Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The risk of shrugging at climate change

Weather is what you see out the window right now; climate is the probability of that weather happening outside your window. It’s a simple distinction. And it’s the reason why we cannot be certain if climate change played any role in Hurricane Sandy.

Scientists can only say climate change is expected to increase the probability of such hurricanes, and there are considerable uncertainties and disagreements about even that.

Most people don’t like that sort of answer. It’s not conclusive. And an answer that isn’t conclusive doesn’t feel like an answer. Harry Truman famously said he wanted to hear from a one-armed economist because he was sick of hearing “on the one hand, on the other hand.”

That’s human nature. Uncertainty is unsettling. We want answers. And “maybe” won’t do.

But “maybe” is inherent in any probability greater than zero per cent and less than 100 per cent. When the American polling guru Nate Silver runs numbers through his model and calculates that Barack Obama has a 75-per-cent chance of winning the election, Silver does not conclude that Obama “will” win. He says it is probable that Obama will win — but there is still a 25-per-cent chance he won’t. Will he win? Won’t he? The answer to both questions is “maybe.”

For making this sort of forecast — a forecast that acknowledges the limits of human knowledge and the uncertainty inherent in reality — Silver has been accused of “hedging.” That’s the polite description. The cruder version is “covering his ass.”

Of course these hostile responses are motivated by more than an aversion to uncertainty. Silver’s critics are almost exclusively Republicans who are angry that his forecast contradicts their belief that the Republicans have overtaken the Democrats. They accuse him of acting in bad faith. And their hostility spills over to his probabilistic call. Hence: “covering his ass.”

Something similar happens with climate change.

Most of those who do not accept what almost every climatologist on the planet believes to be true are passionate about their non-belief. Climate change isn’t a serious threat, they say. Some go further and insist the whole thing is nonsense. And a sub-set of the sub-set believes climate change is a massive fraud perpetrated by environmentalists and scientists bent on the socialist re-engineering of the developed world.

When these people hear probabilistic forecasts and carefully stated acknowledgments of uncertainty, they pounce. “Maybe” this, “maybe” that — it’s all weasel words! Scientists don’t really know what’s going to happen, they say, and it would be crazy to spend enormous amounts of money to stop a threat when we’re not even sure how big it is.

Curiously, those who make this argument do not use it when dealing with other public and private matters.

Consider that scientists cannot say with certainty that smoking will kill you. The best they can do is estimate the probability that it will. For regular smokers, over a lifetime, it’s about 50 per cent. So: maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Weasel words, right? Go suck on a butt.

And stop wasting money on fire insurance. It’s very unlikely your house will burn down.

But these are both risks where the probability of the bad thing happening can be calculated fairly precisely. That’s not true of climate change. Those who would like us to do nothing might suggest that makes a difference.

So let’s try another risk.

Remember “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”? That was the Bush administration’s standard response to critics who said it was far from certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or would use them, as an argument against the invasion of Iraq. In effect, the administration acknowledged that there was uncertainty about how much risk Saddam posed. But it insisted that waiting for the uncertainty to resolved was not an option because to do so meant waiting until it was too late.

“What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or wilful blindness,” U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney argued in 2002. “Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator or the two networking together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”

The administration even had what Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind called a “One Per Cent Doctrine,” in the book of the same name. “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,” Cheney said at a meeting two months after 9/11. This idea became “the standard of action that would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come,” Suskind wrote.

Now look at the terrifying power of Hurricane Sandy. Look at the damage done, the lives lost.

And remember, more and bigger storms may not even be the most frightening part of catastrophic climate change. Imagine droughts so severe they wipe out food production across whole regions. Imagine sea level rises permanently flooding low-level coastlines and cities. Imagine God knows what else because the planet is immensely complex and full of surprises and some of them may be very nasty.

Should we really do nothing because it is not certain that any of that will happen? Even if we grant that the probability of truly catastrophic climate change is very small — something many scientists would dispute — does it make sense to shrug and ignore the possibility?

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest we should pay any cost to reduce these risks no matter how unlikely they may be. That would be irrational. (And yes, I think the Bush administration very much erred in this direction.)

But dismissing the danger because it is uncertain or improbable? Rejecting any action because it has a cost? That’s crazy, too.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Dan Gardner

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