Making Uncertainties Explicit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Explicit Representations ◽  
Value Free Ideal ◽  
Is Value

According to Richard Jeffrey’s value-free ideal, scientists should avoid making value judgments about inductive risks by offering explicit representations of scientific uncertainty to decision-makers, who can use these to make decisions according to their own values. Some philosophers have responded by arguing that higher-order inductive risks arise in the process of producing representations of uncertainty. This chapter explores this line of argument and its limits, arguing that the Jeffreyan value-free ideal is achievable in contexts where methodological decisions introduce minimal higher-order uncertainty and where communications of uncertainty are unlikely to be manipulated or misunderstood by scientists or decision-makers. This chapter illustrates the limits of the Jeffreyan ideal with reference to climate science and argues that the context of climate science is not conducive to the Jeffreyan ideal, so the argument that climate modeling is value-laden due to higher-order inductive risks withstands recent criticisms.

scholarly journals Helping to Make Sense of Regional Climate Modeling: Professional Development for Scientists and Decision-Makers Anytime, Anywhere

2016 ◽  
Vol 97 (7) ◽  
pp. 1173-1185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Walton ◽  
Morgan B. Yarker ◽  
Michel D. S. Mesquita ◽  
Friederike E. L. Otto
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
E Learning

Abstract Globally, decision-makers are increasingly using high-resolution climate models to support policy and planning; however, many of these users do not have the knowledge needed to use them appropriately. This problem is compounded by not having access to quality learning opportunities to better understand how to apply the models and interpret results. This paper discusses and proposes an educational framework based on two independent online courses on regional climate modeling, which addresses the accessibility issue and provides guidance to climate science professors, researchers, and institutions who want to create their own online courses. The role of e-learning as an educational tool is well documented, highlighting the benefits of improved personal efficiency through “anywhere, anytime” learning with the flexibility to support professional development across different sectors. In addition, improved global Internet means increased accessibility. However, e-learning’s function as a tool to support understanding of atmospheric physics and high-resolution climate modeling has not been widely discussed. To date, few courses, if any, support understanding that takes full advantage of e-learning best practices. There is a growing need for climate literacy to help inform decision-making on a range of scales, from individual households to corporate CEOs. And while there is a plethora of climate information online, educational theory suggests that people need to be guided in how to convert this information into applicable knowledge. Here, we present how the experience of the courses we designed and ran independent of each other, both engaging learners with better understanding benefits and limitations of regional climate modeling, lead to a framework of designing e-learning for climate modeling.

scholarly journals Climate Science Needs to Take Risk Assessment Much More Seriously

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (9) ◽  
pp. 1637-1642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan T. Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Climate Research ◽  
Group I ◽  
Widespread View

AbstractFor decision-makers, climate change is a problem in risk assessment and risk management. It is, therefore, surprising that the needs and lessons of risk assessment have not featured more centrally in the consideration of priorities for physical climate science research, or in the Working Group I contributions to the major assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This article considers the reasons, which include a widespread view that the job of physical climate science is to provide predictions and projections—with a focus on likelihood rather than risk—and that risk assessment is a job for others. This view, it is argued, is incorrect. There is an urgent need for physical climate science to take the needs of risk assessment much more seriously. The challenge of meeting this need has important implications for priorities in climate research, climate modeling, and climate assessments.

Communicating About Climate Change with Urban Populations and Decision-Makers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Chu ◽  
Todd Schenk
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Communication Processes ◽  
Concrete Action

