Science & Climate Change Part III: Understanding the Limits of Climate Models in Risk Assessment

Following on from part 1 and part 2 in this series, let’s conclude by exploring climate models and risk assessment. On the physical nature of climate change, some scientists argue that climate modelling should be trusted because it is specific and can point to physical laws that are currently observable and constant. Alas, this is only partially true - but even if it were wholly true, that still does not justify such confidence that the world’s extreme and hugely costly reactions to climate change are sensible, balanced and well-conceived. Just because a model relies on physical laws doesn't mean it has far-reaching predictability. The specific weather on any given day relies on physical laws, but it does not have far reaching predictability. The predictions are relatively short-term; in issues surrounding the perturbations of the environment, short-term predictions are not very reliable antecedents for long-term outcomes. Climate change science suffers from the same problem. Trying to rely on long-term predictions by extrapolating current patterns would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°. But I don’t suggest that illustration just in terms of future problems – it’s current and future problems plus current and future solutions. Once you factor in responsive and pre-emptive human innovation into the equation, the model is not as unyielding as most environmentalists assume by their narrow projections.

Furthermore, focusing solely on the situation from a purely physical perspective is not helping the so-called climate scientists' cause. No one disputes that the underlying physics behind any purported climate changes gives us empirical objects of study - and few deny that changes will occur, and there will be problems to solve. But the climate change considerations must give more emphasis to how humans will respond to those changes. The environmentalists’ fear of the rate of temperature change - and that its impact on ecosystems, societies, and economies can outpace the ability of ecosystems and human systems to adapt – is highly likely completely backwards. Because what we are dealing with is slow, gradual change in temperature, and a rapid rate of change and adaptability from human ingenuity and natural scientific and technological advancement. Most environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

Yes, it is almost certainly true that climate change is in some parts anthropogenic, but most of what we’ve done industrially and technologically has been to the huge benefit of the human race, not least in the way in which the industrial revolution and consequent progression-explosion of the past 200 years has increased standards of living, life expectancy, prosperity, well-being, knowledge, and the many other qualities that benefit the human race. Don’t forget that our global emissions in the past century have been part of the very same scientific and industrial advancements that have facilitated this extraordinary human progression. To criticise our innovations as being environmentally detrimental is a bit like criticising a vegetable patch for ruining perfectly good soil, or criticising medicine for ruining perfectly good plants.

Professor Richard Tol (do Google his work - there's plenty of it) has perhaps done the most of anyone I've researched to show that when you factor in the economic, the ecological, the humanitarian and the financial considerations, there is an overall positive effect in climate change. He arrived at this conclusion after undertaking 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends. One of professor Tol's key findings is that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when his paper was written). Some say those temperatures may not be reached until the end of the century, some say even longer. The IPCC predicts we will reach that temperature increase by 2080. This means that, far from being a so-called ‘climate emergency’, even at worst case scenario, global warming could continue to be of net benefit for another 60 years. And even if it is the case that global warming will only benefit us for another 60 years (assuming current conditions) then the people who will have to deal with it in 2080 will be about nine times as rich as we are today (assuming economic growth continues on its present trajectory), and more scientifically and technologically advanced than we can possibly imagine. While I'm encouraged by Richard Tol's research, I actually think he slightly underestimates the mood for optimism by making an understated assumption himself. He talks of global warming possibly being a problem by the time the planet undergoes 2.2˚C of warming (in 2080) without paying enough regard to just how much better equipped we'll be in 60 years from now to tackle perceived problems in 2009 (or even today).

This has always been a strange solecism from climate change alarmists too: Look at how the world has gone from 1924 to 2024. Nobody sane thinks that the world's population hasn't benefiting immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate during the past 100 years. Given that we are richer and more advanced in this day than in 1924, it’s absurd that so many people are unconvinced that the world's population won't benefit immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate in the next 100 years. Moreover, given that we in 2024 have most of the advancements to have been able to solve the majority of economic problems people in 1924 faced, we should be more confident of having similar capacities 60-100 years henceforward, given that we are starting from an even stronger place, and that we have far more people on the planet to help solve the problems that might arise. We seem drastically unfair on ourselves when it comes to forecasting our ability to work together to solve complex problems.

