Blaise Pascal’s 17th-century argument—believing in God to avoid eternal damnation—mirrors modern climate debates: if science proves catastrophic warming (e.g., record-high daily anomalies since May 2023), inaction risks societal collapse, while mitigation demands sacrifices like Illinois’s CEJA (2050 fossil-fuel-free goal). David Bloomberg’s 30-year air pollution work shows health gains—fewer asthma attacks, cancer deaths—outweigh costs, yet deniers like Elon Musk prioritize personal safety over collective survival. Unlike Pascal’s wager, climate science offers measurable evidence, yet motivated reasoning still delays action, echoing pre-WWII Nazi denial. The choice isn’t just rational but existential: ignore the data or pay now to save future generations. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello everyone, I'm Saul and I'm Sandy and we are the hosts of Tinfoil Tales.
We have been observing the Australian freedom movement since its COVID era inception.
We share our observations and analysis of a movement that has swept the world looking at how it has affected Australia specifically.
So if you want to know about people yelling across lakes, why what flag you carry, Maddox, and a super secret list of 28 names, find us in your podcast app.
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
So, so official, back today.
I'm just, I keep forgetting to do this in this new way that I do this.
So I am Spencer.
I'm the host of this podcast.
I used to just have that part of the shtick.
Yeah, I know.
I've listened back to a couple of the other episodes and I see that I've not always put that in there since I've started this new way of doing it.
So I keep forgetting to do that part, to introduce myself before this.
But regular listeners to this podcast will have noted that that is David Bloomberg that's with me today.
Longtime co-host.
Are you co-hosting this podcast?
Are you just a regular guest host?
Yeah.
I don't have, I'm very informal.
I don't have strict definitions of whatever.
Vice president in charge of tangents.
I don't know.
David's here.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, we don't need people in charge of that.
They'll happen on their own.
So before I get started into the content today, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear on this podcast or see on YouTube on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com and into the content today.
So topic today, I want to talk about Pascal's wager.
So super dry and boring.
You pick this up from philosophy, not everyone's favorite subject.
Oh, I thought it was in Vegas.
Nope.
I would have bet on that.
Las Vegas was not a thing, not even a twinkle in anyone's eye when Blaise Pascal put this together.
Blaise Pascal was a super hardcore Christian guy.
In fact, he was part of a very niche Christian sect that actually had an interpretation of the Bible.
I can't remember the name of the sect he was part of, but in that sect's interpretation of the Bible, only something like 5,000 people were ever going to make it into heaven.
It was sort of this, I think there's a similar part to Islam about how only a certain number of people are going to make it to the end.
And I also don't know, forgive me, I don't know a lot about Islam, but if there's multiple different versions of it in which there's different numbers or, you know, some of them have everyone making it to heaven.
I don't really know.
But I know I've heard that this wager, this, that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Makes this wager almost null and void now, yeah.
So I know when he put this out, a lot of people who lived in that time said to him, this is total BS, man.
What are you talking about?
But let's get into what he said with the wager and we'll explain why that is.
We won't get too deep into the whole history of Blaise Pascal and all of that thing.
But just to introduce why it's a thing is the wager was, his wager was sort of A part of philosophy he added to try to convince people that they should believe in the Christian God.
I mean, at that time, there was a growing number of people who were sort of becoming more enlightened and slightly disillusioned with the idea of going along with the church and God and everything.
Atheism was sort of a growing theme at that time.
It wasn't huge, but it was a thing people talked about.
Not like it's taken over now, you know.
Well, I mean, it's a much stronger thing now than it ever was then, right?
It's not like the atheists just kind of poofed into existence.
They grew as a percentage of the people who stopped believing in God.
I don't think they would believe that they had poofed into existence.
Well, no, especially, yeah, right.
But the Christians might believe that.
But his wager was that essentially that it takes, he said that it takes very little effort to follow the strictures of the Christian religion and that the reward, if God exists, the reward would be eternal happiness of whatever description that is in heaven.
And then if you didn't follow those strictures, then and God exists, then you would have eternal damnation.
And so what you would pay to engage in the wager is a very low price.
And what you stand to gain and lose is a very high price in either direction.
So therefore, it's in your interest to just go along with the Christian religion and all of its many rules because it's not that much to ask and you're just sort of hedging your bets just in case, right?
I mean, this is generally what he's saying.
And of course, this comes into immediate problems, right?
As people pointed out, there was this firstist idea that, oh, really, but not everyone makes it, right?
Blaise Pascal, right?
That this is your, okay.
But even if you believe everyone makes it, you still have a couple of the problems.
For example, if you're going to believe in a God, the next question is, which God?
Because if you follow the strictures and the rules of a Christian God, and according to Blaise Pascal, that would be, it would be very close to the way that we see the way that we look at some of the Amish people today who sort of are much more humble and lean heavy heavily on that humble button.
You know, if you find out at the end of your life that the actual real God was Odin and not Jehovah, then you might discover that you weren't going to get into Valhalla because you hadn't pillaged enough villages and you hadn't gained enough honor in combat, etc.
So obviously, you know, and then of course that's just Odin.
What if the actual God was Buddha or I don't know what God is in Tao?
