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Climate Uncertainty and Risk
- Rethinking Our Response
- Judith Curry
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- Published by:
- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 06 June 2023
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World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break this gridlock. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and how we can respond to these challenges. Understanding the deep uncertainty surrounding the climate change problem helps us to better assess the risks. This book shows how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map for formulating pragmatic solutions. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is essential reading for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change and our national leaders.
Author's Foreword
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”
—Anthropologist Gregory BatesonWorld leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. While the majority of people are worried by climate change, most are unwilling to follow the call from the United Nations for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Further, many of the technologies needed to effectively transition the world's economy away from fossil fuels are not ready for large-scale deployment. As a result, there is acrimonious worldwide political debate on implementing climate policies, which even if successful, have little chance of improving the climate or human well-being in the twenty-first century.
How did we come to be between a rock and hard place on the issue of climate change? This book shows how the narrow and politicized framing of the climate debate has resulted in an oversimplification of both the scientific problem and its solutions. My personal journey in navigating the climate debate provides insights into the problem and ways forward for finding solutions.
Prior to about 2003, it was fashionable in academic circles to be skeptical about the highly confident conclusions being issued in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports on human-caused climate change. I became concerned about the way these assessment reports were treating uncertainty and confidence levels in their conclusions. Apart from reading the IPCC Reports, I was mostly oblivious to the public debate and controversies surrounding climate change.
I inadvertently entered the public debate on climate change on September 14, 2005. The American Association for the Advancement of Science organized a press conference for a paper I co-authored that described a substantial increase in the global proportion of category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The unplanned and uncanny timing of publication of this paper was three weeks after Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans. Our “15 minutes” stretched into days, weeks, and months, as Hurricane Katrina became a major focusing event for the global warming debate. I was treated like a rock star by the environmental movement.
Part Three - Climate Risk and Response
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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- Climate Uncertainty and Risk
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- 06 June 2023, pp 139-140
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Summary
“The future will be neither a nirvana nor a hell on earth, but an evolution of the past, a combination of our best endeavours hindered by obstacles and aided by serendipity.”
—Physicist and engineer Michael J. KellyClimate change is a risk because it may affect prosperity and security, and because its consequences are uncertain. The way we understand and describe a risk strongly influences the way in which it is analyzed, with implications for risk management and decision-making. By characterizing climate change as a well-understood problem with a strong consensus, traditional risk management approaches assume that climate change can and ought to be rationally managed, or at the very least contained, and preferably eliminated. However, the diversity of climate-related impact drivers and their complex linkages, various inherent and irreducible uncertainties, ambiguities about the consequences of climate change, and the unequal distribution of exposure and effects across geography and time, confound any simple or uncontested application of traditional risk management approaches.
Characterization of climate change as a simple, tame hazard risk of dose-response (such as regulation of food additives or use of antibiotics in feedstocks) to be controlled via the Precautionary Principle has torqued both the science and the policy process in misleading directions. As a result, the policy process that has evolved over the past several decades is not only inadequate to deal with the risks associated with climate change, but has fueled societal controversies around climate risk.
Human-caused climate change has become a topic of contested politics, with great economic stakes associated with both the problem and its proposed solutions. Guided by the analyses in Parts One and Two on the nature of the climate change problem and scenarios of future climate outcomes, Part Three presents a framework for analyzing climate risks in all of their complexity and ambiguity, toward formulating pragmatic and adaptable policies. Integrative thinking in the context of the tension associated with different perspectives, best practices from risk science and decision-making under deep uncertainty, and focusing on resilience and antifragility can lead to broader risk management frameworks that are politically viable and support human well-being, both now and in the future.
Chapter Seven - IPCC Scenarios of Twenty-First Century Climate Change
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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- Climate Uncertainty and Risk
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Summary
“[A]ll of our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future.”
—Ian Wilson, author of From Scenario Thinking to Strategic ActionClimate policy discussions are framed by the IPCC Assessment Reports. At the center of the IPCC approach to climate policy analysis are scenarios of the future climate. The IPCC uses global climate models, driven by scenarios of future emissions, as the basis for generating climate futures.
