Greg Craven, an Oregon HS teacher in Corvallis, wrote the one book to read on climate change if you're reading only one -- a concise, well-written, often amusing, and compelling argument for getting off the dime on responding to climate change.
He's going to speak here in Salem at an Audubon Society meeting and YOU are invited to attend this free event.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Audubon Society, Salem Chapter Meeting
Greg Craven will focus on the central themes of his just published book, "What's The Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate." He offers a concise way of thinking and making decisions about climate change amidst all the claims and counterclaims.
Bill McKibben, long time environmental activist and author, has said, "The book trumps most of our accounts of the global warming crisis, partly for its good humor and straight forward logic and partly because the author has actually figured out what actions make sense."
Greg Craven graduated from the University of Puget Sound with majors in Asian Studies and Computer Science and from Willamette University with a Master of Arts in Teaching.
Audubon Society chapter meetings are held in the Anderson Room, in the basement at the Salem Public Library on Liberty at 6:30 PM and the program generally starts around 7 PM.
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3 comments:
I am a proponent of curbing global emissions and stopping climate change, but this argument has a few logical fallacies I need to address.
Pascals wager is much the same argument - to convince us on the existence of god. Row 1 is replaced with "god exists" and Row 2 is replaced with "god does not exists." The choice is then to believe god exists and either waste your finite life believing in him if he doesn't or be given eternal bliss if he does. the opposite is to not waste your life believing in him if he doesn't, but are sentenced to eternal damnation if he does. By the same logic you've used, the choice is obvious, you must believe in god.
This is, of course, absurd. The same argument could be made for any homeopathic medicine, any religion, any superstition. It would be silly to believe in something based strictly upon the chance it may occur, unless you can place empirical probabilities on those chances. This is why the argument doesn't hold for god, or superstition, but could hold for climate change if you address the statistical issue. If we are going to win hearts and minds to push this movement forward, you need those numbers on your side.
Of course, fleshing out the outlines of the basic structure (Pascal's wager) is what his book does -- or, more precisely, he provides a way for lay people who are not climate scientists to develop their own expected values for each outcome.
The laypeople shouldn't be developing statistical models and coming up with expected values. That is the job of the scientific community. It would be interesting to see this idea pushed forward with what the consensus is for expected values and expected costs/damages. Maybe that's what the book does, I'll have to read it.
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