothesis test is.
Simple argument for simple rural minds like Ken:
Consider Pascal's wager.
Imagine that instead of belief in God, the wager now considers the utility of a belief in climate change. Then, imagine the payouts are thus:
- if climate change exists, and you live according to this principle, you gain life everlasting (through your progeny having a livable environment), an infinite payoff.
- If climate change does not exist, and you live according to this principle, you lose some finite amount of comfort. A bounded and relatively small loss.
- If climate change exists and you do not live according to this principle, the environment will be ruined and your progeny will suffer greatly, an infinite loss.
- If climate change does not exist and you do not live according to this principle, there is no loss whatsoever.
The largest payoff is infinite. The largest loss is also infinite. The obvious choice here, for reasonable individuals, ought to be the first, as it would minimize the overall risk to future generations. Of course, if you only care about yourself then doing nothing may be a more optimal choice.
Constructing false arguments which rely on putative scientific findings that don't exist for your audience of 3 readers is something else entirely and it's difficult for me to see why someone would pour so many hours into writing out such lazy indefensible ideas.
The message of your little blog here could be summed up as "Ken doesn't want to do anything he's told". In that sense, it's about as entertaining and informative as reading your own kid's journal. I just do it at this point so that your local authorities can be contacted the moment you cross the line of appearing to present a risk of harm to yourself or others.
I'd definitely want my kid's guitar teacher to be openly advocating for more political violence. Excellent marketing tactic, Kenny.
There’s a lot to be angry about, as they say, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”.
Where I and others disagree with you is about the object of that anger, or what exactly the “important issues” are.
You probably believe that climate change is not an “important issue”, that it’s silly to be angry about climate change and our continued investment in fossil fuel projects, subsidies etc.
Maybe you believe that we’re tricked by what you believe to be exaggeration or scare-mongering in the media.
As you can probably guess, we think that gendered bathrooms are not an important issue, that it’s silly to be angry about bathrooms, and you’re tricked by the media’s exaggeration and scare mongering.
Maybe we should think about what people in 100 years from now will think when they look back on this period of time. How will they judge us, and what would their perspective be on these issues? I find it difficult to imagine that culture war stuff will be significant. On the other hand, climate change has the potential to alter the trajectory of life on earth.
It’s also hard to imagine what can be achieved by being angry about culture war stuff, but anger about climate change can translate into action, limiting the very real damage being done.
Well, at present, the "very real damage" caused by climate change has resulted in higher crop yields and a smaller death toll from non-optimal ambient temperatures. So it seems a little ridiculous to be actively shutting down the fuel source that has made 1st world life possible and lifted millions out of poverty. Especially when doing so will impact (as always) the less fortunate. So, I think more people should be angry about that.
Gendered bathrooms are an issue that at best, distract from the real issue, which is the slippery slope we've discussed.
Most the issues in the culture war that people get angry about aren't the real issues anyway.
Yes, just like the Covid example, the supporters of the official narrative refuse to debate the skeptics, with the flimsy excuse that to do so would only lend them undeserved credibility. Yet climate change alarmism proceeds without even identification of what optimum global average temperature is. Geologic history designates several periods (of different durations) as being 'climate optimums' with higher temperatures and more abundant and diverse biota than at present. The most recent climate optimum was the Holocene Optimum, around 8,000 years ago, a relatively short time period after the peak 20,000 yrs ago, of the last ice age, the Quaternary, which we are still officially in (in an interstitial). Sea levels at that glaciation peak were 140 meters (400 ft) lower than they are now. Sea level changes follow climate changes with a considerable delay. The Holocene Highstand, the peak ocean level in these last 20,000 years was about 5,000 years ago, with levels between one and two meters higher than current levels. The fear about a tipping point caused by permafrost melt and methane release is entirely defused if one recognizes that most permafrost present 20,000 years ago has already melted, along with 98% plus of that continental ice.
The Romans grew grapes in Britain during the Roman Age 2000 years ago. Iceland and Greenland were colonized during the Medieval Warm Period. Poplar trees grew and the colonists were able to grow barley and raise livestock in southern Greenland. Neither is possible today, following the Little Ice Age which caused the total collapse of those Greenland colonies and decimation of the Icelandic population by the early 15th century.
People think that wildfires of recent years are unprecedented. They are unaware of century long drought and massive wildfires in California and the American west, evidence for which shows up in the presence of particular xerophytic pollens and in layers rich in ash and char in estuarial sediments along the coast.
Far too many just go along with concepts which have minimal scientific backing but are just complicated enough that it is easier to go with what the official sources say. Yes, CO2 absorbs (and emits) long wave infrared radiation, but that is a completely insufficient basis to extrapolate to catastrophe. Yes, the government, and the behind the scenes funders of election campaigns, and other beneficiaries, will and do lie to you, whenever it serves their purposes. Those who demand answers and justification for promoted policies are deplatformed but never debated.
It’s been interesting to watch the climate change deniers alter the narrative from ‘there’s no major climate change occurring’ to ‘well, there is a major change happening but the climate has ALWAYS changed, we’ll be fine’.
I could point to every piece of research, all the climate models and predictions made by the thousands of experts on the subject, but it’s quite clear that evidence alone is not going to sway someone who’s so invested, ideologically, that they can continue the denial.
But for any others reading this, I feel a duty to rebut the nonsense, so here goes…
The alarm/concern over human-caused climate change is based on it being well outside of the ‘normal’ cycles of warming and cooling which occur over millennia, and as such, will have completely unpredictable knock-on effects. The earth is indeed used to slow warming and cooling events, and these occur within a system of relative equilibrium (and very slowly).