Is it Tao?
I don't even know.
I probably shouldn't even go there because I don't know.
But there's many other versions, many other religions, many other gods you could follow.
And so this is only a question of a binary choice between Christianity or nothing.
And he says that if your choices are just Christianity or nothing, you should go for Christianity because of the reasons he said.
So before I get into your thoughts on that specifically, I just want to say, first of all, that about religion, I don't talk about religion much on this podcast or what my beliefs are.
I don't think they're important.
I think generally speaking, as far as religion goes, when an individual person chooses to engage in a spiritual belief for their own well-being, right?
I personally have no problem with that when I've spoken to an individual and they want to believe in a certain thing to help their inner healing of whatever description.
I'm totally fine.
I think personally that religions get into sort of what might be called trouble when they get into arguments where they try to convince everyone else to follow along with the thing that each individual that has done this is attempting to follow.
And so that's exactly what Pascal's wager is.
I would say it's problematic in many of the same ways that most of those other arguments are.
Yeah, I would say you want to try to convince, fine.
It's when you want to try to force that you get in trouble.
Well, okay, but even the convincing, I mean, in almost every case, if the convincing, the argument that they make doesn't work, that's when the forcing comes in.
Well, right.
But as long as they stop it convincing.
As just leaving the argument there as an offer rather than trying to make a sale, right?
Which is sort of, yeah.
you could try to make a sale too you know it's just well okay If they say no, don't.
I mean, you know, it's like if you go to buy a car, which, by the way, in many states, you can't do on Sunday because someone pushed their religion onto those states.
But if you go to buy a car and, you know, you say no and the salesman says, but it's got this and this and this, and you still say no, well, okay, they tried and you said no, and it's the end of it.
But if he then, that salesman went to the mayor of town and said, you must, you need to pass a law that says people must buy cars from you.
Yeah, right.
You know, that's what I'm looking at, which oddly, as I'm saying it, I realize it sounds a lot like Elon Musk and Tesla.
But he's getting there.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's the difference as I see it.
And yes, you know, what you said about the wager and the problems with it are, you know, clear, you know, that, yeah, if you had this binary choice, this clear binary choice.
These were the only two choices.
Right.
Yeah.
But here's the other problem.
I don't know about you.
I can't force myself to believe in something that I don't believe in.
So even if I did have a clear binary choice and I did not believe in the Christian God and the Christian God is all-knowing, even if I did everything I was supposed to do, I went to church every Sunday.
I prayed before every meal.
I did whatever it is Blaise Pascal thinks I was supposed to do.
The omnipotent God would still know I was faking it.
Yeah, as I've understood the sort of the current formulations of these arguments, in that case, you would get the eternal damnation.
I don't know, you know, we imagine that this has always been the case.
That interpretation of the religion has been the case, but I'm not convinced, actually, that Christians of the 1600s would have gone that way.
I think for many of them, they fully believe that if you just do all the things that you're supposed to do, that should be enough.
And it, you know, yeah, whatever.
And so, I mean, this is been ongoing sort of, you know, ways in which people try to point out that Christians are sometimes hypocritical or whatever.
And maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
I don't know.
I can't see inside their hearts.
I'm not sure it matters all that much, at least for the rest of this discussion, because we are not going to stay here talking about Pascal's wager the entire time.
At least not in its original formulation of what it originally meant, which in Pascal's case was definitely a choice between a god or not a god.
Right.
One thing I want to point out about Pascal's wager, which will definitely dovetail straight into the way we're going to take it, is that I think Blaise Pascal was downplaying what the cost would be of living your life in the way he imagined.
If you lived your whole life in that way, you would be giving up a lot.
In fact, a lot of pleasure.
I mean, that life is very knuckled down.
If you compare the Amish life to the life that's not Amish in the Western world, there's not a lot of people that choose the Amish way when they, you know, they only choose that way when they're born with that society as theirs and they continue with it because it's part of their community.
But not all of them do.
Some of them leave, right?
Not many leave this world, go to that one.
Tends to be the other way around.
And I point out that you're kind of giving up a great deal just making those choices to be that humble for the for that much of your life.
Right.
And that's the reverse kind of of Pascal's wager is if this is the only life we have.
Yeah, right.
And you spend the whole time with your knees in the dirt.
Yeah.
You know, rather than doing something that you enjoy, well, you just lost everything.
That was the what I heard it best put by Christopher Hitchens, known atheist, who, who was asked once if he had no, how could he find any worth in this life if there is no afterlife for him?
And he said, it's the opposite.
If this is all there is for me, then this is the only thing that has meaning.
It has the ultimate meaning.
It has much more meaning than anything else.
And in fact, believe for me, believing the other thing reduces the meaning of this life to relatively nothing because of you're comparing it to like some eternal thing that you can't even prove exists.
Well, that was his whole, we could, I mean, I'm sure podcasts have been done on that exact topic and the justifications and rationalizations that some people use, you know, of, oh, well, they're in a better place now.
Oh, well, they're, you know, any horrendous thing can happen, but it's okay.
Because I mean, for me, for me personally, when someone says, you know, they're, they're, they've lost a loved one and they say to themselves they're in a better place now.
