Abstractions of Proof and Why Your Value Judgement is a Climate Risk - Director's Cut
Abstractions of Proof and Why Your Value Judgement is a Climate Risk - Director's Cut
Previously published on LinkedIn, November 29, 2022: Light Revision
There is a climate problem, and should you believe it, you surely agree we must do better at appreciating the underlying issues. Civility is important because it helps build dialogue, although, I tend to agree with Christopher Hitchens' remark that it’s over-rated.
We need to be invested in important things (I'd rather be offended than lied to), but most of all we need to care about our best understanding of the facts, and also recognise where our confidence comes from and whether it’s deserved.
It is the job of lawyers to represent a legal position by establishing what is effectively a case based on risk. In a criminal case the defence will emphasise the standard that guilt must be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the implied risk that an innocent be convicted. The prosecution presents the risk that someone guilty should escape justice, potentially, freeing them to cause harm again. In a civil trial the criterion is much lower and ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ simply means better than 50%, or, more likely than not.
Yet in all things there are few absolutes. Even the absolutes we have are likely to be provisional placeholders for a better explanation in the future. The language of scientific outcomes are best understood in terms of probabilities, which it just so happens, is also the language of risk.
More generally, what this means is that the risk attached to anything, be it technology, economics, law or scientific endeavours, is fungible. When risk is not incorporated into value judgements it forces its own way in by putting the reliability of that judgement at risk. Belief in infallibility is a threat that is most pronounced in hysterical mob behaviour.
The preponderance of evidence for climate change is equivalent to the standard set for a civil trial, but the IPCC also says that climate change is 'unequivocal'. This is a qualified opinion formed by taking into account all the significant studies from nearly every academic or scientific institution in the world and subjecting them to rigorous review and analysis.1
There formidable and credible opposing views on anthropomorphic climate change such as those of Robert Lindzen. For reasons I set out in a future article, they fall into a general pattern that can be understood remarkably easily, which includes exploiting the public’s confusion over statistical terminology.
Now you might think that this is what informs policy but science is not politics and what counts is how the citizenry interpret the risks. Our opinions whether they be thought out or borrowed are at the basis of our political choices; in a democracy the call to action should come from the signals that elections provide.
Of course, such calls are not unopposed and there is a need to overcome the vested interests of lobbyists, but how can citizens become informed enough to be a significant factor in legislator’s political survival? By honing the ability to assess the risks inherent to, or incurred by, complex systems.
This is not easy and made more difficult because with greater complexity comes opportunity for the information to be subject to manipulation and reinterpretation.
In the article linked below, ‘time, truth and public discourse’ were identified as factors that influence our subjective value judgement. In what was effectively a primer for this piece, it was asserted that threats posed by dysfunctional public discourse also impede our ability to respond to climate change.
Why am I persisting with this here instead of getting directly to the point where I start to speak about the practical issues of implementing new energy technologies? Well actually I am.
The threat of climate change has created an unprecedented need for options, so if our willingness to explore them is in any way curtailed, it is a practical problem that we cannot afford to ignore. If we allow technical discussions to become public arguments about arbitrary personal preferences it becomes a problem. Science offers society explanations and engineering provides the options.
Technical Selection versus Objection
In the process of technical selection, the comparisons made between alternative solutions, ought to be based on functional and performance criteria within the operational context. It should not be swayed by subjective opinion which is why it is important to set out the criteria in advance.
It matters that the focus is on the technical merits, of course, advocacy is still important when it comes to discussing them. None of that is adequately conveyed in journalism, commentary and the gross over-simplification, is a public disservice.
Decision-Making for Complex Systems
In 2006 at Stanford, Stephen Schneider posed the partly rhetorical question, 'is anthropomorphic climate change settled?' He concluded that 'climate science is not like test tube science'. Falsification, he argued, has to come later because in systems science there are three components.
Settled information: - his given example was the global warming trend over the last 150 years. [I will discuss this in a future post]
Competing explanations: - his given example was Greenland is melting faster than anyone predicted but how much of that is due to 'global warming theory' and how much is due to ‘natural internal variability theory’.
