What Climate Scientists Don’t Seem to Get
And so why we can’t fully trust their warnings
Posted on 18 Nov 24
by John RidgwayIn Uncategorized
Given that net zero is a risk management response to a perceived threat, one would hope that those who are both directly and indirectly responsible for establishing such policies would have a sound theoretical and conceptual understanding of risk and uncertainty. In particular, one would hope that they fully understand the basic principles of risk management and appreciate how risk and uncertainty are related. Unfortunately, although we are perfectly entitled to assume that such concepts are fully understood by those driving climate policy, this is actually not the case. I firmly believe that this shortcoming is one of the most important issues to be addressed by the sceptic, since it is a shortcoming that severely impairs the ability to make the correct risk-based decisions under uncertainty. Indeed, it could be argued that our government’s uncompromising pursuit of a carbon-free future is as a direct result of such a miscalculation. It is therefore a matter of great personal frustration that the publicising and addressing of this issue has not been a priority amongst professional and academic risk scientists. For too long now, climate scientists have been allowed to get away with professing a superior expertise in the evaluation and communication of risk and uncertainty, unchallenged by domain experts within the broader community of risk scientists.
Despite being something of an amateur when it comes to risk science, I have done what little I can by writing articles here that attempt to clarify the relevant technical issues. For example, I have challenged the IPCC’s concept of a ‘risk management framework’, given that it is predominantly focused upon psychological manipulation aimed at engineering compliance with policy. I have drawn attention to a profound and widespread failure within the climate science community to understand uncertainty’s philosophical framework and how this has resulted in an over-reliance on probability distributions when quantifying risk and uncertainty. I have taken a prominent communicator of climate science to task for advocating the view that gaps in knowledge are a layman’s misconception of what uncertainty is. I have warned of the important distinction to be made between risk and uncertainty aversions and what this means for those who advocate a precautionary approach. I have drawn attention to the relevance of ergodicity and have warned against the misuse of terminology such as ‘black swan’. And I have tried to point out how causal narratives are routinely oversimplified in the interest of promoting a ‘correct’ framing of the problem.1
https://cliscep.com/2024/11/18/what-climate-scientists-dont-seem-to-get/