The climate change alarmists' assumption is that because climate change is an emergency, we should be risk-averse, and risk-aversion here means spending more money and resources on tackling climate change in the here and now. But this is faulty reasoning, because risk-aversion should primarily focus on the world’s biggest risks - and the biggest risk of all is not that future (richer) generations will be born into a warmer climate, it is that present (poorer) people are going to be born in a poverty-stricken state where they can’t afford access to cheap, necessary, dependable energy. The way to be rationally risk-averse is to help poorer people become more prosperous - not adopt short-sighted climate change policies that make energy unaffordable for those that need it most.

Here I refer you to a passage about risk in my previous series on climate change risk:

“Risk is assessing the potential costs with known probability. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is not knowing the probability, which means an inability to calculate a risk. If I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from a 52 card deck to win £1,000,000 or else die, that is a ‘risk’ because I can calculate the probability (12 in 52). On the other hand, if I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from an unspecified pile of cards, and I don't know how many are missing from the pack, then I have ‘uncertainty’. I cannot calculate the probability of drawing a picture card because I don't know if any picture cards have been removed.

Let me make it even clearer with an illustration. Suppose there is a pile of 99 cards - all of which are either a Jack, a Queen or a King, and all three cards are represented. You know that 33 of the cards are Jacks, but you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings in the remaining 66 cards. You can choose from two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Jack, and nothing if you draw a Queen or King. 

Scenario 2: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Queen, and nothing if you draw a Jack or King.

Which scenario would you prefer? Due to scarcity of information there really is no way to know which scenario is preferable because you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings - you only know there are 33 Jacks. If you choose Scenario 1 you know you have a 1 in 3 chance of £1,000,000. If you choose Scenario 2 you don't know what chance you have because you don't know how many of the remaining 66 cards are Queens - there could be as few as 1 or as many as 65. Scenario 1 offers you a risk; Scenario 2 offers you uncertainty.

The climate change assessments are generally more like Scenario 2 than Scenario 1 - they involve uncertainties where drastically little is understood about the probability. It was important to mention that before we got under way with the series. In the next part I will look at how mindful we should be of future generations, and what we owe them.”

Rising tides sinking some boats?
Let’s now focus one of the other main messages of the environmentalists - that even small increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal areas (this amounts to about 650 million people according to a BBC report in 2019). Alas, this prophecy of doom is a presumption they never attempt to justify. Whatever science tells us about the changing climate, the future is far too complex for anyone to know the magnitude of the effect of those changes, how future humans will be equipped to deal with them, and who will be better and worse off. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or lying (or perhaps a bit of both).

Suppose the world gets a little warmer in the next 100 years, as predicted. Through today’s lens of analysis, it’s expected to have a net negative effect on places like Ethiopia, Uganda, Bangladesh and Ecuador. But no one talks about the net positive effect it could have in regions of Russia, Mongolia, Norway and Canada, where inhabitants are subjected to harsh winters. But even that’s too simplistic, because you then have the unenviable task of considering what future Norway or future Bangladesh will be like compared to now, and undertake a separate measurement of forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time. This is not a method of analysis that we can undertake right now – and this is something that seems to be almost entirely missing from the climate discussions.

Not only is a forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time very complex, it’s almost certain to be short-sighted and hasty. China in 1965 would be very poorly-equipped to deal with a metre of rising tide compared with the China of now or future China, who could pay for it with loose change. Just as in every decade that has passed recently, global warming has produced both negative externalities and positive externalities, and future global temperatures are too hard to predict in terms of whether or not longer growing seasons and milder winters produce a net cost on the world.

All that said, let’s be generous to the environmentalists and declare that their spectre is wholly accurate (against what my own reasoning says) - that increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal regions. What might they still be overlooking? Currently we live in a world in which about 71% of our world’s surface area is ocean, where it could rise by half a percent if the ice caps melt very much in the next few decades. Humans have done pretty well in the past few hundred years adapting their industry in a world in which 71% of our world is ocean – so it shouldn’t be so hard to believe that people in the future with more money, greater knowledge and better technology will find it within their grasp to adapt to a world in which 71.5% of the world’s surface is ocean.

