Pascal's Wager and Climate Change Rhetoric

[gulliver]

I googled this and found that Tim O'Reilly has a great blog entry on it.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/pascals-wager-and-climate-change.html

Republican "elite thought leaders" have almost universally manacled themselves to the idea that climate change is a myth. We know it's dumb and wrong, but we still haven't quite figured out how to push them into the pool.

Dems keep trying to gape at Republicans for not accepting the scientific consensus. We seem to forget that our outrage is exactly what they want. It's all a big emotional power struggle with them. They are like children. They want to see steam coming out of our ears. They want to show that they are fearless and cool.

A better approach that we use is to try to appeal to greed, pride, and competitiveness: "America needs to position itself for a stake in the green and clean energy jobs of the future." That works, IMO. The two things it lacks are: 1) It doesn't force an immediate conditional decision on the climate change controversy, and 2) It doesn't damage Republicans. America is perfectly willing to go after clean jobs without believing in climate change. Republican voters will take those jobs while denying any environmental reasons for doing so.

The Pascal's Wager argument takes the appeal to greed, pride, and competitiveness to a higher sales level. It says that believing in climate change will produce benefits, whether the phenomenon is true or not. Disbelieving has no profit and high risk. Therefore, you should decide to believe, at least for now. The Republican position is for outsiders.

[defendandprotect]

1. "Climate Change" is a euphemis for Global Warming ... created by Frank Luntz, GOP propagandist .....

Global Warming is the term we have been using since the 1950's and it makes clear

what we are talking about. HEATING the environment is what creates chaotic weather.

Luntz made the suggestion to Bush in 2002 to CHANGE over to the less explicit term --

which probably sounds to a lot of people like something normal is going on.

It's not!!