I don't, you know, I'm not some kind of asshole that puts my, you know, throws sand in their eyes.
So, no, screw you.
They're just dead.
You know, like, but I mean, for me, that part, that aspect of a spiritual belief is relatively harmless.
So I'm okay with it.
When people try to use it to stir up hatred of a marginalized group, that's kind of when I have a problem.
Or what has happened in the past where they use religion as a justification for war, that's that's martyrdom.
You're going to go blow up.
And you'll go to heaven.
Yeah, martyrdom.
That's a huge.
Yeah, I don't think those are really good justifications for a religion.
and I don't think they're good uses for a spiritual belief.
And that's kind of where I draw the line, right?
I mean, I think that at the point that you're using it to justify removing things from other people.
Yeah, yeah, I have a problem with that.
Yeah.
But interestingly, also religion plays into like the way people view the environment and the state of the world.
Yes.
Yeah, good pivot, David.
Good pivot.
I was just about to interrupt you as you were saying so that I could get to, yeah, wow, you're really good at this podcasting thing.
Have you ever thought about doing it like in for other topics or anything?
I thought about it.
I've thought about it.
I'll have to consider it.
Okay, well, you should, you should, it was really swiftly done.
Yeah.
So what David did there was he segued the conversation toward climate and the environment, which is exactly where we're going to take this conversation about Pascal's wager.
Pascal's wager in its original formulation, as we said, was a binary choice between believing in a God and not believing in a God and having some cost to your life for the strictures you'd have to live for believing in the God.
And then if that God really exists, there's some benefit if you follow those strictures and there's some pain or displeasure for not following them.
And we're transporting that idea directly into climate change.
So climate science is extremely complex.
I'm not going to say it's quite as complex as like genetics.
Genetics can be pretty complex, pretty amazingly complex, actually.
But it's on par.
They're like maybe a couple degrees apart.
They're not that far.
Like the kind of equations that you're using in climate models, they are tremendous.
So much so that we use supercomputers for them and we're still like got fairly wide margins on how everything turns out just because there's so many factors.
And so when we have ordinary people who don't know a lot about science, they went to high school, they graduated, they did their work to get their dogwood diploma and then they go off and find a job and they did their grade 11 chemistry and they, you know, they're fine.
And they go out the rest of their life and they don't know much about how all this stuff works.
When they look at climate science stuff, it does look like Star Trek jargon or something like that.
It almost looks made up, I think, to a lot of people of that description.
And that's not any kind of slight on them.
That's what I look at when I look at genetics.
I'm not any kind of biologist.
I don't know all the parts of a cell and how to name them and proteins and genes.
It's a whole new language for me and I have to work hard to follow along.
And a lot of times I still don't.
But do you trust the people who are experts in that field?
Yes.
There is a big difference.
Well, right.
So I've gotten one thing about like when I, with my education that I have in science, it is not including even some small part of anything biological, as I mentioned, but I've developed a good ear to understand when someone knows the thing they're talking about and when they're just making it up and not providing enough details to do it.
And every once in a while, I find someone and get confused by them because they found a way to provide a lot of details.
And then I try to look them up and kind of, you know, look up some of the things.
And then I notice that they're not being applied the same way.
And then I kind of have to question.
And there's not that many grifters I've found who are able to do that, but they exist.
There's, you know, I don't have a perfect meter to find out who's lying and who's not lying.
We've talked about that on this podcast too.
But for most people who have to look at the climate change situation, they have to be in a situation where they have to believe something.
They have to sort of take something on something like faith because it's just too complicated for them to understand.
It's, it's, frankly, I know a lot about a lot of the science and a lot of it's beyond me too.
It's very difficult for me to understand a lot of the many complicated things for this.
I can get the gist of a lot of it, but it's, you know, a lot of people, I do have to take their word on it.
And that's where a lot of us are with this.
So we are in Pascal's wager when we look at climate change.
If climate change is real, if carbon and the increase in carbon is increasing the temperature and will increase it to the point that they predict that will heat the planet up to a point where we will see plant die-off in entire regions and not like regions like,
you know, the region around a city, but like entire regions like areas the size of Europe or larger, right?
That's the prediction now is that, you know, that in some conversations that some people might hear about climate change, they talk about something that they predict called the Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl is roughly an area that's about, you know, a little bit, you know, an area just a little bit west of the Mississippi and north of about, you know, probably about the Mexican border and then, you know, a little bit east of the Pacific coast and from the southern part being like the Mexican border up to probably somewhere around northern Saskatchewan somewhere,
which is a large area that's that's probably actually larger than Europe if you're looking at it.
It's it's a huge area.
And they predict that, you know, we'll get less and less plant life in this area to the point where it just kind of turns into a dust bowl and it'll be like a new desert kind of thing.
Only a lot less cooler because I don't know if you know the difference between sand and dust.
Sand is way cooler than dust.
Dust sucks.
I've always thought sand is pretty cool also, but then yeah, well, you know, I did my training as a ceramic engineer and we used sand.
Yeah, well, sand will blow into like these nice arches that make like sand dunes, but dust won't do that.
Dust will just, yeah, I don't know.