The sharp and accelerated increase in global temperatures (yes, global. Not local, like the Romans growing grapes in England [btw there are hundreds of vineyards in the British Isles today, so..]) mean we’re now experiencing the hottest global temperatures in human history, this is not part of any natural process, but a sudden spike beginning with the industrialization and accelerating.
What the deniers do is gaslight and muddy the waters by bringing up some vaguely plausible-sounding things about permafrost, for example, and this is usually enough for anyone looking for an excuse to be a naysayer. The next thing they do is claim that their narrative is being ‘silenced’ by the powers that be, despite the fact that the most powerful business interests on the planet (and their media arms) are the ones producing the very propaganda they’re repeating.
This issue at its heart is the same as every other major issue today - it's been politicized and used to create cultural division.
Here's the dumbed-down version: There are only two official sides. One side are deniers and on the other side are the catastrophic end-of-days people. And then unofficially there's everyone else (most people) who are pigeonholed into either one of these camps.
There is significant propaganda coming from both sides. Contrary to your claim, the most reasonable people speaking sbout this issue have never "altered their narrative" but have always maintained that sure, the earth may be warming a little bit, but it's hardly life threatening.
The biggest problem any of these so-called "deniers" have with the way this issue is being addressed is NOT that they're being forced to be responsible, but that the legislation being thrust down our throats does much more harm than good, if it does any good at all.
Mr. Smith is the one so invested ideologically that he cannot seriously address any counterarguments to his alarmism. He provides no evidence to counter any of my contentions and is evidently quite blind to the reality of suppression of skeptical opinions by the MSM and social media. He raises the matter of powerful business interests providing talking points for skeptics when we are actually seeing big business adopt foolish politically correct policies of all sorts, including 'carbon footprint' reduction targets and the likes of British Petroleum advertise that their initials now stand for Beyond Petroleum.
William Nordhaus was awarded the 2018 prize in Economics for his analysis of IPCC data and projections (RCP - Representative Concentration Pathways) which modeled the effects of different levels of CO2 emission and resultant increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. He compared the costs attributed to higher temperatures to the economic costs of achieving the different levels of emission reduction. He concluded that the cost of mitigation of adverse effects was lower than the economic losses resulting from curtailing emissions of the probable RCP path. And that was while ignoring the benefits of higher temperatures and higher biological activity.
Mortality from natural disasters and temperature extremes has been going down for decades, and far more people die from cold than from heat.
It’s not for me to “provide .. evidence to counter any of [your] contentions'' because neither you nor I are climate scientists. As such, we can both make appeals to authority, but the onus is firmly on you in this case, not me.
If you ask my opinion on the science of climate change, or if you ask my opinion on the best type of cement to use in bridge foundations, or my opinion on cosmology, or animal husbandry, my answer will be this: “what do the leading experts in that particular field say?” Because whatever they say is probably my opinion.
I’m not taking ice-core samples in the arctic. I’m not studying atmospheric changes and historical weather records. I’m doing my job. Humans specialize. That’s how we achieve such amazing things, we delegate specific fields to study to specialized experts.
The IPCC, World Meteorological Society, American Meteorological Society, the Royal Societies (UK, and Commonwealth), the US Navy, NASA, the list is very long…
Your assertion is that they are all wrong, and you are right. I’m sorry but that’s going to take some rather spectacular reasoning and evidence on your part. A lot more than something an economist wrote about cost analysis (William Nordhaus is by no means a ‘climate skeptic btw, his beliefs on the science are roughly the same as mine, and he believes we should be doing more, not less, to reduce carbon emissions) or about your dislike for energy companies’ greenwashing campaigns (huh?).
There are two separate issues here: the science, and the policy. The science says we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions immediately. The policy is open to debate, William Nordhaus has some ideas on policy, for example. But the policy must be based on the science. What you’re doing is some creative remixing of science-adjacent cherry-picking to make it compatible with your preferred policies.
The science isn’t political. Science is science. It tells us what the problem is, and what we need to do to reverse it in time. I have said it before, but I’ll say it again… watch the film 'Manufacturing Doubt', it goes into great detail about the teams of PR specialists who are not shy to admit they follow the exact playbook of big tobacco, creating narratives to undermine science, to make out as though our scientific bodies are divided, or influenced by some political ideology, specifically so that you guys can say ‘see? It’s all so politicized!’ You are following the script perfectly.
And this is what I keep saying: the issue is not the science, it's the politics. There is no science anywhere that says a catastrophe is imminent. There is no science that says we've reached some kind of "tipping point". This is all politics.
So if someone tells you there's a large asteroid headed toward Earth, you wouldn't care because everything appears to be just fine for now? We're talking about the planet, that's why we err on the cautious side with projections. You want to see the mass die-offs for yourself before you think it's worth worrying about?
Things don't "appear to be fine", they ARE fine. Science deals with facts, and the facts are what Greg and I have laid out above. The only "climate emergency" we are facing at present is an emergency of ifs, ands, and buts. Talk about following a script. Humans have never been doing better than they are right now.
A much more present real emergency is the rise of totalitarian tendencies in democratic governments. That should be much more of a concern to everyone.
You should tell the vast majority of scientists they are wrong, and show them your grade 10 report card to back your authority. I doubt you even know what a hypothesis test is.