Speculative components: advocates for a certain view will latch onto a ‘settled issue’ and ignore inconvenient components. [I have an entire series of articles planned around such an example]
He provided an initial example of the latter component as follows:
... somebody from say Competitive Enterprise Institute will tell you that carbon dioxide is a fertilizer of green plants and therefore a benefit, and it is indeed a fertiliser of green plants, but it also fertilises weeds and in the process of getting in the atmosphere it slowly gets in the oceans, where it acidifies the oceans and threatens the bottom of the food chain.
Stephen Schneider, Stanford, 2006
It’s not just that there are many confounding factors that can easily destabilise established ecologies, but that in complicated systems, we tend to omit things that are inconvenient to our case. Schneider classified this speculative component as ‘courtroom epistemology’ or, ‘it’s not my job to make my opponent’s case’; another way to classify this is as a lie of omission. Schneider went on to explain why this is works in the legal context but is entirely inappropriate for discussions about complex systems
I don’t want my lawyer dwelling on abstractions of truth, I want him to get me off, so the object is, in a courtroom, or if you have a civil trial with very complicated technical components, how long do those take? Months? Years? And that’s because it takes that long for issues presented elliptical sides, each leaving things out before the other side exposes that, and the judges and the juries have time to be able to fathom it. Well, so in a sense that kind of advocacy dichotomy works, when you have adequate time the judges and the jurors understand what’s going on, but what happens when the judge and the jury is the Congress, the public, the lawyers of the media and you get, if you’re lucky, ten seconds on the National Evening News to get your soundbite in, twenty, twenty-five seconds on the local TV news, five minutes in front of congress?
ibid.
Yet there is a danger with only discussing issues at the extremes because over the range of possible outcomes, they represent the left and right tails of the bell curve.
It is inconceivable that a debate polarised into ‘end of the world’ and ‘good for you’, which to me are the lowest probability outcomes, can possibly be properly communicated through that kind of advocacy dichotomy.
ibid.
I have written about numerous examples of just how irrational such discussions at the extremes can get. In any case, similar entrenchment exists on either side for just about everything energy related, such as solar panels, wind turbines, CCUS, electric vehicles, the role of hydrogen and of course Nuclear Power.
Undoubtedly, these things should be scrutinised, but what is happening instead is designed to shut down the discussion. It has become fair game to snuff out any proposition, by simply paralysing the debate, misrepresenting the information and stoking fears.
Friends with Benefits
By 2022, I had been quietly observing many of the informal groups that gather around issues such as climate change, energy transition, net-zero, pandemics and vaccines over a period of about two years (on LinkedIn). It was revealing.
Regardless of how divisive the topic is, once these groups form, the members don’t tend to disagree with each other; at least not in the public spaces where these conversations are taking place. What I have witnessed instead, are the efforts made to avoid internal conflict and occasionally (and it’s fun to observe), there have been obvious signs of cognitive dissonance.
For example, I have seen engineers fail to correct factual errors about technical reports, because the person asserting them is in the coterie. It seems that belonging is valued above authenticity in such cases. The humour of the situation soon wears off and what becomes increasingly dispiriting is the non-exclusive open-relationships these people have with the truth.
Of course, there are many benefits of being in a group; security, validation, reassurance perhaps even a sense of certainty and protection that the umbrella of belonging brings. The trade-offs are also many. The social dynamics influence perspectives, the way new information is processed, and the filters applied to outgroup sources.
There is an innate human tendency to be drawn to groups of like-minded people, but even in the most enlightened confederacies of ‘free thinkers’, groupthink persists, indeed, that is often the agenda of the dogmatists who lead them. In September 1948, Harold Rosenberg was talking about a similar phenomena in the arts when he wrote:
Everyone has met those culture-conscious “responsibles” who think a book or movie or magazine wonderful not because it illuminates or pleases them but because it tells “the people” what they “ought to know.”
“The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?”
The Risk to Our Value Judgement
No surprise then, that as social creatures, our core values came from our immediate environment. It follows naturally that our value judgements are most influenced by the most-available information rather than the best-available information.
Then comes the question of who is making that information available to us and for what purpose. In the sciences, various protocols and methodologies are used, to establish and demonstrate objectivity. Unfortunately, objectivity cannot be scaled in the way that subjectivity often is.