It's not going to be great.
The wind will take the dust off to you get to bare rock some in some places, right?
Like it'll change geographic or geologically, it'll change that whole area if we get to that point.
Like it's, you know, erasing a huge chunk of North America, which is why they mentioned this in a lot of conversations because a lot of the people who make the decisions for this, these very important decisions, are in North America.
When you need to convince people that this is a real thing, you need to convince the people in North America, very specifically the U.S., but Canada would also be good to change their minds.
And there's a lot of people in Canada who just say, yeah, whatever.
Let's just keep drilling until we're done.
So Pascal's wager, what do you think, David?
have i picked a good way to look at this are we well uh i i would say you have picked a way that uh has certainly been addressed before and And, you know, now, of course, the most important part about why we need to stop global warming is because all otherwise all the Reese will melt.
Yeah.
So just another joy of life that's gone, right?
But for other than that, there is, so there is a comic, a fairly well-known comic by Joel Pett.
And I was trying to figure out how I could show it here, and I have no idea.
So, but it shows someone presenting at a summit, some sort of global summit.
And he has this list of all the, you know, benefits for stopping global warming.
And someone in the audience raises their hand and says, what if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
And so that's, you know, the things that it lists are preserving rainforests, sustaining sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, healthy children, etc.
And the, you know, the main point is that you don't, so I guess I should also start with something else that's kind of important here.
I worked in air pollution reduction for over 30 years.
Did you really?
I know.
What a shock.
Wow.
I really picked the right person to talk to about this.
Wow.
So lucky.
Yes.
Who would have thought?
Wow.
And I mean, I don't usually come on here to talk about that.
Yeah.
We talk about the other things.
We have to talk about it.
So it's, you know, I worked in mostly more localized pollutants.
I did not work mostly on global warming.
Right.
Because it would be more like the environment rather than the climate, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
But, of course, the only way you impact global warming is you get down to the smaller levels and you stop, you know, more carbon from going into the atmosphere.
And with Illinois being a progressive state, at least now, you know, it was most of the time that I worked there.
You know, I did help write the climate.
It's called CEJA.
I think it's Climate and Environmental Jobs Act or something like that.
Now, did I come up with the ideas?
No.
I cleaned up with the idea people wrote down, which didn't make sense.
And I was like, no, you can't say that.
No, you can't do that.
You have to define this term.
Things like that.
You know, no, air pollution doesn't work that way and the like.
So, but, you know, I still like to say I worked on it.
And that, that act guarantees, you know, that Illinois, well, guarantees unless they pass a new law, that Illinois will be a clean state by like 2050 or something like that.
That all the, you know, will be just on nuclear and renewables by that point.
There will be no fossil fuel at that point.
And so, so I did have to get involved more in my later years in a lot of the greenhouse gas types of things.
But the long way around that I was getting to this point is when you reduce carbon emissions, that's not all you're reducing.
It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
If it happened in a vacuum, it would just suck it all away.
When you switch from coal, for example, you're also reducing all sorts of other nasty pollutants, from particulate matter to nitrogen oxides to carbon monoxide to mercury, to other hazardous chemicals, and even natural gas, any sort of fossil fuel.
Natural gas is cleaner, but it's not clean, clean.
And so it still has a number of those things.
So even if we are moving forward and getting rid of fossil fuels not for greenhouse gases, even if that's totally wrong, you're still doing all these other things, like that comic that I mentioned says.
You're doing all these other things to create a better world, a healthier world.
And, you know, I don't see how that's a bad thing, even if everything else was wrong.
So it's kind of like you have Pascal's wager, but that's definitely not the comic that I was going to.
But even if you have, like I said, Pascal's wager, but there is no, in addition to the one big upside, there's a whole bunch of other upsides as well.
Yeah.
You know, you got me off track there, David.
How dare you?
We got to rein this in before we go straight into a you didn't know you didn't know where I was going with this?
I thought that was obvious.
So I want to get into some of the direct correlations between Pascal's wager and this.
One that I want to talk about first is the cost.
In my opinion, the number one reason why there hasn't been a significant effort put into climate change and in fact is weirdly a strong driver for people to not want to believe it is that there is some cost associated with doing things about climate change.
There are some industries that will be affected.
They'll have to change some things that they're doing.
Some jobs will have to change from some areas to some other areas.
They're usually described as job losses.
Yes.
And all those buggy whip manufacturers, they lost their jobs.
They lost their jobs too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All those people who were caring for horses, there were far fewer people caring for horses now than there were 100, you know, 120, 130 years ago.
And but they got new jobs, you know, looking after cars, right?
There will be some transition that has to happen here.
And so I don't want to downplay that, though.
I don't want to try to say that like when Blaise Pascal put his, put, you know, wrote down his ideas about his wager, he minimized the cost.
He said, oh, it's not going to cost that much.
And so you might as well, right?
You might as well, which I point out is it's not, it's not an insignificant cost to try to live that life.
Right.
And, you know, what we're talking about here also includes a cost.
It would involve changes to pretty much everyone's life in some way or other.
Everyone's life would have to change to some degree at least.
You know, more electric cars, fewer cars.
