You tell me:
I realize that the guy is trying to boil it down for people by assessing "risk", but by co-opting Pascal's wager to prove a point, he's made an false and unnecessary concession ("maybe we didn't have a hand in it") and drawn out the denialists and all their baggage on the Digg comment thread.
This sort of logic teaser/statistical manipulation smacks of a bit of pseudoscience. Creationists claim to have "scientific" proof of God or Noah's Ark or whatever, whereupon they submit a logic teaser founded on false assumptions. I'm not equating the two here, it just reminds me of that sort of argument. But, in general, I think these arguments work because some people have trouble disentangling the concepts of "science" and "logic."
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I think it fails because of the same reason Pascal fails.
He doesn't take into account the multitude of other possiblities.
Such as: What if it is not in our power to stop climate change by directly affecting CO2 levels. Meanwhile we use our resources to combat carbon emissions at the tailpipe rather than combatting, say, poverty and the education problem which contributes to unsustainable human population growth.
Just to state my position, I think global warming is real and human caused. I'm not a denier. I just wanted to point out the logical problems with an oversimplified argument.
Siamang writes: I think it fails because of the same reason Pascal fails: He doesn't take into account the multitude of other possiblities.
I wouldn't say that Pascal's Wager fails. Rather, I would say that the conclusion may very well be the best course of action for Pascal (but not necessarily for anyone else).
If you have many competing theories describing some phenomenon, then the first step is to assign a subjective likelihood to each of them. In practice, that usually means giving a tiny number of possibilities sizable likelihoods, and giving all the rest likelihood zero. Then to decide on what course of action to take, you try to maximize the expected outcome, weighted over all theories with nonzero likelihood. In Pascal's case, he only considered two possibilities, which means that he was assigning probability zero to all the rest. That was a subjective choice on his part. Different people would have weighted things differently, but it is the rare person who is 100% certain that his current best theory is actually correct.
This Bayesian approach to competing theories is difficult to implement as public policy, because it depends on subjective likelihoods, which vary from person to person.