This is a pretty interesting video (I can't figure out how to embed in Drupal) featuring an examination of the risks/rewards of action on climate change. Some of you will feel a nostalgic tingling when he busts out the grid on the whiteboard. That's because his analysis is an adaptation Pascal's wager, which you probably heard of back in your college philosophy class.

I think that the idea of choosing between columns rather than gambling on rows is valuable, but the author's wager is hardly any more bulletproof than Pascal's. Probably the biggest problem is actually mathematical: he does not (and I would contend cannot) attribute values to the four cells, or to the probability of each row being true. It seems obvious to me that a skeptic would assign very different values to each of these variables than I would, and that any final calculus will probably only back up each individual's pre-exisitng opinion.

But what do I know? Watch it and let me know what you think.