Some people try to point out, yeah, but that wouldn't solve the whole problem.
But it might buy us time.
Right.
And that is why the act that I mentioned in Illinois is, I believe, called the Climate and Environmental Jobs Act.
Because part of it, this was an ongoing negotiation.
I was not involved in the negotiation.
I heard about the negotiation where it wasn't just the governor's people and other elected representatives talking to the environmentalists.
It was, you know, they had to talk to the unions that work in these plants.
And so a lot of what's in that act, which I had nothing to do with these portions, but a lot of it is stuff like, okay, here is this power plant in this small town.
We lose that power plant.
We're losing jobs.
You're affecting the whole town.
It's like the main employer in that town.
So what are we doing?
How are we redeveloping?
And that is a part of the act.
And it must still be ongoing, even though I'm retired three years now.
It must be still ongoing because I'm getting like online commercials for it.
I live close enough to that town that I'm getting commercials like call your representative and tell them.
And so, yeah, you know, part of it was, okay, that already has the infrastructure for the electric grid.
So you can build something that you need if you're moving to renewables, which are giant batteries.
Yeah.
So, you know, you can start doing that.
Now, on the, you know, flip side, maintaining giant batteries, you don't need as many people once they're built.
I mean, obviously the construction jobs are there, but those are temporary.
But once they're built, you don't need as many people maintaining giant batteries as you do maintaining a coal-fired power plant.
Yeah.
And so, yes, things will change.
And it, you know, some people will, you know, face job loss or job change.
And that's where you ask the question of, okay, but are we looking at this for one person or are we looking at this for every person?
Because Pascal's wager is for one person, one individual.
Yeah, right.
And this is for everyone.
Like, you're not just.
I think Pascal meant for everyone to make the wager, though.
I know, but individually.
It is a thing that's meant to change an individual's mind.
Yeah.
Right.
If you choose to live a certain life or not live a certain life and you go to heaven or hell, that doesn't impact three generations from now.
Right, right.
I mean, the cost here, the scale of the cost is also interesting because much of the cost is going to fall directly on future generations, right?
If we don't do anything, yes.
If we don't do anything and the climate change changes as badly as we currently predict, yeah, yeah, their life will be far worse, measurably worse, very measurably worse.
And so, but if we do something, then like you said, there are costs.
There are changes.
You know, I grew up in this town.
My father worked at the coal plant.
Now I work at the coal plant.
Yeah.
And I plan to have my son work at the coal plant.
Well, now you're telling me I won't even finish my career there and my son has to go look for something else to do.
So that affects you.
And it's like, yes, it does.
It does.
But all of you will have, and this, okay, I can't say all of you will have better lives because I can't.
I don't know that for sure.
But as a whole, everybody will be better off.
And so, I mean, the same thing is true of literally any environmental regulation.
Because anytime you impose or I imposed an environmental regulation, someone had to pay for it.
Now, there were occasions where we imposed a regulation and people actually realized, companies realized they saved money.
Like, oh, by forcing us to turn off the solvent tap so it's not running all the time, we don't have to buy as much solvent.
Yeah, and it also doesn't all evaporate into the air.
Oh, look at that.
Win-win.
Face palm.
Yeah.
But yet, this is they drink it like water.
You know, they it's so much more convenient if we just leave it running the whole time.
We don't have to hire a guy to go up there and turn it off.
Yeah.
Or if we leave the degreaser open so we could just rinse things in it, you know.
Yeah.
You know, but, you know, other things, yes, they required a change in process or more expensive materials or, you know, add-on controls.
But some of those things have gotten even better.
When I first started, my expertise was in paints and coatings.
And so I was looking at, you know, one way to reduce volatile organic compounds was powder coatings.
Just shoot the powder directly on using a variety of methods.
And oh my gosh, companies hated it.
They hated the idea.
They hated everything about it.
But a few started doing it and it took off.
Now, you literally see it advertised on certain things.
You will see, you know, buy this piece of metal furniture powder coated.
In the oil field, there were guys who had parts of their toolboxes in their truck powder coated specifically because they wanted that look.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was just a thing.
You know, so things change.
You know, it may take a few years, but things change.
And yes, it may take a few dollars too.
But it needs, you know, when you look at the cost, and this is something that US EPA used to do.
They're certainly not going to do it now.
But, you know, was they would do studies to determine, okay, if we have this level of pollution, how many people are hospitalized?
How many people die?
What's the cost?
I personally think that there was a little bit of witchcraft in some of those calculations that seemed to change.
But the point is, they did calculations and they said, and this, I mean, whether you believe the exact numbers or not, yeah, having more pollution in the air causes more asthma attacks, more cancer deaths, you know, more missed work days, more missed school days, all those things.
They add up.
Yeah.
And they cause more health care problems that people have to pay for or insurance companies have to pay for.
Somebody has to pay for.
And so by reducing the pollution, you don't have as many of those issues.
And so there's, again, the company that has to pay to put on this extra control is spending money, but society as a whole, I don't know that we could say they're saving money.
Some would say they are.
I would have to see the specifics on a specific rule, but it's offset.
And so you have to look at it.
I mean, it's called global climate change.
You have to look at it globally.
