Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute,
published an invited op-ed in today's Financial Post arguing that the remaining uncertainties in climate projections should be a case for action -- not delay.
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, published an invited op-ed in today's Financial Post arguing that the remaining uncertainties in climate projections should be a case for action -- not delay. Instead of overselling the scientific certainty -- a strategy which could create serious obstacles in the face of near-term climate variations -- climate advocates would be better served by acknowledging the uncertainties and using them as a call to action.
Andy Revkin of the New York Times featured the story on Dot Earth. Revkin wrote:
The scary thing about Dr. Pielke's statement is how much it echoes experts going back decades. One of the most significant statements, to my mind, came from a panel assembled by the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, which I quoted in an op-ed I wrote in 1992 for the Christian Science Monitor (back in the days when I was a freelancer and author):
"Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now."
As I wrote at the time, "one of the authors of that statement was Robert Frosch, the head of research for General Motors Corporation -- hardly a radical environmentalist. Unfortunately, quiet, sensible voices such as his have been drowned out in all the noise from left and right."
So here we are, still facing a clear long-term picture (more CO2 = warming world = less ice + higher seas + lots of changing climate patterns), but sufficient murk in the short run to fuel the "green noise" and "destructive interference" in climate discourse
In order to successfully advance a long-term climate change mitigation agenda, climate advocates should advance a politics that is resilient to scientific uncertainty. Some ingredients for such a politics include recognizing the uncertainty in near and long-term climate impacts, using the uncertainty as a motivating factor, and avoiding the elevation of climate change as the central motivation for a clean energy agenda. Here are some takeaways from Pielke's op-ed:
Whether one is faced with evacuating from a possible hurricane landfall or investing in a mutual fund, decision-making is improved when uncertainties are readily understood.
On the highly politicized issue of climate change, however, understanding uncertainties is made difficult when scientists advocating for action oversell the predictive capabilities of climate models, such as those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But action on climate change makes sense even if many climate scientists oversell predictive capabilities.
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So in the debate on what to do about climate change, what are we to make of the overstated claims of predictive accuracy offered by many scientists? Not surprisingly, the reason for overstated claims lies in the bitter and contested politics of climate change.
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Lost in the Manichean debate over climate change is the real significance of what climate models really are telling us: We should act on climate mitigation and adaptation not because we are able to predict the future, but because we cannot.
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The reality is that the future state of the climate is uncertain, and as such it represents a type of risk management problem. In 2002 Steve Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University and long-time advocate for action on climate change, explained "uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes." Combatants in the climate debate congregate around the extremes, emphasize either mild or catastrophic outcomes as is convenient and overstate the certainty of such outcomes.
When scientists advocating action overstate the certainty of predictions, and policy-makers commit political and other resources based on those claims, they find themselves in a difficult situation because, according to Frame and colleagues, "they are likely to face strong criticism if they revise up their estimates of uncertainty in the relatively near future." Scientists who oversell the predictive capacity of climate models provide a basis for legitimate criticism by their political opponents, and in the process, actually create obstacles to action on climate change.
