Pascal's Wager and the Planet

Without question, Blaise Pascal is one of the smartest men to have lived ________ (you can fill in the blank with any set of time that includes his life - week, month, year, and century are out, but millennium, 'in the last 500 years', or "AD" would all work fine). His intro sentence on Wikipedia says he was a "French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher." A true interdisciplanarian. Further down, "after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator."  Oops, left out "while still a teenager".

When he was 16, he "wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry" - I'm twice as old as that, and I don't even know what projective geometry *is*. He proved that vacuums do exist (a vacuum had been believed impossible since Aristotle), so you can thank *him* for your Roomba, as well as giving us this great quote, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." I'm leaving out a whole bunch of his achievements, but here's one more: "And, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat on the subject, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities."

One of his contributions, in the realm of religion, or philosophy, or probability, or however you'd like to categorize it, is called Pascal's Wager. He laid out the following statements: "God is, or He is not." "A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up." "According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions". "You must wager" (not choosing a position is the same as believing there's no God). "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." "Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

Pascal recognized that we couldn't verify the claims of Christianity in the same way we would claims of probability or physics, but, knowing what the stakes were, he proposed it was very wise to take measures to protect oneself from the risks of inaction (and, if you're reading this and not a Christian, while I find his vacuum quote more compelling, this is a great reason to consider the claims of Jesus).

However, I believe Pascal's approach is also useful in a lot of areas of life - the basic lesson that, when the stakes are both very high and very one-sided, it's simply pragmatic to take the safe bet. One place this makes *very* good sense, although the individual stakes are not *as high*, is climate change.

If you know me well, you're probably tired of my refrains, warnings, discussions and Facebook posts about climate change. Most people are; congratulations, you find me just as boring as the rest of the population! (Be kind to my wife; she has the burden of living with me *every* day, with no escape.) I believe the science behind climate change is both sound and convincing, but the real problem with discussions about climate change isn't as much disagreement about the science, as it is that most of us don't know what the stakes are.

The danger of climate change isn't that we don't get to build snowmen in the winter, or that our air conditioning bill goes up. It's not even record wildfires like we saw this summer in Colorado, or mega-tornadoes cutting huge swaths across towns like Joplin, Missouri. No, the real threat of climate change involves two "f" words. The first one is flooding; most of us have seen pictures on the news at various times of flooded homes. My parents, little sister and little brother had their home flooded in 2008, and it was one of the most devastating things that's ever happened to them.

But the good thing about flooding, in typical human experience, is that the waters go back down, you're able to go back and salvage what possessions are intact, and if it's feasible, clean or rebuild your home. If climate change predictions are correct, and there are only reasons to think that they are (though perhaps underestimated), we won't be facing floods from rivers, streams, or broken dams that last days or months (my parent's house was flooded for six weeks); we'll be looking at oceans rising (due to melting ice caps), flooding our cities (as many of the largest cities are near the coast, both in the US and throughout the world), and the water never leaving. It's a pretty bad scenario, and by itself, just the risk of it ought to motivate us to get our collective act together in terms of pollution, fossil fuels, and CO2. But that's the little f.

The big F, the much more deadly and disturbing F, and the far less familiar F, is famine. Climate change is affecting, and will affect, global rainfall patterns, and while some local areas will have better growing conditions (parts of Canada and Siberia), the parts of the world that currently excel at feeding 7 billion of us are going to be increasingly more difficult to get adequate yields from - especially regions that are currently more arid. I had the fortune of growing up on some of the best farmland in the country, and as much as I wished I lived in the city so I could have friends, I didn't realize that friends required social skills, and there were a lot of privileges to growing up on the farm, as well.

This summer, I was back to visit our family farm for about three weeks, in the midst of the worst drought America has experienced in roughly 60 years. Not only did I drive from Texas to get there and back, but I did a fair amount of driving around in the Midwest, as well, and on every farm that wasn't irrigated, the corn was either brown and dead, or wilted and unlikely to produce more than a few kernels per ear. My parents were lucky to have an irrigation system for their field, but not only was that expensive, but for their farm, it uses 1100 gallons of water *per minute* (that's twenty 55 gallon barrels). Per minute! It was great for them, and for other farmers during this drought, to have these systems, but many don't because of the cost. And at 1100 gallons per minute, if major droughts should become more common, I question how many years groundwater tables are able to sustain that use.

This is an important question, because while the world *does* produce enough food for everyone, we don't distribute it well enough or use it wisely enough for everyone to have what they need, and about 20,000 children under 5 die every day due to malnutrition and similar effects. If we start producing less food, those numbers will skyrocket, as will the non-fatal effects of malnutrition.

In any case, if climate change occurs as scientists are predicting, many of the world's major cities will flood, but that's not actually the real threat. The real risk of climate change is that droughts will increase, crops will fail, and millions more will die of hunger or be malnourished than is already the case. The ironic thing is that the CO2 emissions that would cause climate change, relatively, come from the global rich and middle class, with our higher rates of consumption, but it's the world's poor who won't be able to afford higher food prices and would be faced with starvation.

I don't know how it came to be that we live in a country where *Christians* are the main opponents of calls to steward what God has given us, but it's past time for that trend to stop. We can't leave care for the planet, and the poor it most effects, to the non-believing any longer.

Developing ways to raise efficiency, use less oil, and lower CO2 emissions has a cost (though probably a lower cost that flooding many of the world's largest cities), but when looking at the overall stakes, the relatively small costs to avert disaster, compared to the ongoing deaths and losses due to floods and famines climate change would bring about, I believe Blaise Pascal would say, regardless of what doubts you may have about the work of scientists, you should wager, without hesitation, that climate change is a real threat we must prevent.