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Climate change is no longer a probability — it’s time to face reality

by Stuart Mackintosh, opinion contributor - 02/12/22 9:01 AM ET

Being human means having remarkable cognitive abilities far in advance of most other species. We have used our abilities, collective skills and learning to dominate the world, reform it, change it, and yes, to despoil and degrade it.

But humans are bad at understanding probabilities. We tend to underestimate the likelihood of events. When shocking things happen, we think of them as being incredibly unlikely. This probabilistic failure undermines our collective efforts to understand the real and increasing dangers we face as climate change risks mount. Let’s take a prosaic example to understand the challenge.

Humans rely on what author Michael Shermer calls ‘folk numeracy,’ an erroneous intuitive sense of an event’s likelihood of occurring to override the numerical possibility of it taking place. For instance, you may dream about someone, only to wake and find they passed away that night. Shermer estimates a person has five dreams a night, and we remember only one-tenth of these. This is 182 dreams remembered a year. With 300 million Americans that amounts to almost 55 billion remembered dreams a year. Given a normal social circle of connections of 150 people, it is quite likely that one of us will remember a dream about a friend who is then found to have died during the night. It is not a premonition or a miracle. It is a reasonable probability misunderstood. We confront similar difficulties when trying to gauge the chance of disaster from climate change.

The climate change problem is so large and so all-consuming we can fail to get our collective hands and minds around it. The timescale is so long we fail to plan properly. Too often we look backward for lessons when the probability of severe weather events such as fires in California, Siberia, Australia, or hurricanes and typhoons are increasing in severity and number rather than remaining the same year-to-year. We look at past averages for solace even though this gives us the wrong probability for severe climate-related events. Perhaps most worryingly of all, we fail almost completely to account for epoch-shifting tipping points.

The late economist Martin Weitzman calculated the was a non-zero probability that failure to address climate change would end our civilization. This dangerous outcome would be brought closer through interlinked tipping points such as the end of summer Arctic Ice, melting of the world’s Alpine glaciers, the slowing and halting of the Gulf Stream, the loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, or the collapse of the West Antarctic ‘Doomsday’ glacier. The tipping points are many and terrifying, and all are being pulled closer by our failures to understand the risks. I argue in “Climate Crisis Economics” we must factor in these horrific tipping points so we properly account for the risks before us.

Weitzman in “Climate Shock” also estimated the chance of the global temperature rising by a staggering 6 degrees Celsius at a whopping 10 percent. Yet because of our inability to understand probabilities and what economist Mark Carney calls the tragedy of our horizons too many of us underestimate the climate change dangers, to our peril. Yet if I put it this way — if you knew that there was a 10 percent chance of you or your children being killed walking down a street in your neighborhood you would act. You would demand action, more policing, better streetlights, more expenditures to ensure such an event did not occur; or you would move, refusing to countenance such risks to your family. What we all need to do is adjust our estimates of risks probability and keep doing so.

Events may be finally forcing our attention and calculations to shift, making many more of us better understand probabilistic thinking. After all, if you live in California you know next year’s fires will be as bad or worse. If you live in Louisiana you know the storms will get worse. Coloradans can see water scarcity increasing. We can all see it if we chose to do so. Twenty-five years ago, I knew the leaves of the Blue Ridge near my cabin all fell to the earth by Oct. 31. This year, the leaves were still on the trees at the beginning of December.

I can see the climate changing and so can you.

What we need now is for politicians to catch up with the worried majority, who sense climate change is underway and results are increasingly dangerous. Our leaders must not be allowed to push off until tomorrow what must be urgently begun today. We need businesses to continue to plan for net-zero green tomorrow. Doing good business and securing a profitable future requires CEOs to factor in the probability of severe material events, take advantage of that knowledge, create new businesses and products and protect existing ones. We, as activist citizens and consumers, need to press our politicians, employers and businesses to take responsibility for and plan for climate change events and risks using real shifting increasing probabilities in their calculations.