Scenarios refer to “a plausible, comprehensive, integrated and consistent description of how the future might unfold while refraining from a concrete statement on probability.” Scenarios of climate futures play a fundamental role in characterizing societal risks and policy response options.
This chapter examines the IPCC's scenarios of future climate change.
Emissions Scenarios
“There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs [emissions scenarios], we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.” (Brian O’Neill, one of the lead architects of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways developed for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report)
The IPCC projections of future climate change are driven by changes to radiative forcing arising from changes to concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols associated with human activity—primarily from emissions associated with fossil fuels. One approach to generating scenarios is simply to specify different levels of radiative forcing, which are referred to as “pathways.” Another approach is to develop socioeconomic and emission scenarios to provide plausible descriptions of how future emissions and their radiative forcing may evolve. To capture a range of possible future emissions scenarios, energy system modelers use Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that simulate both future energy technologies and emissions, and also incorporate assumptions about population, land use, socioeconomic development and policy assumptions.
The most recent set of scenarios used by the IPCC are the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) and scenarios developed from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP).
The RCPs are a set of four climate scenarios for the end of the twenty-first century. The RCPs were formulated for use in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, to reflect different potential climate outcomes (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5). The number (e.g., 8.5) reflects the additional radiative forcing (in Watts per square meter, W/m2, which is a measure of energy per unit time and per unit area) in 2100 at the top of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas emissions and other factors, relative to pre-industrial times.
Contents
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Chapter Nine - What's The Worst Case?
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them.”
—American nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, writing during the Cold WarFuture scenarios of worst-case outcomes have an important role to play in many decision-making frameworks (Part Three). How to formulate worst-case scenarios, and assess whether they are plausible, is a substantial challenge. This chapter brings into play some complex epistemological issues, focused on formulating and assessing plausible worst-case scenarios.
Global climate models provide a coherent basis for generating scenarios of future climate change, based on emissions scenarios. The worst case is clearly associated with the 8.5 scenarios (RCP8.5, SSP5–8.5). However, Section 7.1.1 provided evidence that RCP8.5 is an implausible scenario. What exactly does implausible mean, and how do we delineate between a scenario that is improbable (<10 percent chance) versus a plausible or an implausible scenario?
Emissions-driven climate model simulations do not allow exploration of all possible future scenarios that are compatible with our background knowledge of the basic way the climate system actually behaves, as described in Chapter Eight. Some of these unexplored possibilities might turn out to be real ones.
Surprises are a class of risk that can be defined as low-likelihood but well-understood events that cannot be predicted with current understanding. Examples include: a series of major volcanic eruptions, a nuclear war, significant twenty-first-century sea level rise due to collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and unexpected pandemics.
Black swans are a category of surprise with the following attributes. A black swan is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations and is associated with an extreme impact. In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. Another class of surprises are known events or processes that were ignored for some reason or judged to be of negligible importance by the scientific community. These are often referred to as Pink Flamingos (also referred to as unknown knowns or known neglecteds).
Four risk factors have been articulated for genuine surprise:
System complexity—risk of surprise is higher when the system under study is nonlinear and complex.
Limited knowledge of the system's past behavior and processes that underlie that behavior.
Past instances of genuine surprise when investigating the system.
Chapter One - Introduction
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.”
—American biologist E. O. WilsonWithin the public domain, there is a widespread narrative of climate catastrophe if we do not urgently reduce or eliminate emissions from burning fossil fuels. Example quotes are provided below from United Nations (UN) officials and national leaders:
“The clock is ticking towards climate catastrophe.” (Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, 2015)
“We face a direct existential threat.” (Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, 2018)
“There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate.” (US President Barack Obama, 2014)
“We are killing our planet. Let's face it, there is no planet B.” (Emmanuel Macron, President of France, 2018)
In the 1990s, the world's nations embarked on a path to prevent dangerous human-caused climate change by stabilizing the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2). These efforts were codified by the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plays a primary role in legitimizing UNFCCC policies. The IPCC prepares periodic assessment reports that are formulated around identifying human influences on climate, adverse environmental and socioeconomic impacts of climate change, and stabilization of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
How concerned should we be about climate change? The IPCC Assessment Reports do not support the concept of imminent global catastrophe associated with global warming. However, a minority of scientists, some very vocal, believe that catastrophic scenarios are more realistic than the IPCC's likely scenarios. There is also a very vocal contingent among journalists and politicians that supports the catastrophe narrative.
