Minding the Sciences—Wicked Science and Understanding Climate Change: Uncertainty, Risk, and Pragmatics
By Joe Nalven March 7, 2024 3 comments
Wicked problems need wicked science to, minimally, frame what is puzzling. Wickedness is not a moral judgment. Instead, it is tied to the limits of knowing—when rationality is encumbered by ambiguity and uncertainty and when control over the variables is limited or currently impossible. Predictions that emerge from modeling, especially those that reach decades into the future, cannot be adequately evaluated in the present, thus affecting whether such predictions have low, middling, or high confidence. The policymaker is left to choose between effective or ineffective programs based on blind faith, ideology, and hope. This is the arena where Judith Curry offers enlightenment about the stumbling blocks to robust climate science. As a seasoned climate scientist, she asks us to dwell on the uncertainty and risk in predicting climate change and, equally important, to understand the different policy principles used to enable programs to affect climate and its effects.
When I first studied climate in the 1980s, it was limited to air pollution policy in the San Diego-Tijuana air basin. The focus was on measurable pollutants, air transport, and stationary versus mobile sources. It was also about what a developed nation—United States—could address versus a developing nation—Mexico. The physical context aided policymakers in their transborder efforts at cooperation.
Over the decades, environmental policy concerns have shifted focus in a major way to climate change. Multiple disciplines are required—from ocean dynamics, volcanic activity, atmospheric processes, radiative activity from the sun to human activity along with geological, historical, and contemporary data sources to predict climate and its distributive manifestations next year, ten years, fifty years, and more into the future without, unfortunately, being able to include significant technological fixes. Indeed, a very different order of measurement and global understanding from my early experiences of a local, transborder location.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2024/03/07/minding-the-sciences-wicked-science-and-understanding-climate-change-uncertainty-risk-and-pragmatics/
