Thaddeus Howze shares a classic video about how to change the future, and suggests that it is even more relevant today.
A single man engaging in a struggle against the most awesome forces ever assembled. Economic titans, political giants, and devastating natural phenomena. Who is this man? Is he a superhero we don’t know about?
Not at all. Greg Craven seems like a very simple, very rational individual. No superpowers included. He published a video a few years ago simply called: The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See… Seven million views and thousands of attempts to refute later, he is still standing. His video engages in logic, reasoning and makes for an answer toward the argument of climate change and how we deal with it that is both irrefutable and annoyingly effective.
If only reason and logic were a tools in the hands of political candidates, oil mega-corporations, and business organizations who make every effort to avoid dealing with climate change. After dealing with refutations to his video, he wrote a book called “What’s The Worst That Can Happen?”
The video creator does mention something I have said before: We are in the midst of this experiment right now, inside one of the petri dishes. It would be terrible to find out that by denying climate change, and making no effort to change it, when we had the chance, we damn ourselves to having NO future choices that matter.
Climate change can be denied. The effects of climate change are not so easily ignored.
Ask the survivors of Sandy and every storm like her in the years ahead. Ask those farmers in the midwest this year who survived over 100 days of triple digit heat which destroyed more than a third of our farmlands production value. Ask those leaders of island nations who are experiencing rising sea levels which ultimately will make their nations disappear during high tide.
For them, climate change’s reality or ability to be proven matter not at all. For them, a life-altering experience has already taken place, unable to be undone. Your belief in climate change is not required. Only for you to apply some logic and see if we do nothing and are wrong, life as we know it is over.
I admire Greg Craven because he dares you to imagine what could happen and forces you to consider NO action is NOT a choice.
I respectfully dissent. Judging by this chap’s accent I would say he is American. Few countries in the world practice the kind of environmental restrictions that America does because very few countries can afford it. World wide economic collapse could lead to nuclear war which would end the planet as we know it. The same result as found in column 2 row 2. The devil is in the details. Also, we could change our policies and practices with an eye toward controlling global warming without effect and end up in column 2, row 2 anyway. There is nothing logically conclusive… Read more »
Yes, there is a distinct possibility we could do everything in our power and it still not be enough. It may already be too late especially with the nations of the world wanting to create and produce more materials out of natural resources than ever before. With economies built out of turning NATURE into STUFF at a breakneck pace, there is absolutely no incentive to do anything differently. And as far as you are concerned we should do nothing. Seems reasonable to me. Why should we take any effort to change what is the natural order of things. Extinction has… Read more »
I would tend to agree with the sentiment that we don’t really need to know whether it’s happening or not, whether it’s caused by humans or by natural planetary cycles. My stance is, no matter the cause, we certainly shouldn’t be actively making it worse. Maybe the planet is heating up on its own – but burning fossil fuels and raising thousands of acres worth of methane-farting livestock, at the scale that we do it *as a planet, not just in America* surely can’t be helping things. I think it’s a little silly to pretend these actions have no effect… Read more »
It have always found it interesting how so many assume that scientific knowledge and understanding leads to immediate enlightenment. I know one political psychology specialist who calls it Hindu Sacred Cow Syndrome. When people are faced with the issues the biggest fear for many is the lack of a Skinny Mocha Latte to make them wake up. NO Joke. What gets interesting is how people react to coffee. Coffee plants need a limited climate range to grow and produce that Delicious Dark brew. Coffee is also the second most traded commodity on the planet after Oil. The issue with coffee… Read more »
I don’t think Pascal’s wager applies. In his time, with his knowledge, maybe so – but that’s not where we are today. His rationale assumes, incorrectly, that the evidence for/against are of equal chance – they are not.
Surely this is just a version of Pascal’s Wager. The exact same logic can be applied to the existence of God. As many of those who will support this climate change form of the argument may ridicule the original God version of the argument, it might be worth asking why exactly the argument is considered persuasive.
Two reasons this is different to Pascal’s wager:
1- Prior plausibility. For the argument from consequences to be persuasive, you have to first establish that the bad thing is plausible, in proportion to the damage it would do if it happens.
2- Sufficiency. Pascal’s wager assumes that if there’s a god, it’s the particular one that the author is proposing. This is a false dichotomy – there’s a virtually infinite array of religions and gods to choose from, and no reason to expect that what propiates one would not enrage another. Global warming doesn’t have this issue.
I do love the way that ideas and arguments get tweaked off into tangents and arguments about just how to define an argument – is ice cold? – and if a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there to hear it does a squirrel fart! P^) Putting the issues into context can get very interesting – Such as how 9/11 and Terrorist attacks on the USA helped to uncover yet more knowledge on Global Climate Change and changed the perception of so many. The findings even have been linked to how language has been shifted from Global Warming… Read more »