Article2011

Uncertainty in science and its role in climate policy

138 citations0/0 files storedPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

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Climate Change Policy and Economics Climate Change Communication and Perception Climate Change and Geoengineering

Abstract

Policy-making is usually about risk management. Thus, the handling of uncertainty in science is central to its support of sound policy-making. There is value in scientists engaging in a deep conversation with policy-makers and others, not merely 'delivering' results or analyses and then playing no further role. Communicating the policy relevance of different varieties of uncertainty, including imprecision, ambiguity, intractability and indeterminism, is an important part of this conversation. Uncertainty is handled better when scientists engage with policy-makers. Climate policy aims both to alter future risks (particularly via mitigation) and to take account of and respond to relevant remaining risks (via adaptation) in the complex causal chain that begins and ends with individuals. Policy-making profits from learning how to shift the distribution of risks towards less dangerous impacts, even if the probability of events remains uncertain. Immediate value lies not only in communicating how risks may change with time and how those risks may be changed by action, but also in projecting how our understanding of those risks may improve with time (via science) and how our ability to influence them may advance (via technology and policy design). Guidance on the most urgent places to gather information and realistic estimates of when to expect more informative answers is of immediate value, as are plausible estimates of the risk of delaying action. Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of '50 per cent chance of remaining under +2(°)C' is either 'right' or 'safe'. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?

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References

1921Risk, Uncertainty and Profit 1967Philosophical Investigations.2009Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C 2000Science and the Modern World 2003Defining Uncertainty: A Conceptual Basis for Uncertainty Management in Model-Based Decision Support 1990Uncertainty 1926Science and the Modern World 2010Science in the Age of Computer Simulation

Cited by

2021The social cost of carbon dioxide under climate-economy feedbacks and temperature variability 2017Understanding the origin of Paris Agreement emission uncertainties 2019Dependence of economic impacts of climate change on anthropogenically directed pathways 2016The epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of uncertainty in integrated assessment modeling 2022Challenges and innovations in the economic evaluation of the risks of climate change 2019Escape from model-land 2024Central banks and climate risks: Where we are and where we are going?

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