At the same time, there are other scientists that do not view climate change to be a serious threat. Many of these adopt the lukewarmer perspective, which expects warming to be on the lower end of the IPCC likely range and do not expect the impacts to be alarming or catastrophic. Some politicians and industrialists reject the solutions put forward by the international climate treaties in favor of near-term economic development.
This chapter lays out the contours of the climate change problem: ambiguities surrounding the definition of climate change, what we know with confidence, what we do not know and cannot know, and whether climate change is dangerous.
Acknowledgments
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Chapter Eleven - Risk Management
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“[O]ne could prepare, one could strive, one could make choices, but ultimately life was an elaborate game of providence and probability.”
—Author Daniel SilvaManaging risks involves balancing amongst concerns, safety, profits, and reputation in the context of the assessed risks. In general, risk management evaluates a collection of alternatives, considers pros and cons, and then reaches a decision that best achieves the decision-makers’ priorities.
Risk management is closely related to policy analysis and creation. A policy acts as a belief or plan to guide decision-making toward favored outcomes for international organizations, governments, private sector organizations, or individuals. The development and operation of policies are often influenced by risk management practices and decision theory.
Risk assessments often include a combination of strategic risks (long term), tactical risks (medium term), and operational risks (short term). Management priorities and strategies for risks on each of these time scales are typically different, with conflicts arising when near- and long-term strategies have the potential to worsen either the longterm or near-term impacts.
Risks associated with climate change are characterized by large uncertainties and emergence, with complex interplays between emergency and incremental, long-term risks. For such situations, there is a growing focus on dynamic risk assessment and management rather than on conventional risk management and control.4 Particularly for emergent risks, the risks as well as the risk management responses need to be monitored and adjusted.
Risk Management Principles
“The unfortunate reality is that efforts to regulate one risk can create other, often more dangerous risks.” (Legal scholar Jonathan Adler)
Risk management starts with reviewing the results generated by risk estimation, characterization, and assessment. Acceptable risk requires no further management. With intolerable risk, benefits aside, management involves phasing out or eliminating the risk if at all possible. If that is impossible, then mitigation and increasing resilience come into focus. With tolerable risk, while there are perceived benefits, there remains a call for risk reduction. Public risk management for such risks should focus on designing and implementing actions that result in either acceptable risk or create sustainable longterm tolerance via reduction, mitigation, or increasing resilience. and implementing actions that result in either acceptable risk or create sustainable longterm tolerance via reduction, mitigation, or increasing resilience.
List of Figure and Tables
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Chapter Eight - Alternative Methods for Generating Climate Change Scenarios
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“When it comes to thinking about the impacts of climate change, we must guard against a failure of imagination.”
—Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory BoardThere is a growing realization that global climate models are not fit for the purpose of predicting twenty-first century climate variations and change, particularly on decadal and regional scales (Sections 6.3.4, 6.4). Climate model simulations under the auspices of the CMIP program and the IPCC are not providing the full range of scenarios of plausible climate outcomes. The CMIP simulations include very limited scenarios of volcanic eruptions and solar variability. Further, the climate models have inadequate representations of solar indirect effects and multi-decadal to century scale variations in the large-scale ocean circulations. Natural internal climate variability is of particular importance for scenarios of regional climate variations.
There is a need for alternative science-based frameworks for developing scenarios of climate futures, particularly with regard to regional extreme weather and climate events. The framework presented here has an indirect role for climate model simulations in developing scenarios of climate futures, but utilizes a broader range of methods for generating scenarios. Statistical and network-based models, data-driven scenarios, and speculative but physically-based what-if scenarios are also used in scenario generation. This alternative scenario framework reflects a shift away from median and likely values to a possibility framework for scenarios that accepts all outcomes that are not judged to be implausible by our current background knowledge.
