Chance and Prediction: Will The World Agree Action on Global Warming?
The debate about global warming and what we should do about it has raged for twenty years, now.
The politicians can agree that it is an important issue (it is often called the greatest challenge of our times), but find it very so difficult to agree action on action.
Why should this be? There are a number of reasons.
Firstly, the science of climate change is very complex.
At one level, it is very simple: increasing the concentrations of certain so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as has happened through man's activities over the past two hundred and fifty years leads to higher global average temperatures.
Higher temperatures lead to melting ice, which in turn leads to rising sea levels (whilst that takes place, changing weather patterns will make growing crops more difficult and extreme weather events more frequent).
But being able to say exactly when the levels will rise or exactly which areas will experience the most significant weather changes or exactly how things might change is much more difficult.
It is subject to probabilities and risks.
Probabilities have a bigger impact on your daily life than you might imagine.
How much you pay for your car insurance or to insure your house is directly related to chance: the assumption is that people with similar profiles face the same risks and the higher the risks, the higher the price you pay.
In fact, probabilities are used by people and businesses all around the world to help them make decisions, every day.
Some probabilities and decisions are easier to calculate than others.
Let's take an example: suppose I wanted to launch a career as a magician and decided that to show my credibility, I needed a video of myself tossing a coin and 'magically' getting 10 heads in a row.
Although the chance of getting a head on any one throw is 1 in 2, if I toss a coin repeatedly getting a sequence that runs head, tail, head, tail, head, tail and so on is only one out of a great number of possible outcomes, each with equal chance.
By doing the maths, I know that if I flip a coin 1024 times the chance is that I will get a streak of 10 heads in a row.
Now, let's say I can make 12 flips in a minute.
That means that if I spend about an hour and-a-half filming myself flipping a coin, I will end up with a section of about a minute where I will have 10 heads in a row and will have that 'magical' clip to put on my website.
All I need to decide now is whether the time investment is worth my perceived value of the clip.
Consider another example.
Say I am single male in my late twenties or early thirties.
I have met and fallen in love with a beautiful woman and am wondering whether I should ask her to marry me, as I'd really like to have children of my own.
Should I ask her to marry me? The decision here is much more complex, although the desired outcome is still easy to specify.
How could we go about working out the probabilities and risks in this situation? In my calculations, it might help to understand how fertile the prospective partner is and how high my sperm count is, so we can work out how easy it will be to have children.
It might also help to understand how compatible our personalities are, which will tell us how likely we are to enjoy living together.
These calculations help but don't illuminate the key risks that I am trying to resolve: will she say yes or no? Will I meet an even better candidate at sometime in the near future? The final decision will come down to my intuition.
With climate change, the decisions the politicians are being asked to make are more akin to trying to decide about making the proposal than making the video.
There is a huge amount of variables that are involved.
Some can be measured, like the probability of a certain level of temperature rise given a quantity of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emitted.
Some are unknowable, like what will the United States (or China or Europe or India) do? Should we try to avert the changes we are causing to the atmosphere? Will enough countries co-operate to make our efforts worthwhile? Should we just try to cope with the impacts as they come along? Should we do a combination of both and if so, what is the best combination? Who should pay? When should we take action? These are the questions about taking action on global warming and the resultant climate change that the politicians are grappling with.
Politics being politics it is taking time but and the scientists are telling them they need to start making these decisions now.
Because if the politicians do not decide quickly what kind of future we want to marry ourselves to, nature is on course to make it very ugly indeed.
In fact, there is 49 in 50 chance that current emissions levels will cause dangerous climate change (dangerous = leads to loss of life through flooding, drought etc) and only a 1 in 50 chance that the climate will remain as it is today.
Humans have the capacity to act and replace fossil fuel with sustainable sources of energy but it will need a huge shift in our shared imagination.
It will also need a shift in the way we account for our economic activity so that people are rewarded for behaviour that nourishes the environment and not for destroying it.
To do that will need a shift from a competitive to a collaborative mindset, something that is alien to our current political and economic processes.
Global warming and the resultant climate change is alien to all of human experience in our all of our history.
At present, the probabilities look like we will continue on a crash course of "business as usual" which in turn raises the chance of catastrophic climate change.
But how humans run in the world can change and change very quickly: just look at the collapse of communism in the late 1980's and the collapsing Arab world now.
