Feature Reference Articles #5

The 'Fat Tail' of Climate Change Risk. Michael E. Mann, HuffPost. Sep. 11, 2015.


A World at War. Bill McKibben, New Republic. Aug. 15, 2016.

We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. 

There are powerful forces, of course, that stand in the way of a full-scale mobilization. If you add up every last coal mine and filling station in the world, governments and corporations have spent $20 trillion on fossil fuel infrastructure. “No country will walk away from such investments,” writes Vaclav Smil, a Canadian energy expert. As investigative journalists have shown over the past year, the oil giant Exxon knew all about global warming for decades—yet spent millions to spread climate-denial propaganda. The only way to overcome that concerted opposition—from the very same industrial forces that opposed America’s entry into World War II—is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the old mindset that stands in the way of victory. “The first step is we have to win,” says Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher at Stanford University. “That is, we have to have broad acceptance among the broader political community that we need urgent action, not just nibbling around the edges, which is what the D.C. crowd still thinks.”

Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII? Emma Foehringer Merchant, New Republic. May 12, 2016.

The controversial theory of "climate mobilization" says we should.

These proponents of climate mobilization call for the federal government to use its power to reduce carbon emissions to zero as soon as possible, an economic shift no less substantial and disruptive than during WWII. New coal-fired power plants would be banned, and many existing ones shut down; offshore drilling and fracking might also cease. Meat and livestock production would be drastically reduced. Cars and airplane factories would instead produce solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy equipment. Americans who insisted on driving and flying would face steeper taxes.

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Despite these inroads, climate mobilization remains a fringe idea. Its supporters don’t entirely agree on the answers to key questions, such as: What will trigger this mobilization—a catastrophic event or global alliance? Who will lead this global effort? When will the mobilization start? And perhaps the greatest hurdle isn’t logistical or technical, but psychological: convincing enough people that climate change is a greater threat to our way of life than even the Axis powers were.

Climate Disruption: Are We Beyond the Worst Case Scenario? Michael Jennings, Wiley Online Library. Sep. 3, 2012.

Abstract 

The inability of world governments to agree on and implement effective mitigation response policy for anthropogenic climate change has resulted in the continuation of an exponential growth in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) that averages 3.1 per cent per year since 1870. With the exception of 2009, world GHG emission levels surpassed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2000) worst case scenario every year since 2004. Because of increasing temperatures due to GHG emissions a suite of amplifying feedback mechanisms, such as massive methane leaks from the sub-sea Arctic Ocean, have engaged and are probably unstoppable. These processes, acting in concert with the biological and physical inertia of the Earth system in responding to atmospheric loading of GHGs, along with economic, political and social barriers to emission reduction, currently place Earth’s climate trajectory well within the IPCC’s A1FI future climate change scenario. There is a rapidly diminishing chance of altering this trajectory as time goes on. There is also now a very real risk of sudden climate change. The pace of this quickly advancing situation, along with our scientific understanding of it, has substantially outstripped policy discussion. This article examines current primary science literature and data on today’s climate condition in a policy relevant context. 

Policy Implications 

• An all out shift to a broad range of adaptive response policies is urgently needed. Climate change will force reevaluations of present day governance agreements on trade, finance, food supply, security, development, environment, and similar sectors.
• Easy to understand scientific data driven visualizations and culturally appropriate interpretations of probable future conditions are needed to facilitate realistic adaptive policy responses from all levels of governance.
• Multilateral policies for an international crop seed cooperative could significantly lessen the impacts of crop failures and low yields, reducing the risk of famine and economic effects of unstable food prices. There is a need to store a large enough volume of crop seed varieties to allow for quick switching of varieties one year to the next based on dynamic forecasts of seasonal climates.
• Harmonization of international, national, subnational, and local policies for the orderly resettlement of coastal populations should begin now. This will become a chronic condition involving very large numbers of people. Improved and coordinated policies are needed for refugee services and related issues of migration and integration as well as planning for land use change and infrastructure development.

