If I tell you that it has to do with global warming, your interest level might drop a thousand fold. Stupid “climate change†videos are everywhere, including classrooms where unsuspecting children have their reason replaced with biodegradable compost. But in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, the prize goes to a video that has had an enormous world-wide impact on the weak of mind, more indelibly perhaps than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
How It All Ends by high school science teacher Greg Craven has been such a hit on YouTube (since 2007), that he’s offered to let you pay for it on DVD. If you really want to throw money away, killing trees and increasing atmospheric CO2 in the process, you can also buy the short paper-back version with the long title What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate.
Mr. Craven’s claim: You can make a rational choice about whether to support political action on global warming without considering whether there’s really a problem to address. Make no mistake about it; he expects you to support political action even if you’re not convinced that climate change is a problem. It defies common sense, obviously. But once again, we’re asked to ignore the obvious for a little more compost in place of reason.
He puts his political action argument in the form of a “risk analysis;†one that I’m sure would not survive a cursory review in a first year business course. The bottom line is that if you feel confused by the global warming debate, then you should definitely favor draining trillions of dollars from the world economy even if it causes a world-wide depression and you starve to death as a result. It doesn’t matter whether the trillions spent address any real problem or whether political action could do any good even if a real problem exists. You don’t need to think about that.
You don’t need to think about that because Mr. Craven does it for you, replacing your uncertainty with the fear that we’ll face dire consequences if political action is not taken. Here’s the trick. He says if you are not certain either way, then you must accept that the alarmists’ view “might be†true. If it “might be†true, then he asserts that you must treat it in your analysis as if it is true. In other words, if you don’t know that it’s true, then it’s true. And by the way; even if you are absolutely certain that global warming is not a problem requiring political action, you’re still instructed to act as if it is. After all, you’re not infallible (like the warmers are); which equates to uncertainty and by his default reasoning tips the analysis in favor of political action.
Real-world risk assessment does in fact require that you understand what you’re talking about. The point is to understand risks and assess their impact. There is no magic that transforms not having a clue into “a rational response†to anything.
Bottom line: Mr. Craven is preaching fear of the unknown: telling you to forget about knowledge and reason and to allow yourself to be driven by global warming fear-mongering without question. Be afraid of what “might be” imagined as true – even if it’s not. It makes you wonder what other compost he might be stuffing into the heads of high school students in place of reason.
