The one-sentence summary

We need to rethink the science, economics and diplomacy of climate change to move five times faster.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

 

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • Experts are not properly examining risk assessments related to climate change, nor even asking the right questions. We seem to know the least about the things that matter most. When the author asked scientists, research funders, and those in government who receive research intended for policy makers why this was, they responded with three reasons.
    1. Wilful ignorance. Researchers have been discouraged from looking at global warming scenarios over 2 degrees celsius in case they were seen to be giving up on the target.
    2. More confidence than relevance. Scientists don’t like to make predictions unless they are completely confident, which means that politicians are rarely presented with the possibly of catastrophic outcomes whilst there is still a tiny chance that they may not happen.
    3. A preference for novelty over relevance. This is a fundamental ambiguity about what science is for. People, including scientists, get bored with the same old stuff, so they often get excited about so-called ‘original’ studies whilst ignoring more fundamental, but possibly important, work.
  • Thresholds of impact demonstrate risks that can be found if we go looking for them. These include temperatures being too hot for humans and crops, and there being too much sea for cities. The author calls this telling the boiling frog what he needs to know.
  • Because of reinforcing feedback loops, there are tipping points of no return, and they are irreversible. When all three of these phenomena come together, it’s bad news, as in melting ice caps, hotter temperatures and rising sea levels.
  • Scientists have two different ways of being wrong. One is to believe that your hypothesis is correct when it is not (called a false positive or type I error), and the other is to believe your hypothesis is wrong when in fact it is true (a false negative or type II error). Scientists have a strong aversion to type I but are relatively tolerant of type II. There is no standard practice for checking if you have thrown out a finding that was actually true.
  • False precision in the face of uncertainty is an issue. You can’t add up your question marks.
  • The choice between whether to view the economy as a machine or an ecosystem directly affects our ability to make good policy on climate change. Reductionism has dominated Western science for 300 years but it has limitations, You can’t establish the possibility of a hurricane by studying the properties of a water molecule.
  • The Accelerating Transitions Framework has three parts: emergence (that’s faster innovation with coordinated development and testing), diffusion (coordinated deployment with larger economies of scale), and reconfiguration (with coordinated standards and level playing fields where needed).

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • There is an art to reaching an agreement. Most climate agreements have failed because they tried to agree everything at the same time. The professor of international relations, David Victor, believes that you ‘grow’ an agreement by agreeing to settle on small, less contentious elements first and then building as you go.
  • The journey to and from a tipping point follows a path that begins with policy-driven transition through research, development, demonstration, deployment subsidy, infrastructure investment and tax. At that tipping point it becomes a self-accelerating transition.
  • In a positive tipping cascade, support for electric vehicles leads to deployment rising and costs falling, which makes them cheaper than petrol cars, trucks then follow, and eventually renewable energy and battery storage is cheaper than coal power, so the oil companies have to diversify their investments.
  • Old so-called equilibrium economics is far weaker than evolutionary economics or complexity economics that allows for unexpected variations.
  • Many observers believe that doom-mongering is a counterproductive approach to climate change because it makes people switch off and not pay attention to what needs to be done. It has even been called shroud-waving.
  • An old military chief is quoted as saying: “Tell me what you know; tell me what you don’t know; and tell me what you think.”
  • In summary, without proper climate change risk assessments that outline the full extent of the threat, we cannot expect leaders to have the political will to take on the difficult tasks of transition as determinedly as they must.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. This is an interesting take on why policy is so far behind the science.