The blending of the scientific with the subjective is a problem because the internet has become a personalised environment, where the window to the world is made of polarised glass. Thanks to algorithms, the information that becomes ‘most available’ to an individual changes as opinion evolves, thus the individual becomes conditioned in a loop of forced feedback.
Within a short paragraph, I will ground this in a relatable example, of how scientific conclusions can inform our value judgement, providing of course, that value judgement is not already conditioned by self-sabotaging biases.
The conversation about climate change, energy transitions and clean technology is a necessarily open one but this has exposed the science and the technology to the subjectivity of people with no technical expertise. The meaning of basic concepts such as truth, proof and evidence, become contentious in public forums. This hampers us in a practical sense.
The issue is worse when those concepts are lifted from the context of a legal or STEM discipline and transplanted into public arenas where, for all practical purposes, such terms have no precise meaning.
Weather Prediction
Let's assume a large meteorology centre uses a multi-physics model to make its weather forecasts. The model derives its scenarios from first principles and the regions are meshed. Below a certain resolution sub-grid parametrisation is necessary because of the limit of computational power.
See the link to video for - “Public Lecture: Climate Change, Chaos, and Inexact Computing”, given by ensemble technique pioneer Dr Tim Palmer at the Perimeter Institute2.
The internal chaotic variability within weather systems, is mirrored by the internal chaotic variability within the Navier-Stokes equations (partial differential equations that describe the behaviour of viscous fluids, in this case atmosphere and oceans).
This is not a true representation of the real-world uncertainty, but it means that like the weather, the results are not deterministic i.e., the same starting conditions can lead to many different outcomes. To simulate this Tim Palmer is investigating how noise can be introduced to create these fuzzy initial conditions. This once again can be visualised as a bell curve or spectrum of possible outcomes.
Hypothetical Example
Having conducted an ensemble run of 100 simulations the meteorologist discovers that a hurricane is predicted in 60 of them. This tells her there is a 60% chance of a hurricane. Her task is complete once she disseminates that information.
The meteorologist can't decree a how the public must react, and any evacuation order would be a political decision, with all the political risk that entails. Similarly, an individual armed with this forecast might determine the 60% risk is best mitigated by heading to the basement, because they are less tolerant to the risk that the house is looted in their absence.
The homeowner's decision to stay would be the result of a value judgement, and if their opinion about the politician's response were to influence subsequent voting behaviour, that would also be a value judgement. Such value judgements should not extend to the scientific method, but this is what frequently happens in the media, when the professional evaluation of risks are retrospectively scrutinised.
Yet the question of whether they were right or wrong is meaningless, because even if there is no hurricane, the 40% possibility of that was implied in the prediction. Value judgements are nevertheless important to a functioning democracy, because they flag the political opinions that should guide policy. It is obviously better if those value judgements are informed by the highest quality science.
Conclusion
Subordinating one’s critical thinking only matters if the truth matters to us too. If we submit to groupthink, dogma and appeals to our emotions, we are consenting to being manipulated and inadvertently become complicit in manipulating others, including our representatives in government.
By failing to high personal standards of proof our contribution to the discussion is devalued, in which case, why not have our opinions reduced to a clickable option on a meaningless poll?
In the process we debase ourselves by voluntarily becoming less effective human beings, which is dangerous, because only humans can mitigate existential risks like asteroid strikes or possibly climate change.
None of this is what makes it possible for us to fail, because until we succeed, failure will always be a potential outcome. The misuse of our intellect and unique human abilities just makes it far more likely.
At our most defiant, we are fond of saying that 'failure is not an option' and perhaps in certain circumstances, it is good that we can tell ourselves that lie. But if we are resolved to change big things, it must be based on truth, not wishful thinking or our emotional response to hyperbole. Recognising that failure is an option gives us some control, because only then can we decide, it's an option that we will never willingly choose.
The IPCC represents the scientific output of 196 member nations who contribute scientists to local and international studies. The resulting meta analyses that the IPCC produce shows broad international agreement. Without placing too much reliance on consensus, it is important to note that these agreements exist across otherwise unreconcilable political and ideological divides. This means that when politics do exert an influence it is very revealing for example by OPEC+ (mostly autocratic regimes) and consequently summary reports the err towards the conservative.
Tim Palmer “Public Lecture: Climate Change, Chaos, and Inexact Computing” at the Perimeter Institute