Certain Uncertainty: Models and Climate Change

Of course, very few of us really claim to know the future with much certainty, and climate science has none of the pretensions or divine endorsement associated with those who make dramatic predictions. From a policy perspective, prognostication is fraught with much risk. How do you make important, costly decisions when you are unsure what the future will be like? Of course, uncertainty about the future is nothing new, and most policy can best be described as risk avoidance and minimization: how can we balance the probability of certain events with the costs of addressing them? But climate change puts a powerful new twist on the situation. Climate is important to much of what we do as a species, and we are very sure that the climate is rapidly changing. But knowing exactly how the climate is changing in a particular place by a particular time is extremely difficult — and arguably impossible. The most that scientists (such as those at the IPCC) are willing to endorse is that to provide a range of scenarios or a set of probabilities around one scenario. Read More...

Tags: modeling, synergies, policy