After Gutenberg

Chris Goodall warns that “some of the resistance to aggressive action on climate seems to spring from mental attitudes that may have helped us survive as a species in the past… Although we are constantly fed with information on the severity of the threat, at some subconscious level most people believe that climate change is not dangerous.”

He elaborates why in his most excellent post.

a) Optimism bias

Human beings seem to have a psychological predisposition towards believing matters will eventually turn out well. The phrase ‘optimism bias’ is sometimes used to describe this phenomenon. We see this in many different circumstances. In the planning of a new construction project, for example, the costs are routinely underestimated. The UK Department for Transport website says that ‘there is a demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic and that to redress this tendency appraisers should make explicit, empirically based adjustments to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits, and duration.’

In the case of climate change, we may unconsciously have a similar bias. Although the results from scientific work seem increasingly worrying, many of us may be saying at the back of our minds that the concerns are exaggerated. Inherent optimism may have helped our ancestors and ourselves cope with present adversity and future threats. It does not help us deal with a long-distant and highly uncertain set of risks from rising temperatures and changing climate patterns.

b) Central estimate bias

Humans tend systematically to over-estimate the tightness of the distribution of likely outcomes (loosely speaking, they wrongly guess the width of the ‘bell curve’). Ask an individual a question on a subject about which they know little and then request an estimate of the probability that his or her answer is nearly right. People will routinely be far more certain than they should be. Examples might be a question that asked how many species there are on the planet or the number of books published a year. People don’t generally know the answer but will nevertheless be far more confident than they should be about the general correctness of their estimate.

This phenomenon helps us to be usefully decisive. Rather than endlessly discussing which way to go to hunt, perhaps our ancestors found it useful to have an exaggerated certainty. This phenomenon allows leaders to get groups to engage in purposeful action. Unfortunately this human attribute is not helpful when it comes to climate change. The world faces a high degree of uncertainty about the impacts of warming, with a very wide distribution of possible outcomes. We may experience 1.5 degrees of temperature rise or it may be four times that level. Humankind can probably cope with the smaller number but the larger figure will make most of the globe uninhabitable. Similarly, the Siberian permafrost may melt, causing an outpouring of methane that rapidly destabilises the world climate. Or it may not. It is the width of bell curve of outcomes that should worry us, but we naturally tend to compress the range of outcomes into a much tighter range than is justified.

The books about climate change from Nigel Lawson and Bjørn Lomborg are particularly good examples of this. Having been sceptics about the existence and then the severity of climate change, both authors write with excessive certainty that the eventual temperature rise is going to be about 2 degrees. The overconfidence is their way of getting us all to underestimate the risks of unpredicted climatic change.

c) Problems dealing with a high noise-to-signal ratio

We are much more aware of weather than we are of climate. In countries like the UK, the variability of the weather is high. It can be sunny and 25 degrees one day and rainy and 15 degrees on the next. This variability (or ‘noise’) tends to drown out the underlying ‘signal’ (changes in the climate). A coldish 2008/9 winter in the US may be connected with recent opinion poll evidence that shows increasing numbers of people thinking that the potential effects of climate change are exaggerated. People in countries with a lot of weather can always find data that supports whatever opinion that they happen to have on climate change. This is unsurprising: survival in past centuries depended more on the weather in the crop growing season than it did on the climate.

It may be no accident that countries with less weather and more climate seem to have smaller percentages of their population denying the existence of climate change. The rapid spread of deserts in eastern China is obvious, and perhaps is correlated with polls showing the Chinese are among the most worried by the effects of climatic change.

d) Assumption of exaggeration in those trying to persuade us

Scientists are increasingly seen as salespeople trying to ‘sell’ their research findings. Correctly or otherwise, ordinary people seem to believe that the conclusions in scientific papers are biased by the need to impress the journalists that cover the topic, who then amplify the results in order to attract attention from their readers. The general population tends to discount the findings, presuming them to be exaggerated and distorted by the need to show increasingly bad outcomes. A cynical citizenry may also believe that striking results are more likely to get the authors future research funding.

