Betting the Earth: How We Can Still Win the Biggest Gamble of All Time (review)

I first learned of Betting the Earthwhen the Gonzaga Law School chapter of the Federalist Society invited me to debate its author, John Kunich. I later learned that the Gonzaga debate was part of Kunich’s informal tour of Federalist Society chapters across the country. Because climate change seems to have a macabre sense of humor, our event ended up being cancelled due to a large snow storm. “Global warming debate cancelled due to blizzard” was the inevitable headline announcing that the event would be rescheduled. This sort of cheap rhetoric is not surprising. However, what did surprise me is that Kunich is not a climate change denier (or what the influential climate change writer Joe Romm memorably calls “climate zombies”). Betting the Earthis not an anti-scientific denial of climate change. Indeed, Kunich notes that part of his motivation for writing the book is to help overcome what he sees as the dangerous politicization of the study of and response to climate change. Noting that there are no “easy answers” to the “important questions about our planet’s well being,” Betting the Earthdoes not set out concrete proposals to address climate change (307). Rather, drawing on his experience as a gambler and a Harvard-trained lawyer, Kunich’s goal is to “set out a way for all of us to make logically correct, evidence-guided, probability-based, rational decisions regarding the future of our planet” (185–86). Thus, Kunich is less interested in defending a particular course of action than he is in outlining how environmental challenges, such as climate change and species extinction, should be approached, even in the “dim light of unknowable facts and gap-riddled evidence” (14). Though there are serious, perhaps fatal, problems with the author’s argument, Betting the Earthdoes contain several noteworthy insights.

First, Kunich is quite right to note that the debate over climate change is often simplistic, misleading, and hyperbolic and that the push for doctrinal purity on this issue—whether by the Tea Party or progressives—makes rational decision making more difficult. For instance, many political leaders seem to be of the view that, if climate change is a problem or if it becomes a serious problem, we can “fix it” by inventing our way out of the problem. American’s love of and trust in technology is seemingly boundless. Although technology will no doubt play a role in our mitigation and adaptation strategies, Kunich is right to note that there is no “neat, tidy, insta-fix, happy-ending resolution” to the problem of global climate change (306). He is quite right to argue that, given the stakes, what is needed are fewer hyperbolic sound bites and mindless litmus tests and more science-based policies.

Secondly, Kunich is right to note that, while consensus is (used to be?) of the essence in politics, strictly speaking, it has no place in scientific inquiry per se. The beautiful, self-correcting nature of science is only possible because scientific claims are continuously subjected to rigorous testing. As E.O. Wilson noted in his 1998 book of the same title, science proceeds via “consilience,” not consensus. Kunich goes to greater lengths than most to note that absolute certainty is not possible in science. Indeed, he dedicates a chapter each to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Although he admits that his use of Gödel’s and Heisenberg’s work goes far beyond what they intended, his use of them is not entirely inappropriate. His point is that there is no absolutecertainty in science or in any form of investigation for that matter. If absolute scientific certainty is unattainable, Kunich argues, then it is a mistake to insist on scientific certainty regarding the nature of climate change before taking action. “If doubt, indefiniteness, and incompleteness are in some sense inevitable features of all scientific theories and the means...