You can't look at it as a, this is what it's hurting me.
But I think most people look at it like I'm going to lose my job.
My town is going to lose this power plant.
Right.
And many of them are also looking at it like the bad effects aren't really going to take place till I'm gone.
Exactly.
So screw it.
Let her rip.
Right.
Why should I go through?
Why should I stop having winters in Arizona when I can do that?
And, you know, why should there be any cost?
Right.
And that's.
Which is terrible.
I think that there are certainly some people like that, the people who have no empathy for others, including future generations.
Including some guys, their own children and grandchildren.
I've seen.
Okay.
I'm just going to say it.
It sucks to be them.
I don't know.
The current U.S. president.
He doesn't care about anyone but himself, including his own children, including his own grandchildren.
He may fake it sometimes, but he doesn't.
You know, Elon Musk, he doesn't care about anyone.
Look at how many children of his own children don't even talk to him.
Hate it.
Right.
But they'll also have the availability of a bunker if everything goes really bad, right?
Yeah.
And Peter Thiel bought himself a New Zealand citizenship because he thinks it'll be the safest place on earth if everything goes really bad.
And he's probably right.
Geographically, New Zealand probably is the safest place.
Yeah.
And so it's easy for very wealthy people who are also sociopaths to deny it.
Most other people I don't think who deny it, I don't think are quite as blatant.
They deny it because they don't like it.
And subconsciously, it's, you know, they're looking for a justification to not believe it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so it's, you know, motivated reasoning.
I don't want this to happen.
This will be bad for me.
Am I sure it's right?
Well, it turns out there's a way I can look at it.
So I'm not sure that it's right.
So I should maybe lean on that.
Yeah.
Because I feel a lot better about not just not believing it and carrying on with my life the way it is because things are pretty good right now.
Right.
And that's where the whole the rest of it comes in, which is, okay, let's say you don't believe in global warming.
Well, what about all this other stuff?
Well, you know, there are deniers for that too.
Yeah, well.
No, we've already got healthy levels of particulate matter.
We don't need to worry about that.
And then they have debates over that.
Oh, lead isn't a problem anymore.
We got it out of gasoline.
It's fine.
Yeah.
You know, and just all these other things.
Everything can be argued because it's, you know, it is complicated.
Yeah.
Well, it is complicated.
But we're going to get closer to wrapping up here, I think, because, you know, we don't need to have an hour and a half necessarily.
It's fun, but, you know, we don't need one.
I mean, I did work in the field for 31 years plus, you know, so I could keep going.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we'll have another episode where we circle back to it.
I'm sure this won't go away.
This isn't, you know.
And I'm going to show everyone who's watching on YouTube exactly why I think it's not going to go away.
I want to include you, David.
How do I do that?
How does this work?
Why does this?
Oh.
There we are.
There we go.
Okay, this one.
It shows it good enough, I think.
So this is, I got this from Twitter.
I still refuse to call it X.
I used to.
I'm just going to have a quick side here.
Sure.
I used to refuse, but it is X. Because Twitter was, at least at one point, a good thing.
X is not.
And therefore, agreeing to call it X. You know, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast aren't on the platform, so they would still know it as Twitter.
So that's the one.
That's the hellhole you want to avoid is Twitter slash X.
But this is a saint, in my opinion.
His name is Professor Elliott Jacobson.
I think he's actually a professor of mathematics and statistics.
But he talks about a thing that isn't real, actually, but him and I both, he and I both wish it was, a thing called the climate casino.
Because I wish people could bet on where the line is going.
So this graph, if you're looking at it.
Shouldn't you just call it Pascal's Wager?
Well, maybe we'll call it Pascal's Casino.
Maybe I'll talk to him and see if we can get that going.
This graph, what do you think of this graph?
Does this, just on its own, does this seem to show visually what's happening here?
What it shows me is it looks like there's a sea at the bottom and then a sandy beach at the top.
Right.
So this is a graph of January 1st to December 31st from left to right.
Every year from the year of the pre-industrial baseline to, or actually it's every year from 1940 to 2025 is on here.
The older years are in darker blue and the newer years are in lighter blue up to this very pale light gray color.
So as you know, if you're watching this on YouTube, I'll describe it for people who are listening.
It's very dark near the bottom.
There's a line at the bottom for the pre-industrial baseline and it gets it's the darker blue is just a little bit above the pre-industrial baseline and then it gradually sifts to lighter as you go up.
What is the axis that we're going up on?
This one on the left here is degrees Celsius because the entire world uses Celsius except for the United States.
But this is the, these are the, this is the, the scale in which they, when they, when they talk about climate change, they talk about two critical markers, which is the, the.
They talk about being below the 1.5 line and the 2.0 line.
So they, they would like they, they think that we can avoid the worst parts of the of what we're becoming if we can stay at a, at a global yearly average, year over year, of 1.5.
But I think, technically this scale isn't showing the global uh, um air temperature average.
This is the sea surface temperature, the top two meters of this, of the oceans, um and so or not the oceans.
This is sorry, global two meter surface temperature.
So this is this is all over the world.
Okay, my apologies, and The.