The rationale for the scenario generation methods described in this chapter is provided by the risk governance framework that is discussed in Part Three of this book. A broad range of justified scenarios, along with expression of uncertainties, provide inputs for robust decision-making. Robust decision-making incorporates scientific uncertainty into the decision-theoretic framework as knowledge, not ignorance.
Escape From Model-Land
“Letting go of the phantastic mathematical objects and achievables of model-land can lead to more relevant information on the real world and thus better-informed decision-making.”
(Computer modeler Erica Thompson, author of Escape from Model-Land)“Model-land” is a world in which mathematical simulations are evaluated against other mathematical simulations. Decision support in model-land implies taking the output of model simulations at face value, and then interpreting the frequencies from model-land to represent probabilities in the real world.
Description
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Chapter Fourteen - Mitigation
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“Make me chaste and celibate—but not yet!”
—Fourth-century philosopher Saint AugustineClimate change mitigation refers to efforts to control the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases by reducing or preventing emission of greenhouse gases and enhancing sinks of carbon. By contrast with adaptation, which manages the local impacts of a hazard, mitigation seeks to prevent the hazard from occurring.
Carbon Mitigation and Management
“Shutting down investment in fossil fuels before you have a plan to replace their role in the energy system is neither resilient nor just.” (Energy finance expert Michael Liebreich)
Carbon management is targeted at limiting the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and additional compounds that comprise carbon-based air pollution (e.g., methane and soot). Several comprehensive schemes have been formulated for atmospheric CO2 emissions and carbon-based air pollution, including the IPCC AR6 WGIII Report,4 Climate Stabilization Wedges, and Project Drawdown. While the emphasis has been on atmospheric CO2, management of other carbon pollutants is important in efforts to reduce warming. These mitigation schemes focus primarily on the sources of emissions: energy systems, transportation, industry, agriculture and forests, buildings, and urban systems.
Reducing CO2 emissions has become an end in itself, with the implicit assumption that reducing CO2 emissions will rapidly decrease atmospheric CO2 and improve the climate. However, rigorous detection and attribution of the climate impacts of even very strong emission mitigation efforts will be very challenging. Emergence of a climate mitigation signal beyond natural variability can never be proven, as we would be comparing it to an unknown, counterfactual world. The challenge is to understand how atmospheric carbon will evolve in response to emissions reductions, and how the fast and slow components of the climate system will respond.
Global Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks and Budget
“There is room for words on subjects other than last words.” (Philosopher Robert Nozick, author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia)
Reservoirs of carbon in the earth system include the atmosphere, land ecosystems, the ocean, sediments, and the Earth's interior. Excluding rocks, by far the largest reservoir of carbon is the ocean. Exchanges of carbon between reservoirs occurs via various chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes. These exchanges establish a dynamical equilibrium over time in the absence of large external perturbations to the system. Since the advent of agriculture, humans have gradually influenced the carbon cycle by modifying the vegetation in land ecosystems.
Chapter Three - The Climate Change Response Challenge
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”
—Nobel laureate economist Friedrich HayekThe climate change response challenge is often portrayed as simple: increasing CO2 emissions causes problems, therefore stop fossil fuel emissions. Our failure to stop fossil fuel emissions, after decades of international policies, is often blamed on a lack of political will. Well, political will is lacking at least in part because CO2 emissions are the byproduct of dependable energy delivered by fossil fuels that has underpinned two centuries of human and economic development.
In a 2018 interim Special Report requested by the UNFCCC, the IPCC mapped out a pathway to limiting the temperature increase in 2100 to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Limiting warming to 1.5°C is assessed to require dramatic emissions reductions by the year 2030 and complete carbon neutrality by around 2050. This would entail unprecedented transformations of energy, transportation, agricultural, urban, and industrial systems. However, no feasible and effective pathway has been identified to achieve any of these objectives in such a short time frame.
