Greg Craven

I've read lots of books about climate change ...including some from the skeptics....but Greg Craven takes a different approach here. The book is really about a decision-making technique to help us decide whether we should be doing something about climate change. Basically he starts with a "Boston Box". On the vertical scale are 1. Global Warming is true and 2. Global warming is false. And on the horizontal scale he has A. Take significant action now. B. Little or no action now. And the rest of the book is about making these choices for ourselves. Though Craven also takes us through his own reasoning and comes out quite strongly in favour of taking action now. He draws attention to humans almost infinite capacity for self delusion and the particular dangers of the "confirmation rule" where we look for instances that confirm our beliefs and disregard the non-confirming instances. He suggests one way to check for such bias is to try and falsify the belief. (What evidence would falsify the belief?). He also cites an article by Daniel Gilbert in the Los Angeles Times that argues that the human brain's alarm system has been conditioned over time to respond to threats that are immediate and visible....and climate warming doesn't fit these conditions,
There are some quite useful techniques employed here. One is his way of ranking the various (competing and contradictory) sources of information by credibility. Ranking them as more credible and less credible For example individual lay people (with no formal qualifications in climate science are given quite low credibility whereas the global CEO letters from Shell oil and Exxon (stating that Global warming is real and they need to be taking action) are given high credibility because that stance would seem to require that they were working against the immediate interests of their industry. Another thing I found useful was his potted summary of various sources such as the Stern Review. Though Craven gives rather more credibility to Government reports than I might give myself. I have helped produce such reports and saw first-hand how "stakeholders" fought long and hard to defend their organisations "point of view". Often this resulted in having the report language watered down: "softened" so it became less hard-hitting (and maybe less accurate). But, having read about the tactics employed by the cigarette industry and more recently the fossil fuels industry.....such as paying/rewarding scientists to throw doubts on scientific findings....I guess that Government reports, where the individuals, putting their names to the report, are publicly known......tend to have more reliability than, say, the "Global Warming Policy Foundation".
At the start Craven insists that we write out what it would take to change our current view on climate change: Mine were: "That I'd need to be convinced that a. the world is not already warming at a rapid rate. and b. that reducing CO2 and greenhouse gases won't make a difference". And I didn't come away from reading the book convinced that either of these were correct.
Mind you, the book is really not about convincing one of the truth or otherwise of climate warming, it's about a methodology of making a decision where there is a cacophony of competing views being spouted and many "experts" supporting opposite views . (They can't both be right....though they could both be wrong).
Did I find the methodology useful? Yes I did. and it was somewhat original and some of the material that he included was useful;. Happy to give it four stars.… (altro)

Simple, one might even say simplistic, approach to the global warming debate. The author lays out reasons to respond immediately to the climate debate, and states that he is not going to try to convince his audience of the truth of global warming, but only that it makes more sense to act than not to act, even if it turns out to be wrong. In spite of that, his approach is much more that of someone attempting to convince, which is fine with me, since it seems unlikely the other approach has any legs at all. After all, if one is totally convinced that global warming is a hoax, then no amount of showing a person that it is more catastrophic to be wrong about that and not act than to be wrong the other way and act. Without some real conviction that there might be some possible truth to global warming, the reader is just going to dismiss the argument. It falls on its own merit. The reader absolutely has to have at least some acceptance of the possibility that global warming is real to accept the author's premise, that there is a good reason to act even if it should turn out to be wrong. In addition, his constant reference to the global warming debate as a "shouting match" is unnecessarily pejorative and, while accurate in some circles, seems to be his only referent for the various publications, books and articles that have been written - many of which are not shouting, and in fact are rather conservative in their estimations of the overall damage. Using words like hysteria and hype to describe the "warmers" can't be erased by simply agreeing with their point of view in the end, pointing out that they are, in fact, rather toned down in their estimates and have proven on numerous occasions to be erring on the side of caution. Overall, it isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree that global warming is real and serious, and those people don't need to be convinced.… (altro)

Craven engages in a praiseworthy effort to try to elicit 'rational responses' from lay people confused by the climate change debate in the media. His strategy is to get people thinking in terms of Pascal's Wager (though he fails to refer to Pascal), comparing the consequences of action and inaction with respect to climate change.

Now, Craven is a high school teacher, and writes like one --that is, the text is written as if holding the hands of restless, nerd-bashing, rather apathetic teenagers (I don't remember reading another book that tries to present scientific conclusions while at the same time making fun of scientists (the 'pocket-protector crowd', 'ubergeeks', etc.) so markedly. It may well be that this dismissal of disciplined scientific work is one of the factors that has got the debate in the media to the point it is now.

Still, as I said before, trying to steer away from political agendas and from impatience and frustration takes effort, and Craven deserves credit for that. If you haven't read any books on the topic, there are far worse places to start than this.… (altro)