Cities are important venues for climate change communication, where global rhetoric, national directives, local priorities, and media discourses interact to advance mitigation, adaptation, and resilience outcomes on the ground. Urban decision makers are often directly accountable to their electorates, responsible for the tasks most relevant to advancing concrete action on climate change, and flexible in pursuing various public engagement programs. However, many cities are designing climate policies without robust downscaled climate projections or clear capacity and support mechanisms. They are often constrained by fragmented governance arrangements, limited resources, and jurisdictional boundaries. Furthermore, policies often fall short in responding to the disparate needs of heterogeneous urban populations. Despite these constraints, cities across the global North and South are innovating with various communication tools to facilitate public awareness, political engagement, context-specific understanding, and action around climate change. These tools range from traditional popular media to innovative participatory processes that acknowledge the interests of different stakeholders, facilitate engagement across institutional boundaries, and address persistent scientific uncertainty through information coproduction and knowledge reflexivity. By selectively employing these tools, local governments and their partners are able to translate climate science into actionable mitigation, adaptation, and resilience plans; prioritize decision making while taking into account the multiscaled nature of urban infrastructures and service provisions; and design adaptable and flexible communication processes that are socially equitable and inclusive over the long term.

scholarly journals Proceed with Caution

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Annette Zimmermann ◽  
Chad Lee-Stronach
Keyword(s):  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Structural Injustice ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Similarity Judgments

Abstract It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty.

scholarly journals Does Scientific Uncertainty in News Articles Affect Readers’ Trust and Decision-Making?

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Hendriks ◽  
Regina Jucks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Epistemic Uncertainty ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
News Article ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Scientific Results ◽  
Negative Impacts

Even though a main goal of science is to reduce the uncertainty in scientific results by applying ever-improving research methods, epistemic uncertainty is an integral part of science. As such, while uncertainty might be communicated in news articles about climate science, climate skeptics have also exploited this uncertainty to cast doubt on science itself. We performed two studies to assess whether scientific uncertainty affects laypeople’s assessments of issue uncertainty, the credibility of the information, their trust in scientists and climate science, and impacts their decision-making. In addition, we addressed how these effects are influenced by further information on relevant scientific processes, because knowing that uncertainty goes along with scientific research could ease laypeople’s interpretations of uncertainty around evidence and may even protect against negative impacts of such uncertainty on trust. Unexpectedly, in study 1, after participants read both a text about research methods and a news article that included scientific uncertainty, they had lower trust in the scientists’ assertions than when they read the uncertain news article alone (but this did not impact trust in climate science or decision-making). In study 2, we tested whether these results occurred due to participants overestimating the scientific uncertainty at hand. Hence, we varied the framing of uncertainty in the text on scientific processes. We found that exaggerating the scientific uncertainty produced by scientific processes (vs. framing the uncertainty as something to be expected) did not negatively affect participants’ trust ratings. However, the degree to which participants preferred effortful reasoning on problems (intellective epistemic style) correlated with ratings of trust in scientists and climate science and with their decision-making. In sum, there was only little evidence that the introduction of uncertainty in news articles would affect participants’ ratings of trust and their decision-making, but their preferred style of reasoning did.

scholarly journals Climate Change, Uncertainty and Policy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen Hopster
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Deep Uncertainty ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Moral Uncertainty ◽  
Climate Economics ◽  
Climate Change Uncertainty ◽  
Management Perspective ◽  
Climate Uncertainty

While the foundations of climate science and ethics are well established, fine-grained climate predictions, as well as policy-decisions, are beset with uncertainties. This chapter maps climate uncertainties and classifies them as to their ground, extent and location. A typology of uncertainty is presented, centered along the axes of scientific and moral uncertainty. This typology is illustrated with paradigmatic examples of uncertainty in climate science, climate ethics and climate economics. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the IPCC’s preferred way of representing uncertainties and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses from a risk management perspective. Three general strategies for decision-makers to cope with climate uncertainty are outlined, the usefulness of which largely depends on whether or not decision-makers find themselves in a context of deep uncertainty. The chapter concludes by offering two recommendations to ease the work of policymakers, faced with the various uncertainties engrained in climate discourse.

scholarly journals Telling the boiling frog what he needs to know: why climate change risks should be plotted as probability over time

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Climate Change Risks ◽  
Science Community ◽  
Over Time

