I know that I am bound to accept global warming for many reasons: because I am misanthropic–and regard humans as a blind, piggy species, and I collect data that support my belief; because I am cheap and anti-materialistic and am judgmental of rich people who use a lot of oil; because I’m outdoorsy and my social pod are treehuggers…
But let’s concede for a moment that the nay-sayers might be right. Let’s say it’s 50-50 (rather than 99-1, where Chris Matthews puts it).
My father’s a scientist, and when I was a kid, my parents were friends of the Pevsners. Their father is a physicist. He was driving us kids somewhere one day and we were talking about a shooting in the subway in New York. I remember saying, Oh I wouldn’t be afraid to go down in the subway, it’s one in a thousand that you’d get shot. And Dr. Pevsner said, If the odds that you would be shot are one in a thousand, no one would go down into the subway, for good reason. Looking back on it, I understand that he was right. And if the odds were 50-50 that you would be shot in the subway– no one would ever set foot there.
If the odds are even 50-50 that we’re destroying the planet earth, we should act and act fast.
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