Human-caused climate change has been characterized as a “tragedy of the horizon” that imposes a cost on future generations that the current one has no direct incentive to fix. The possibility of delayed global rewards is challenged as inadequate justification to take action and incur immediate costs. However, this has led to the concern that we are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Additional background factors that influence the decisions of individual nations to participate in collective action to urgently reduce emissions include: uncertainties and complexity surrounding the underlying climate change science, the priority of economic development, and the unknown impacts of future technologies. There is substantial uncertainty about the magnitude, rate, regionality, and timing of adverse climate impacts, which is confounded by natural climate variability.
Economist Robert Pindyck argues that this uncertainty creates insurance value, pushing us towards early and stronger actions to reduce CO2 emissions. However, the very uncertainties over climate change that create insurance value prevent determination of exactly how large that insurance value is.
Chapter Fifteen - Climate Risk And The Policy Discourse
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“The best way to predict your future is to invent it.”
—Computer scientist Alan KayAs I write this final chapter in mid-summer of 2022, the world is embroiled in geopolitical and financial instability from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's war on Ukraine. In the midst of this instability, we are seeing the inevitable clash between alarming proclamations about the climate crisis, the priorities of food and energy and poverty reduction, and the costs and difficulties of transitioning to net-zero CO2 emissions.
Recent headlines include:
• “German cities impose cold showers and turn off lights amid Russian gas crisis”
• “Hungary declares state of emergency over threat of energy shortages”
• “Almost half of UK adults fear falling into fuel poverty before the years end”
• “The West's Green Delusions Empowered Putin”
• “Russia's war is the end of climate policy as we know it”
• “Trudeau moves forward with fertilizer reduction climate policy”
• “Why Dutch farmers are protesting over emissions cuts”
• “Ireland debates a 30% emissions cap on farmers”
• “Green dogma behind fall of Sri Lanka”
• “Rich countries’ climate policies are colonialism in green”
• “Barbados Resists Climate Colonialism in an Effort to Survive the Costs of Global Warming”
• “African nations expected to make case for big rise in fossil fuel output”
• “UN climate talks end in stalemate and ‘hypocrisy’ allegation”
How to respond to the climate “crisis” in the midst of genuine crises associated with food and energy shortages and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is best reflected by the response of the New Zealand government. In defending its decision to issue fossil fuel prospecting permits in spite of declaring a climate emergency, the New Zealand government stated that the climate crisis was “insufficient” to halt oil and gas exploration. Climate change is indeed a crisis of insufficient weight that is now being all but ignored by many countries as they grapple with the basic human needs for energy and food.
In 2015, the world's nations agreed on a set of 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals to support future global development.16 These goals include, in ranked order:
1. No poverty
2. Zero hunger
7. Affordable and clean energy
13. Climate action
Should one element of Goal 13, related to net-zero emissions, trump the higher priority goals of poverty and hunger and the availability of energy?
Chapter Four - Mixing Science and Politics
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”
—John M. Barry, author of The Great InfluenzaThe relationship between scientific knowledge and political action is far from straightforward. Scientific knowledge invariably has blind spots and is provisional. Policy for complex issues is ever more reliant on knowledge, while science can deliver ever less certainty for society's most complex problems. This tension creates a paradox that is normally resolved through political decisions, and not through the dissemination of “truth” in the sense of uncontested knowledge. Political considerations include public opinion, fiscal priorities, diplomatic considerations, and assessment of political and economic risks and rewards.
Policy decisions related to scientific findings can be fairly straightforward (tame problems), or they can be highly contentious (wicked messes). Good decisions are those that lead to desired outcomes. However, the climate change problem provides much scope for disagreement among reasonable and intelligent people as to what constitutes desired outcomes, let alone how to achieve them.
In politicized arenas, science has become increasingly like litigation, where truth seeking has become secondary to advocacy on behalf of a preferred position or policy solution. Encroachment of politics into socially-relevant science is unavoidable. Problems arise when:
• Driven by external pressures or for their own political purposes, scientists ignore data and research paths that would make their political point weaker or undermine their ideological perspective.