Psychology and Disaster: Why We Do Not See Looming Disasters and How Our Way of Thinking Causes Them. Andreas Glöckner, Global Policy Journal and Wiley Online Library. May 2016.

Abstract 

To be able to decide and act quickly and efficiently in a complex world, individuals rely on mechanisms that reduce information in a meaningful way. Instead of holding a set of partially contradicting cognitions, individuals construct coherent interpretations or stories to make sense of the available information using interactive activation. Interactive activation describes cognitive processing as bidirectional propagation of activation among simple processing units, which allows individuals to integrate large amounts of information quickly and with little cognitive effort. However, interactive activation also has important downsides that can prevent individuals from detecting looming disasters and can even contribute to their emergence. I describe the functioning of interactive activation and how it can be modeled using connectionist networks. Later I explain how interactive activation causes a set of biases (e.g. coherence effects, overconfidence, hindsight bias and status-quo bias) that make it hard to detect looming disasters and how these biases lead to discontinuities in understanding of problems and rapid behavioral switches that can contribute to the emergence of disasters. 

Policy Implications 

• Individuals construct coherent interpretations (narratives, stories) to make sense of the available information using interactive activation.
• Interactive activation causes a set of biases that make it hard to detect looming disasters.
• Interactive activation leads to discontinuities in perception and rapid behavioral switches that can contribute to the emergence of disasters.
• Standard rational models for individual behavior should be replaced by descriptively more adequate interactive activation models.
• This would allow us to derive qualitatively different and more efficient policy measures to support individuals in detecting and avoiding looming disaster.

The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse. Jonathan B. Wiener. Global Policy Journal and Wiley Online Library. May 2016.

Abstract 

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a classic type of problem, involving multiple actors who face individual incentives to deplete shared resources and thereby impose harms on others. Such tragedies can be overcome if societies learn through experience to mobilize collective action. This article formulates a distinct type of problem: ‘the tragedy of the uncommons’, involving the misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks. Although the problem of rare and global catastrophic risk has been much discussed, its sources and solutions need to be better understood. Descriptively, this article identifies psychological heuristics and political forces that underlie neglect of rare catastrophic ‘uncommons’ risks, notably the unavailability heuristic, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Normatively, the article argues that, for rare catastrophic risks, it is the inability to learn from experience, rather than uncertainty, that offers the best case for anticipatory precaution. The article suggests a twist on conventional debates: in contrast to salient experienced risks spurring greater public concern than expert concern, rare uncommons risks exhibit greater expert concern than public concern. Further, optimal precaution against uncommons risks requires careful analysis to avoid misplaced priorities and potentially catastrophic risk–risk trade-offs. The article offers new perspectives on expert vs public perceptions of risk; impact assessment and policy analysis; and precaution, policy learning and foresight. 

Policy Implications

• As societies succeed in overcoming ‘tragedies of the commons’, they can and should pay increasing attention to ‘tragedies of the uncommons’.
• Public perceptions may neglect routine familiar risks, and may overreact to unusual experienced risks (especially crises affecting identified individuals). But a third type – ultra-rare catastrophic risks – may be neglected due to factors such as psychological unavailability, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Expert assessment is needed to overcome public neglect of such uncommons risks.
• Much risk regulation is spurred by policy learning from experience and experimentation. But rare one-time threats to the existence of life or civilization will not offer such opportunities for learning. This absence of adaptive learning offers a stronger rationale for precaution than mere uncertainty. Foresight and anticipation are essential to preventing such rare catastrophic risks.
• Overcoming neglect of rare catastrophic risks is necessary but not sufficient to choose optimal policy responses. Policies to prevent rare catastrophic risks may also misplace priorities, or induce catastrophic risk–risk trade-offs. Optimal precaution against tragedies of the uncommons must be based on careful foresight, impact assessment and policy analysis.