Not convinced? Ok, let’s take a worst case scenario - that all of the 650 million people living in coastal regions are going to be negatively affected by rising sea levels in the next hundred years. A few key facts: firstly, almost all of those 650 million people won’t be alive in 100 years, and during that time they and future descendants will have had the capacity to move inland or make the necessary infrastructural changes in response to the very gradual increase in sea levels. During slow, gradual changes, the next 100 years is a long time to make adjustments, especially in a future in which everyone is richer than now and more technologically astute. Remember, environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

We are not sure how many of the 650 million people (and more factoring in population increase and migration to cites) will be affected by rising sea levels, but here's what we do know. If moving inland or making the necessary infrastructural changes would be costly, not moving inland and not making the necessary infrastructural changes will be a lot costlier. It's one thing to discuss the costs of moving inland and making the necessary infrastructural changes and weigh up those against all the benefits and the future capabilities of dealing such things - but it's quite another thing to warn about staying in coastal areas and getting washed away, because that's just not going to happen.

If some relatively short-term extreme changes are the price that future unborns have to pay for living in such a prosperous world (and it's still a big IF), then it is certain that those future unborns will pay those costs, and almost certainly a lot more easily than we can pay them. If rising oceans and dealing with the consequences are not the price that future unborns have to pay, either because we are burning almost no fossil fuels in the future (which is highly likely to be the case) or because climate alarmists have got their predictions wrong, or because future humans have technology that easily helps them adapt to the gradual changes (which is almost certainly going to be the case), then the alarmism has been absurdly wasteful and largely unnecessary, because global market innovation is already doing about as much as it can, and will continue to do so.

The environmentalists frequently seem to be confused by a base rate fallacy regarding what they are doing. Even if we ignore the fact that this level of uncertainty is not an obvious call to action (and we shouldn’t ignore that, but we will for simplicity’s sake), and the fact that these reactionaries have no real clue of the appropriate measure of range of possible outcomes against range of possible actions, they are utterly confused by the concept of ‘doing’. They peddle the narrative along the lines of ‘What we should be doing’ when really they mean ‘What we should be doing now’. And I’m not saying that everything we are doing is reactionary – we are making some terrific progress on a whole range of innovations to help make us greener – but doing reactionary things now for projected future scenarios is hasty and presumptuous because time is inevitably going to reduce the cost of dealing with the problems (because we’ll be richer, and with better technology, and have more information and understanding).

That fact that uncertainty will decrease over time, and our knowledge, resources and richness will increase over time is an argument that, relative to our abilities, the problem will get smaller not larger, and our ability to manage it will get better not worse. If you don’t believe me, and still think we need immediate action otherwise it’ll be too late, you only need remember that this has been said for every decade for at least the past five decades, and with every passing decade we have gained in understanding, reduced our uncertainty, made humanity better off, reduced poverty, increased global trade and prosperity, become greener, and enhanced our technology - and this in spite of the extreme environmentalists, not because of them.

So many people are getting taken in by the doomsday eco-fundamentalism, on the pretext that ‘we have a climate emergency’ (or worse 'the end is nigh') is a consensual view among climate scientists. Climate scientists are experts at understanding the climate (the clue's in their job title) and the problems we are facing, but they are not economists, so they are unlikely to present the full menu of considerations. Climate scientists can tell us about the relationship between our activities and global warming, and they can tell us about how different levels of carbon emissions in the near future are likely to impact on climate change (to a degree, pun intended). But the climate change situation is not simply a matter for the physical sciences, it's largely a matter for economics.

Science is the systematic study of the physical environment within nature. Economics is the science of allocating resources efficiently amidst competing preferences. Science tries to tell us which challenges a region of the Middle East might have to face if the planet is n degrees warmer in 20 years' time. Economics tries to consider the future resources and technology available to change human behaviour in the region. Science tells us what might happen to our ocean levels. Economics tries to consider how our coastal regions will adapt to those changes. Politicised climate science focuses largely on the costs of climate change, and is wilfully myopic when it comes to trade-offs. Economics focuses on the costs and benefits of climate change, and on the complex trade-offs that have been made over the past 150 years of humanity's great material enrichment and unprecedented rise in living standards.

Climate scientists speak of future problems with scant regard for how innovative, collaborative future humans will be economically, technically and scientifically equipped to solve those problems. Isolated, reactionary appeals to the expert climate science consensus are anaemic appeals, because climate science consensus on its own is too a narrow perspective that neglects to include many of the most relevant tenets of the analysis. Let's have more gratitude and more humility - and we can work together to solve these problems with more balance, and less extremism. Imbalanced extremism almost never acts as a force for good, or as a vehicle for efficient problem-solving.