Humility Isn’t An Offense

Indur Goklany’s got a lengthy but sharp post up about various climate-change mitigation schemes.  The gist is that even the plan proposed by Yale environmental economist William Nordhaus — probably the most sensible and rational of the major climate-change response plans — fails to take human adaptation into account.  More broadly, however, I think the takeaway from Goklany’s post is this line:

Humility isn’t an offense, and it ought to be acceptable for economists and policy analysts—even those whose stock in trade is climate change—to admit that they haven’t a clue what the world will look like beyond 2050 (if then).

There’s a tendency for academics of all sorts, but especially scientists and economists who work in fields which aspire to predictive capacities, to make the boldest, broadest, most sweeping claims possible.  Why? Well, a couple of reasons come to mind. The first is sheer curiosity: Why not extrapolate a given model as far as it will go? The second is self-interest: The bigger and more ecompassing the claim, the more likely it is to draw attention. In other words, it’s an incentive issue — think of it as public choice theory for academics.

Now, it’s also true that most responsible scientists (which is to say most scientists) hedge these claims by speaking in terms of potentiality rather than certainty.  But thanks to the summary-compression-soundbyte system that gets used to deliver most news, it doesn’t take long before predictions become certainties.  That makes for great headlines, but not for terribly useful or accurate science.  Science is a useful guide, of course, but rarely serves as a crystal ball.