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Articles

Pascal’s Climate Wager

Keith Tidman considers the smart bet for our future.

There’s general scientific agreement that something bad is going on with the world’s climate. Contention starts to loom large, however, when the conversation swivels inevitably to why and how that change is happening, and whether we can or even ought to do anything about it. Some people assert that natural cycles traceable over tens of thousands of years are causing the change, and conclude that the science to the contrary is inconclusive at best or even outright bogus – skewed, it’s disdainfully claimed, by the ideologues in order to acquire advantage. Others assert that humans are indeed major contributors to climate change, starting in the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution and societies’ sharp turn to fossil fuels to make their economies hum. These scientists contend that the evidence leads us to human causes of climate change, as shown by various metrics, such as the spike in carbon dioxide levels coinciding with the advent of hydrocarbon-fuelled technologies.

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