The most of the people who look at these numbers think that we can stay away from the worst catastrophes if we can get below 1.5, but they feel that there will be an increasing amount of loss above 1.5 and past 1.5.
They think if we can stay below 2.0 degrees above the pre-industrial baseline, then we will probably more or less make it as a civilization.
But anything much over 2.0 and we're probably looking at tremendous, tremendous loss as opposed to just some loss.
And that's kind of as exact as it gets as far as this goes.
And I'm not going to get into, there's some controversy over what the pre-industrial baseline is and whether 1.5 is a number versus 1.6 or 1.4 or, you know, I mean, but everyone who looks at it agrees there is a number.
It's not that they say, oh, this is all BS.
They all say that there is a number.
It's just a different number for some than the others based on their model.
But I believe that we passed as an average 1.5 or are about to pass it this spring time here, right around this time.
They think on the trajectory, on an average, we are just passing the 1.5 mark and we're on an upward trajectory.
And this is the other part of this that is difficult to explain to people who don't have a lot of mathematical knowledge is that we not only are we at 1.5, this has a fair amount of momentum.
And we're on 1.5 and still gaining speed as far as the momentum goes.
So this is why they talk about that they're not sure we're going to be able to stay under 2.0 because with our current upward momentum on this, we have to act now so that we can curb the momentum and, you know, stop from going over the cliff.
It's like your car is aimed at the cliff, actually, and you're going very, very fast and you're turning, but it would be easier to make the corner if you slowed down as well.
And so that's kind of what they're talking about here.
But this graph shows that it is a gradual warming.
And on this particular graph, this year and the previous two years are in a completely different color than the rest of the graph.
So beginning sometime around the middle of 2023 on this graph, you can see this yellow line.
For anyone not watching on YouTube, I'll describe it.
The yellow line is kind of within many of the other very light gray lines that are already well above the 1.2 mark at the very least.
And it's not the hottest year.
It's whatever.
But then something happened around May-ish of 2023 that I think they're calling, they have an official name for this.
It's something like a new temperature anomaly that they're hoping is an anomaly, not like a permanent shift.
But it spiked and then it stayed high and it stayed as the highest temperature on record for any day in recorded history.
And then it stayed high and it got very, very high in around August, September frame.
And then it got very high again in, you know, October getting into November.
It stayed high.
It stayed the highest.
It dipped a little below the highest mark, but only very barely.
At the end of November, it went back up.
And then it stayed high.
it went a little bit low in 2024.
I mean, you're getting the idea.
It's markedly higher than all of the other data below it, especially in the summertime, in the summer months here.
And this is a global average.
So, you know, some people like to, there's, there's been a, we need to start like dragging and like throwing snowballs at the guys who go out in like a snowstorm and they say, so much for this climate change thing or whatever.
And they say, you know, it's really cold here or whatever, because it's a global average.
It's also possible that even though it's snowing like hell wherever that guy is, it's still warmer than it was the last year at that spot, which is not anything that they're attempting to show by standing in a snowstorm.
And, you know, we have this new shift that started not quite two years ago, and we're still in it.
We're slightly lower than we were this time last year, but we're still above every year before that.
The latest data for this graph was taken on March 14th, which was less than a week ago.
March 14th or May 14th?
Oh, March 14th.
So I guess it is a couple months ago.
That's just March 14th.
Yeah.
So I guess none of the data is collected for everything right up to the current moment.
But we are, you know, this is a reason why in Canada, in Western Canada, we've noted the last two winters have been much more mild than the winters we normally get.
We still have had some days in northern Alberta that were minus 40, but they were like a day or two.
And then it warms up again.
In some cases, in places like Grand Prairie, Alberta, which should have solid winter all winter long, last winter was melting.
It didn't have snow to have a spring runoff when the time came for springtime to come around and for the snow to melt.
This is part of this rapidly changing weather patterns.
And, you know, the idea that you could look at this, all this data, and say, ah, it's not really, it's not really getting warmer.
No, I don't know how you justify that in your.
Oh, it's easy.
It's easy if you don't know what you're talking about.
Okay, but you still have to say that.
Look at it.
That's what I want to tell people.
Look at that and explain to me what's happening here.
How many years did you say is on there?
1940 to 2025.
So a blip in the existence of the Earth.
85 years, yeah.
A blip in the existence of the sun.
True.
The sun goes through all sorts of different things.
The earth has gone through ice ages and warming and everything else.
And you're telling me that because it got a little warmer in this amount of time, that so that is how you do it.
Well, what I point, maybe I need a new graph.
I don't have it handy, but what I need is a graph that shows the trajectory of the increase, the average increase.
I mean, you could drive because that's that the people who people try to say that the earth has been warmer.
It actually hasn't.
It's never been this warm to the best of our geological record.
There's been times when the sea level was higher than it is.
I guarantee it's been warmer.
There was that time when that asteroid came barreling in and kind of incinerated everything.
But it's not, well, ash covered the planet afterwards.
But it cooled off.
Yes, yes.
Right.
But it's never been increasing in temperature this quickly, to the best of all of our, it's never been increasing this quickly.
And that's a, you know, yeah.
The thing is that the people who are going to deny it always have an answer.