• Politicians interfere with the activities of science.
• Narrow framing of the scientific problem by policy makers, whereby government funding draws the efforts of scientists towards a narrow range of projects that supports preferred policies.
• Politicians, advocacy groups, journalists, and even scientists attempt to intimidate or otherwise silence scientists whose research is judged to interfere with their policy preferences or political agendas.
Models of the Science-Policy Interface
“Our ignorance is vast at every single step in this process as we go from emissions to concentrations to climate forcing to changes in temperature and other climatic attributes over to the impact assessments and damage estimates.” (Environmental and energy scientist Ferenc Toth)
The science-policy interface is comprised of social processes that encompass relations between scientists and other actors in the policy process, with the aim of enriching decision-making.
Part One - The Climate Change Challenge
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“[M]y most fundamental objective is to urge a change in the perception and evaluation of familiar data.”
—Philosopher of science Thomas KuhnChange in the Earth's climate and its adverse effects have always been a common concern of humankind. The current challenge of climate change is typically formulated as:
• The Earth's climate is warming.
• A warming climate is dangerous.
• We are causing the warming by emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels.
• We need to prevent dangerous climate change by rapidly reducing and then eliminating our CO2 emissions.
In spite of the perceived urgency of the problem and international climate treaties and agreements that were first signed in 1992, global CO2 emissions continue to increase while targets and deadlines continue to be missed.
Most people feel that climate change is a very serious issue. Depending on your perspective and values, there will be much future loss and damage from either climate change itself, or from the policies designed to prevent climate change. Conflicts surrounding climate change have been exacerbated by oversimplifying both the problem and its solutions.
Acknowledging disagreement is not the same as rejecting climate change as an important problem. In the context of the international treaties and agreements on climate change, both the problem of climate change and its solutions are framed as a global issue. This framing of the central challenge that focuses on reducing global carbon emissions has allowed technical fixes such as geo-engineering and low-carbon energy to take center-stage. This focus has come at the expense of a host of wider visions for social, economic, and political change, particularly at the national and local levels.
Part One describes how the challenge of climate change has evolved in the context of a complex interplay among scientists, the organizations that support research, government-sponsored assessments of climate research, national and international climate policy, politics, and the needs and desires of peoples and nations in a rapidly changing world. Polarization has deepened in a fog of confusion about what we know versus what we do not know and what we cannot know. A populace that is trying to understand climate change is left confused by international and national policies and commitments that do not seem doable or politically feasible.
Chapter Five - The Climate Change “Uncertainty Monster”
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Summary
“Science […] can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.”
—Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw1In the linear model of expertise and decision-making (Section 4.1.1), uncertainty and doubt are enemies of action. Attempts to hide or simplify uncertainty are at the heart of some of the most acrimonious debates over climate change.
Uncertainty is a state of incomplete knowledge arising from a lack of information or from disagreement about what is known or even knowable. The fundamental mischaracterization of the climate change problem as a tame rather than a wicked problem (Section 3.4) has resulted in institutionalized efforts to ignore, simplify, reduce, and control uncertainty.
In frontier research, the objective is to extend knowledge in ways that change how we think about a particular topic. Doubt and uncertainty are inherent at the knowledge frontier. Researchers using the same data and hypotheses can come to different conclusions in the context of a vast universe of different possible research designs. While extending the knowledge frontier often reduces uncertainty in some dimensions, inevitably it leads to greater uncertainty in other dimensions as unanticipated complexities are discovered. Careful consideration of uncertainties is not a central element of frontier research.
However, uncertainty assessment and characterization are paramount for science that is targeted at policy-making. The greatest challenges are presented by frontier research that is policy relevant, such as climate change.
This chapter presents a consilience of diverse ideas about uncertainty, which provides the foundation for a strategy to accommodate uncertainty at the climate science-policy interface and in decision-making.
