> If you want people to take climate change seriously, you need to publish conservative numbers and ring the bell when things end up worse than you predicted. Include a word of caution that things could be worse when you publish the conservative numbers, but don't start out with the worst-case scenario if you want to be taken seriously in the future.
Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"?
This seems to give up on any rational attempt at handling risk solely because you're giving in to the least rational instincts of the herd...
Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. No, that doesn't mean that we (and especially leaders) don't have a responsibility to do better.
> Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"?
No. It's basically saying "do not erode the public's trust in you by making frightening predictions that probably wont come true".
> Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability.
I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. I'd be much less concerned about overly-alarming predictions if they were published with an associated probability and margin of error.
I don't understand the expectation that every prediction from a climate scientist should be able to hit inherently stochastic dates precisely. On the scale of geologic time and the level of inherent randomness and epistemic uncertainty, predicting things within a few decades is amazing.
> I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability.
Honestly, if this is true, then it seems like the only thing you have ever read about climate are popular press articles. The error bars on every single prediction are on every graph or study that climate scientists produce. Mean sensitivity itself still has large error bars, but beyond that the amount of emissions we produce is inherently unpredictable. It is not possible for a climate scientist to say with any certainty how much coal we are going to be burning in 40 years.
Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"?
This seems to give up on any rational attempt at handling risk solely because you're giving in to the least rational instincts of the herd...
Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. No, that doesn't mean that we (and especially leaders) don't have a responsibility to do better.