The social and economic structures that have caused us to generate the global warming problem could change just as quickly: the only difficulty is to figure out the chances.
The politicians can agree that it is an important issue (it is often called the greatest challenge of our times), but find it very so difficult to agree action on action.
Why should this be? There are a number of reasons.
Firstly, the science of climate change is very complex.
At one level, it is very simple: increasing the concentrations of certain so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as has happened through man's activities over the past two hundred and fifty years leads to higher global average temperatures.
Higher temperatures lead to melting ice, which in turn leads to rising sea levels (whilst that takes place, changing weather patterns will make growing crops more difficult and extreme weather events more frequent).
But being able to say exactly when the levels will rise or exactly which areas will experience the most significant weather changes or exactly how things might change is much more difficult.
It is subject to probabilities and risks.
Probabilities have a bigger impact on your daily life than you might imagine.
How much you pay for your car insurance or to insure your house is directly related to chance: the assumption is that people with similar profiles face the same risks and the higher the risks, the higher the price you pay.
In fact, probabilities are used by people and businesses all around the world to help them make decisions, every day.
Some probabilities and decisions are easier to calculate than others.
Let's take an example: suppose I wanted to launch a career as a magician and decided that to show my credibility, I needed a video of myself tossing a coin and 'magically' getting 10 heads in a row.
Although the chance of getting a head on any one throw is 1 in 2, if I toss a coin repeatedly getting a sequence that runs head, tail, head, tail, head, tail and so on is only one out of a great number of possible outcomes, each with equal chance.
By doing the maths, I know that if I flip a coin 1024 times the chance is that I will get a streak of 10 heads in a row.
Now, let's say I can make 12 flips in a minute.
That means that if I spend about an hour and-a-half filming myself flipping a coin, I will end up with a section of about a minute where I will have 10 heads in a row and will have that 'magical' clip to put on my website.
All I need to decide now is whether the time investment is worth my perceived value of the clip.
Consider another example.
Say I am single male in my late twenties or early thirties.
I have met and fallen in love with a beautiful woman and am wondering whether I should ask her to marry me, as I'd really like to have children of my own.
Should I ask her to marry me? The decision here is much more complex, although the desired outcome is still easy to specify.
How could we go about working out the probabilities and risks in this situation? In my calculations, it might help to understand how fertile the prospective partner is and how high my sperm count is, so we can work out how easy it will be to have children.
It might also help to understand how compatible our personalities are, which will tell us how likely we are to enjoy living together.
These calculations help but don't illuminate the key risks that I am trying to resolve: will she say yes or no? Will I meet an even better candidate at sometime in the near future? The final decision will come down to my intuition.
With climate change, the decisions the politicians are being asked to make are more akin to trying to decide about making the proposal than making the video.
There is a huge amount of variables that are involved.
Some can be measured, like the probability of a certain level of temperature rise given a quantity of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emitted.
Some are unknowable, like what will the United States (or China or Europe or India) do? Should we try to avert the changes we are causing to the atmosphere? Will enough countries co-operate to make our efforts worthwhile? Should we just try to cope with the impacts as they come along? Should we do a combination of both and if so, what is the best combination? Who should pay? When should we take action? These are the questions about taking action on global warming and the resultant climate change that the politicians are grappling with.
Politics being politics it is taking time but and the scientists are telling them they need to start making these decisions now.
Because if the politicians do not decide quickly what kind of future we want to marry ourselves to, nature is on course to make it very ugly indeed.
In fact, there is 49 in 50 chance that current emissions levels will cause dangerous climate change (dangerous = leads to loss of life through flooding, drought etc) and only a 1 in 50 chance that the climate will remain as it is today.
Humans have the capacity to act and replace fossil fuel with sustainable sources of energy but it will need a huge shift in our shared imagination.
It will also need a shift in the way we account for our economic activity so that people are rewarded for behaviour that nourishes the environment and not for destroying it.
To do that will need a shift from a competitive to a collaborative mindset, something that is alien to our current political and economic processes.
Global warming and the resultant climate change is alien to all of human experience in our all of our history.
At present, the probabilities look like we will continue on a crash course of "business as usual" which in turn raises the chance of catastrophic climate change.
But how humans run in the world can change and change very quickly: just look at the collapse of communism in the late 1980's and the collapsing Arab world now.
The social and economic structures that have caused us to generate the global warming problem could change just as quickly: the only difficulty is to figure out the chances.