Climate science plays a key role when possible futures for the planet are explored. Scientific ‘knowledge’ about the future hence serves as an orientation mark for politicians and policymakers. This knowledge though is accompanied by uncertainties in several ways. First, science that has scenarios for different futures as output relies on modelling to a large extent. A key element of modelling is the reduction of a complex system to some pre-determined key components and processes. This procedure necessarily leads to a result that is uncertain to some extent because most of the infinite processes that happen on Earth are ignored. In order to tackle these uncertainties, the models evolve by time and are made more complex, considering more and more processes and components. As a result, climate models can be seen as a synthesis of scientific knowledge of different disciplines. The attempt to make them more precise means adding further knowledge. In contrast, any study, any thought, or method that is used to expand current knowledge involves follow-up questions, further fields of study and as a consequence – further non-knowledge and additional uncertainties. This yields the paradox of enhancing uncertainty when one actually tries to tackle it. That is why the terms of tackling or reducing uncertainty are misleading because they presume that uncertainty is something that can actually be narrowed down to a minimum or even to zero. So, if uncertainty is something that cannot be erased, scientists and politicians should focus on the assessment of uncertainty, always aware of it as something that is inherent with the production of scientific knowledge.
A second essential part of uncertainty when modelling scenarios for our future is the uncertainty to predict human creativity and technological progress. Physical and biogeochemical processes that are considered in climate models are often well understood and it is for instance quite well possible to tell what happens to the pH-value of the ocean when the atmospheric CO2-concentration changes. Estimating knowledge that does not exist today and knowledge gaps that future generations will have seems to be something impossible and illustrates well why it is uncertain what will happen on our planet in the next decades and centuries.
How could this additional knowledge (for example about Negative Emission Technologies) that we do not have be worked in today when making decisions that are even more relevant for future generations than for ourselves? It is surely a massive challenge to take on.
The future is uncertain and will always remain uncertain. We try our best to predict future scenarios by estimating them with probabilities. But maybe we are already at a point where we cannot increase the probability of occurrence any further because with every try to do so, we produce further uncertainty which could eventually dampen out the effect of the additional knowledge we have gained. Since we now know that uncertainty is something we cannot erase, I want to conclude this post with a reason why uncertainty is something that should not be erased even if it was possible. Imagine, we could advance science that far that uncertainty is something that does not exist anymore. Our world would then be 100% predictable and only follow causal chains. This also means: no room for humans to create their world and to design their lives and their future.
Since this is in my opinion the essential of what we live for I hereby want to apologize to uncertainty for the negative connotation which we always assign to it: ‘Uncertainty – thank you for your existence!’
Further reading and inspiration for this post was this book (in German)
Janich, N., Rhein, L. (ed.) (2018): Unsicherheit als Herausforderung für die Wissenschaft Reflexionen aus Natur-, Sozial und Geisteswissenschaften.
Hi Felix,
I enjoyed your post quite a lot, and I agree with many of your arguments, but let me share another point of view about the paradox you mention and an opinion that I think is important to express.
It is true that the more knowledge we acquire about the climate system, the more questions will pop up to make our lives more painful. But this does not increase the size of the main problem we are facing, because we are just splitting one big question into smaller ones. On the contrary, it decreases just a bit because we get a small answer from the original question. This process of splitting questions and getting small answers will lead us to a point where the change is insignificant (like a logarithmic curve). In other words, a minimum point that will never be reached. This minimum point does not mean zero uncertainty, but just the pure randomness of the climate system that we will never be able to understand.
I prefer to use analogies to express my ideas, so maybe this will be more clear. If we think of our models about future climate as a satellite image, then the picture we will get right now is a very blurred one. As we keep improving technologies, the image will be less and less pixelated and close to the real one (future climate). But no matter how far we go, we will never be able to represent the real image, it will always be pixeled.
Now a personal opinion, do we need a very high-resolution image to make decisions? Or just using our brains to interpret what the satellite image represents is enough? Trying to find the minimum point in uncertainty is good for science, but no so necessary for political actions.
Dear Felix,
I really enjoyed your post.
Only question which remains: But what if we live in a deterministic world?
Would it than matter that we defined uncertainties, significance or anything else? Just because we can not determine the future with our abilities, what if the universe in itselfe is deterministic?
I think that would lead to a different closing statement wouldnt it?
But than my argumentation would rather go in this direction, because everything is deterministic, everything you do has meaning and espacially if you follow the path which seams the best, you can definitly not fail in it.
But I am rather be careful here as I am not a philosopher and I think espacially determinism can trick you and allows many interpretations and implications on your actions.