Asshole’s Wager: What if you’re wrong about global warming?

Asshole’s Wager: This is my parody version of the Pascal’s Wager. Whenever one declares they do not believe in Jesus, the Christian will always ask, “What if you’re wrong?” which is nothing more than an echoing of Pascal’s Wager, long debunked by reasoning people. I’ll get back to this.

Earlier today I met, I think, rightwing moron #29734938712 who couldn’t stop trying to tell me that global warming is just faith without evidence. It was in response to the fact that a friend on Twitter called out this one clown, who I’d blocked I don’t know how long ago for being an atheist-bashing troll, on the fact that he’s failed to ever deliver any evidence on the existence of his god. So rightwing moron #87342987343 said that we swallow global warming as faith.

And when pushed, the comment was simply that apparently NOAA admits having fudged numbers, and the temperature stopped rising for the past 15 years. You know, the same bullshit talking points that the deniers always try to use. BTW temperatures have not stopped rising, and NOAA did no such thing.

Keep in mind the same talking point against NOAA also comes from the same people who claimed NOAA and NASA declared carbon dioxide to be a cooling gas rather than a heating one. NASA and NOAA have never done this. That is a monstrous lie, made by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

What strikes me though, is how quickly people want to jump on any tiny flaw they think that has been made by science. I don’t understand this, but that’s because I’m not a hateful sack of shit like they are. If you know that you’re polluting nature so badly that it’s disrupting the natural world, wouldn’t you move on the side of caution? Wouldn’t you rather be careful about not destroying things rather than destroy things until someone can prove to you that you are?

If climate science was a “faith” then let me propose the same question that believers of the Christian faith throw at you: What if you’re wrong? It’s a serious question. And it’s one that you don’t get to ignore if you’ve thrown Jesus at me in the same way. Especially since in this event you have way more at risk.

What if you’re wrong and you’re actually destroying the planet? What if you’re actually killing the living world that sustains you and has sustained your ancestors?

Now Pascal’s Wager expects me to abandon pleasure, altar my entire personality, change all of my actions, tithe a tenth of my income, and serve in attendance of a church, just in case there might be an angry deity that will send me to hell for all eternity. Just in case there is a hell. Just in case there is a god. Just in case that god actually is a hell-creating kind that likes to send people there for not believing. It expects a lot of out of me with zero evidence to its “case.”

Asshole’s Wager, as I’m calling it… since I am the @BibleAsshole after all… expects very little out of you. You don’t have to even stop attending church. It just asks you to not pollute and to care about the living world around you. And it doesn’t ask this without evidence. We have plenty.

Now if you think pollution doesn’t exist, you’ve got to be a huge moron. I don’t think any of you believers can be that big of a moron. You know there’s pollution. You also must knowthe acidity of the oceans is rising, causing a great deal of species to become close to extinction. But you want to not care. You hear about pollution and you’d rather pretend it doesn’t happen just out of doubt that it might not be real, rather than being careful just in case it is.

This seems remarkably selfish. After all, not caring about god, if your wager is correct, only hurts me. But not caring about the environment, if we’re correct (and we are), hurts everybody. All who are alive right now. All who will live after you. If you’re wrong (and you are) you are going to destroy a great deal of the beauty you think your god created. That’s insane.

Why are you so quick to jump on any tiny bit of a chance, thrown at you by your preferred media, that there might not be global harm caused by man’s pollution? I’ll give you the NOAA claim above as an example. The only thing I was even able to find that NOAA’s “admitted” numbers change gave, was that 2014 maybe wasn’t the hottest year on record. Now with so much evidence that it has been, why is this tiny possible glitch (not even a confirmed one) suddenly a reason to abandon all care and reason? You wouldn’t suddenly throw Christianity entirely out of the window if someone showed you a contradiction in the Bible (and there are many) would you?

It’s like you’re fast to not care and destroy, and slow to maybe care and not destroy. That’s really bizarre priorities.

Oh okay, let’s say that temperatures haven’t risen in 15 years, as is the incorrect claim. Let’s say there was a pause in warming (which there wasn’t). Does a slow-down in rising temperatures mean that all of our harm has been erased? Does that mean it’s cooling? No. Does that mean abandon all measures that man has made that might’ve brought the warming to a halt? Only if you’re fucking nuts!

No, wait, I’m trying to be reasonable. What I meant was, no. You wouldn’t do that. Right?

In fact the “pause” is nothing more than the media clearly not understanding science:

Many popular climate myths share the trait of vagueness. For example, consider the argument that climate has changed naturally in the past. Well of course it has, but what does that tell us? It’s akin to telling a fire investigator that fires have always happened naturally in the past. That would doubtless earn you a puzzled look from the investigator. Is the implication that because they have occurred naturally in the past, humans can’t cause fires or climate change? 

The same problem applies to the ‘pause’ (or ‘hiatus’ or better yet, ‘speed bump‘) assertion. It’s true that the warming of average global surface temperatures has slowed over the past 15 years, but what does that mean? One key piece of information that’s usually omitted when discussing this subject is that the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. 

The speed bump only applies to surface temperatures, which only represent about 2 percent of the overall warming of the global climate. Can you make out the tiny purple segment at the bottom of the above figure? That’s the only part of the climatefor which the warming has ‘paused’. As the IPCC figure indicates, over 90 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans, and it continues at a rapid pace,equivalent to 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second.

In other words, they’re making a giant doubt-mountain out of a hallucinated mole-hill of inaccuracy. It’s not actually even there. They hallucinated it! But they’re acting like everything is entirely debunked! That’s bad waging. Asshole’s Wager asks you, what if you’re wrong? What if even one mistake in a number by a scientist is nothing more than a tiny flaw in a completely correct body of evidence? You’re putting a lot at risk for a tiny thing!

But then, you’re quick to be apathetic about the rest of the world. And yet expect me to be quick to assume your god is correct and I might go to hell for it. If you can’t even respect the planet that has absolutely, positively sustained you and given you life, you’re a horribleambassador of this god of yours. And I won’t be wanting to follow him and become twice the son of hell as you are.

You see how that works? Of course not. If you confuse science with faith, you’re not going to see anything.