Abstract. Humanity's situation with respect to climate change is sometimes compared to that of a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, meaning that change will happen too gradually for us to appreciate the likelihood of catastrophe and act before it is too late. I argue that the scientific community is not yet telling the boiling frog what he needs to know. I use a review of the figures included in two reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show that much of the climate science communicated to policymakers is presented in the form of projections of what is most likely to occur, as a function of time (equivalent to the following statement: in 5 min time, the water you are sitting in will be 2 ∘C warmer). I argue from first principles that a more appropriate means of assessing and communicating the risks of climate change would be to produce assessments of the likelihood of crossing non-arbitrary thresholds of impact, as a function of time (equivalent to the following statement: the probability of you being boiled to death will be 1 % in 5 min time, rising to 100 % in 20 min time if you do not jump out of the pot). This would be consistent with approaches to risk assessment in fields such as insurance, engineering, and health and safety. Importantly, it would ensure that decision makers are informed of the biggest risks and hence of the strongest reasons to act. I suggest ways in which the science community could contribute to promoting this approach, taking into account its inherent need for cross-disciplinary research and for engagement with decision makers before the research is conducted instead of afterwards.

How does HTA addresses current social expectations? An international survey

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Hubert Gagnon ◽  
Georges-Auguste Legault ◽  
Christian A. Bellemare ◽  
Monelle Parent ◽  
Pierre Dagenais ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
Stakeholder Participation ◽  
Participation Rate ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Ethical Analysis ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
International Survey ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Three Phase ◽  
The Status

Abstract Objectives Integration of ethics into technology assessment in healthcare (HTA) reports is directly linked to the need of decision makers to provide rational grounds justifying their social choices. In a decision-making paradigm, facts and values are intertwined and the social role of HTA reports is to provide relevant information to decision makers. Since 2003, numerous surveys and discussions have addressed different aspects of the integration of ethics into HTA. This study aims to clarify how HTA professionals consider the integration of ethics into HTA, so an international survey was conducted in 2018 and the results are reported here. Methods A survey comprising twenty-two questions was designed and carried out from April 2018 to July 2018. Three hundred and twenty-eight HTA agencies from seventy-five countries were invited to participate in this survey. Results Eighty-nine participants completed the survey, representing a participation rate of twenty-seven percent. As to how HTA reports should fulfill their social role, over 84 percent of respondents agreed upon the necessity to address this role for decision makers, patients, and citizens. At a lower level, the same was found regarding the necessity to make value-judgments explicit in different report sections, including ethical analysis. This contrasts with the response-variability obtained on the status of ethical analysis with the exception of the expertise required. Variability in stakeholder-participation usefulness was also observed. Conclusions This study reveals the importance of a three-phase approach, including assessment, contextual data, and recommendations, and highlights the necessity to make explicit value-judgments and have a systematic ethical analysis in order to fulfill HTA's social role in guiding decision makers.

scholarly journals Exploring Atmosphere–Ocean Coupling Using Principal Component and Redundancy Analysis

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (18) ◽  
pp. 4926-4943 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faez Bakalian ◽  
Harold Ritchie ◽  
Keith Thompson ◽  
William Merryfield
Keyword(s):  
Random Vector ◽  
Redundancy Analysis ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
State Space Model ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Coupled Modes ◽  
Modes Of Variability ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages

Abstract Principal component analysis (PCA), which is designed to look at internal modes of variability, has often been applied beyond its intended design to study coupled modes of variability in combined datasets, also referred to as combined PCA. There are statistical techniques better suited for this purpose such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA). In this paper, a different technique is examined that has not often been applied in climate science, that is, redundancy analysis (RA). Similar to multivariate regression, RA seeks to maximize the variance accounted for in one random vector that is linearly regressed against another random vector. RA can be used for forecasting and prediction studies of the climate system. This technique has the added advantage that the time-lagged redundancy index offers a robust method of identifying lead–lag relations among climate variables. In this study, combined PCA and RA of global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea level pressures (SLPs) are carried out for the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data and a simulation of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis (CCCma) climate model. A simplified state-space model is also constructed to aid in the diagnosis and interpretation of the results. The relative advantages and disadvantages of combined PCA and RA are discussed. Overall, RA tends to provide a clearer and more consistent picture of the underlying physical processes than combined PCA.

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