Well, we didn't have this kind of equipment back then.
You can't determine within just a few years using like rock cores and ice cores and stuff like that.
Yeah, you could tell pretty close.
Yeah.
And so you can.
That doesn't mean they're going to accept it.
Yeah, right.
If you're not willing to accept it, you're not willing to accept it is the point.
And you could show them all the graphs in the world.
I mean, and this is, this is a human thing.
You know, I mean, I faced the same thing from the other side when we were, you know, we were doing rulemakings and some people didn't feel we were going far enough.
And they said, they talked about how it's so much worse now than it was when they were children.
And I'd literally be holding up charts because we did have monitors then.
Yeah.
And the chart would show it went down.
You know, no, this is what the pollution was when you were a child.
This is what it is now.
And they ignored it.
They completely ignored it.
Yeah.
And, you know, so it happens, you know, motivated reasoning knows no political boundaries.
I, you know, I think one side does it more than the other.
But if, you know, if you want something to be true, then it, you know, you're not going to allow facts to get in the way.
Right.
So on that note, I think we will wrap it up here as a last point about Pascal's wager is that everyone is going to have to sort of make this choice, increasingly so.
It's going to become a, as, as, as if everything goes as the current prediction is, it's going to become a bigger, bigger issue for everyone as we carry on forward into time.
And everyone's going to have to make their own version of Pascal's wager, whether they commit to having some, accepting some level of cost so that they can make this and it's going to get political.
It's going to be, as we've seen in Canada, political parties that maybe want to do something about this and then recognize that there's going to be some cost attached to it, maybe a tax of some kind, and people saying, yeah, we don't want a tax.
And then what my question is, okay, you don't want that, but what is your answer?
Because if the opposing answer is we, you know, that's not the solution and we're just going to let that drift off into nothing and say nothing and just move on.
Well, what you're saying is you don't believe in climate change.
That's what you're really saying.
If you have no plan at all, you're saying it's not a problem and we don't need to focus on it.
We don't need to put any money into it.
That's what you're saying.
And I wish reporters to hold politicians to this and say, we need you to say it.
If you have no plan, why is that?
And fine, maybe you don't like the other guy's plan, but to say that you don't have a plan, that's silly.
I equate climate change to, well, again, I set rules for this podcast, but I will break it again.
I equate climate change to the Nazis.
The Nazis in 1939 made everyone make a choice.
And people said, okay, are you going to do something about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
And a bunch of nations said, yes, we will.
And some of them, sorry, David, but some of them just said, nah, not our problem.
Yeah.
And they were sort of, in a way, you know, they were saying that the Nazis weren't a problem was what they were saying.
Eventually, the U.S. came around and joined in after they got attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
But some of the nations were unable to fight.
So, you know, whatever.
Uruguay didn't help.
I don't even know if Uruguay was yet a country then, but Uruguay didn't participate in World War II, but they were a very much smaller nation and they were away.
But, you know, even nations like Brazil had some part to play in World War II.
And so when you decide that you're not going to do anything about this imminent problem that will be a problem for everyone, the way the Nazis were eventually going to be a problem for everyone if they got out of control, you're saying that you're okay with this and it's not a problem.
That's what you're saying.
That's really what you're saying.
This issue is going to make everyone make a choice.
I mean, considering we're back to having, you know, a large segment of a political party saying that the Nazis are back to not being a problem.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah.
And the other thing I want to mention about this is that in Pascal's wager, there was no way to know by the definition of a all-knowing God, there was no way to have any proof ever that the God really existed.
And that was part of Pascal's wager that he recognized.
Yeah, there's no way to know.
So you just might as well just follow along and do all the things, right?
Go to church and be a good boy.
In this, we actually have evidence.
We have some proof.
You have to put work in to ignore it, actually.
Oh, yeah.
So in this way, we have a better case for the existence of climate change, much better case for the existence of climate change than we do for the existence of God.
We have proof.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I think people should look at it that way.
I think in some ways it's unfair to make it about just like Pascal's wager because of that.
There was no proof of God.
And yet we have proof of climate change.
But again, for most people, they have to take some kind of leap of faith of some kind, right?
About this issue.
And so, yeah, we'll leave it at that.
But on to other things, David, where can people find you if they want to take part in any future podcast you might start at some point in the future?
Yes, any future.
You can find me at linktree slash David Bloomberg, where you can get all of my different things that I'm doing.
More directly, you can find me as at David Bloomberg on Blue Sky.
I'm also on threads as at David Bloomberg TV, which the TV part is because of Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where I post mini videos on usually reality television topics.
So definitely not air pollution topics.
So, you know, you can definitely find me at those locations.
And it's appropriate that it's blue sky.
You know, it's not brown sky.
It's blue sky.
Yellow sky.
It's an orange sky.
Yeah, it's not toxic fog sky.
Yes.
Yeah.
And I already put my email at the start of the podcast, but you could still find me on Twitter and Blue Sky.
Twitter at Spencer G Watson, Blue Sky at Spencer Watson.
If I'm not on there posting, you could send me a DM if you really need to get in touch with me for some reason.
I still, you know, I get a ding on my phone when those things come in.