I think it is probable that pressure from the press does slightly distort scientific research and, being human, scientists may sometimes amplify their concerns in order to attract attention. But the huge majority of climate change work is carefully designed and robust. Most people in the general population don’t know that the process of peer review will tend to dampen, not exaggerate, the upsetting implications of a new piece of research.

e) An underlying faith in smoothly adjusting and self-correcting processes

The latter half of the twentieth century bought a profound change in the way that people in developed countries saw their world. Effective markets meant that prices generally quietly and unobtrusively adjusted supply and demand so that crises of availability became rare. Although there are good counter-examples, such as the severe depletion of Atlantic fish stocks, markets have been generally very good at dealing with temporary disruptions. For example, it’s possible that a smaller percentage of people have starved to death in the last generation than for any comparable period in the last thousand years. We may have partly lost the ability to comprehend the risk of sudden and unpredictable environmental collapse. Perhaps our pre-industrial ancestors would have understood the threat from catastrophic climate change much better than we can.

Until the recent implosion of large parts of the banking system, trade and financial flows seemed superb at avoiding the awful effects of natural disasters and other extreme events. We have gradually lost the sense that food or raw material shortages can get worse and worse. So an escalating and near-irreversible climate change threat – a classic ‘commons’ problem, like the over-fishing of many of the world’s seas – is not fully comprehended by the modern mind-set. The liberal capitalism of the last twenty years has been so successful that we have become blind to potential threats from environmental collapse. The examples of such crises in the past – from Easter Island through to soil degradation in the US in the Dust Bowl years – are now ignored.

The dominance of what might be called the economist’s model of the world is under threat from the deepening recession. The invisible hand is now looking a little arthritic. But for the last thirty years it has provided the standard ideological framework in Anglo-Saxon economies. We are, in the words of Keynes, all the slaves of some defunct economist. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, the way we think still owes much to Milton Friedman and his friends. The discontinuities, non-linearities and tipping points of climate change will require us to reprogramme our minds. It will take many years. I remember intellectuals like Keith Joseph acting as the nuclei around which free-market liberalism began to form in the mid-seventies. One looks in vain for similar cells of green philosophers or economists now.

f) The lack of an observable enemy

CO2 is invisible, largely innocuous except for its absorption of certain frequencies of infra-red radiation, and it is a natural part of the carbon cycle. It sustains living systems and helps maintain the planet at a habitable temperature. These are not the usual characteristics of an environmental enemy. Depletion of the ozone layer was an easier problem to address. A small number of manufacturers were making CFCs for a limited number of uses and the effects on the stratosphere were clear to even the sceptics of the day. It was possible to begin the process of phasing out their use without too many obstacles because the enemy was obvious.

Human societies have always sought to identify enemies, whether it be racial minorities, foreigners with different ideologies, or people who simply don’t fit in. But with CO2, the opponent is not easy to locate. We all produce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases are not only invisible, which makes the problem difficult to see, but they are also all pervasive. We do not even know how to start battling the opponent – some say we should ban leisure flying, others suggest we need to stop burning coal, increase forest cover, or turn down the thermostat. Compared to the usual cry of ‘repel the barbarians’, this doesn’t make for effective warfare on CO2. The lack of progress on greenhouse gas reduction has unnerved many activists, who now devote far too much attention to fighting among themselves rather than leading the charge against the shared enemy.

g) Unknown unknowns

Donald Rumsfeld’s contribution to world history will be dominated by his disastrous actions before and after the Iraq War. But the useful restatement of the idea of ‘unknown unknowns’ will merit a footnote in his Wikipedia entry. Getting people to accept even the possible existence of unknown unknowns in climate science or in other fields is difficult. It was always thus. Perhaps the more successful of our ancestors found it was generally not useful for us to worry too much about the things we don’t even know we don’t know. Many global warming scientists intuitively understand this. Although they should be telling us that they really don’t understand many aspects of the climate system, they fear that the admission of any ignorance will reduce their credibility. They tend to give us an exaggerated impression of the certainty with which we understand things or, more correctly, know what we don’t know.

I believe that Mr. Goodall would agree that people will demand that something be done about climate change, after it is too late. When severe consequences occur, after the passing of several tipping points and momentum well underway for destruction of life on the planet as we know it, then there will be such a hue and cry.

We only are likely to see any real action in the near term, cynically observes Goodall, if powerful and rich individuals in the prosperous countries of the world began to be directly effect by the consequences of global heating. Without such motivation, it is quite unlikely that we will see “any meaningful political action while there is still time.” But, Mister Cynical Observer of the Onset of the Anthropocene, we will be entertained with some Washington Theater in the interim. Now, on with the show!