The Uncertainty Monster
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” (Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche)
With a heritage in monster theory, Dutch social scientist Jeroen van der Sluijs introduced the concept of the “uncertainty monster” in context of the different ways that the scientific community responds to the monstrous uncertainties associated with environmental problems. The “monster” arises from the confusion and ambiguity associated with knowledge versus ignorance, objectivity versus subjectivity, facts versus values, prediction versus speculation, and science versus policy. The uncertainty monster gives rise to discomfort and fear, particularly with regard to our reactions to things or situations we cannot understand or control, including the presentiment of radical unknown dangers. Specifically, in the context of decision-making, the uncertainty monster is perceived as something to be feared and avoided.
Chapter Ten - Risk and its Assessment
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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- Book:
- Climate Uncertainty and Risk
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 06 June 2023, pp 141-160
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Summary
“[I]n itself, nothing is a risk, there are no risks in reality. Inversely, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one frames the danger, considers the event.”
—Philosopher François EwaldThe concept of risk is an outgrowth of concerns about coping with dangers. For most of human history, the assessment and management of risk occurred informally by trial and error. More than 2400 years ago, Athenians articulated the capacity of assessing risk before making decisions. As the influence and scale of technology expanded, it became evident that society needed to assess risks proactively. Science has increasingly allowed us to recognize and measure more subtle hazards, which has been coupled with a general decreasing tolerance for risk in modern industrialized society.
Risk assessment and management as a scientific field is only about 40–50 years old. There are many different perspectives on risk, and some of these perspectives represent substantially different frameworks. However, there is broad agreement on the basic ideas and principles of risk understanding, assessment, communication, and management.
Risk may have positive or negative outcomes or may simply be associated with uncertainty. Fire and accidents only have negative outcomes, and they are often referred to as hazard risks. Taking a risk can also result in a positive outcome. Risk can also be related to uncertainty of outcome. However, most applications of risk analysis focus on adverse outcomes.
Climate change presents a challenge to risk assessment that is uniquely complex, uncertain, and ambiguous. This chapter provides perspectives on risk and its perception, how risk is characterized, and why climate change is such a challenging problem for risk analysis.
Risk and Perception
“You are so convinced that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you really believe without believing you believe it.” (Writer Orson Scott Card)
Climate risk is generally regarded as a hazard risk, although there are potential positive outcomes as well. The related terms “threat” and “hazard” refer to something that could cause harm, with the possibility of trouble, danger, or ruin. The hazard may be something that is impending and imminent, or something that is likely, or merely possible.
Chapter Two - Consensus, or Not?
- Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
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- Book:
- Climate Uncertainty and Risk
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 06 June 2023, pp 15-32
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Summary
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into their lives.”
—Russian writer Leo TolstoyWhile the public may understand little about climate science, nearly everyone has been exposed to the statement that there is a consensus among scientists regarding dangerous climate change. This chapter explores the history and consequences of the scientific consensus building activities undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For genuinely well-established scientific theories, the concept of consensus is irrelevant. For example, there is no point in discussing a consensus that the Earth orbits the sun, or that the hydrogen molecule has less mass than the nitrogen molecule. While a consensus may arise surrounding a specific scientific hypothesis or theory, the existence of a consensus is not itself the evidence.
There is a key difference between a “scientific consensus” and a “consensus of scientists.” A scientific consensus is a relatively stable paradigm that structures and organizes scientific knowledge. By contrast, a consensus of scientists represents a deliberate expression of collective judgment by a scientific institution or a group of scientists, often at the official request of a government or other organization.
Under the auspices of the IPCC, the international climate community has worked for the past 30 years to establish a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. The IPCC has codified consensus seeking into its assessment procedures: “In taking decisions, drawing conclusions, and adopting reports, the IPCC Plenary and Working Groups shall use all best endeavours to reach consensus.” The IPCC consensus has been described as a “manufactured consensus” (or a consensus of scientists), arising from an intentional consensus building process.
Among the best indicators to nonexperts about climate change is the existence of a consensus among experts. Messaging on the climate consensus went viral with this 2013 tweet from US President Obama:
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climatechange is real, man-made and dangerous.”
President Obama's tweet linked to a paper by Cook et al. that analyzed the abstracts of almost 12,000 climate-related papers.