Uncertainty and Climate Change Policy
نویسندگان
چکیده
layer over the South Pole in the late 1970s went undetected for years. The satellite instrumentation did not fail; rather, the computer programs written to analyze the vast volumes of satellite data were instructed to reject measurements that diverged sharply from expected normal conditions. Amazingly, the rejected values were called to no one’s attention. Noticing outliers in ground-based records of ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching the earth’s surface at a British station on the coast of Antarctica,1 incredulous British scientists plotted the data by hand. To the surprise of all, they discovered a steady decrease in the ozone in the Southern Hemisphere springtime from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. This unexpected phenomenon immediately triggered a reprogramming of the U.S. computers to analyze all data points and revealed a deep hole in the ozone over the Antarctic continent, which was growing in intensity over time and drifting over nearby oceans and continents. This example shows that sometimes the knowable remains undetected because of the assumptions that frame the question or methods of analysis. It is almost a tautology to note that unexpected global changes such as the development of the hole in the ozone layer are inherently difficult to predict. It is equally noninformative to suggest that other climate “surprises” can arise in the future. Yet despite the difficulty in forecasting climate change and its consequences, it remains imperative to address the wide uncertainties in our understanding of climate change and its effects. Global change science and policymaking will continue to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Therefore, more systematic analysis of surprise issues and more formal and consistent methods of
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