An essay on climate change: facts, values, and the limits of knowledge

The planet is heating up. Where to go from this premise? This essay shows that there is nothing inevitable about climate change, that it is a human problem to be solved, and that nobody – whether climate scientist, CIA analyst, historian, or psychologist – can predict how this will end.

David Hume, often quoted and misquoted, once brought to our attention the gap between facts and values. (1, 2) Pandemics, famines, and slavery cause harm to humanity. The planet is heating up. These are facts. And yet, says Hume, we can never go from fact to value. Just because it is cold outside does not force me to bring my coat, especially not in a Northern university town. Nevertheless, by the standards of history, pandemics today are meagre, famines are rare, and slavery is an outlawed institution. (3) Radical ideas in their day, like the scientific method, democracy, education, freedom to express, move, and live, are now boring facts to Westerners – only because today they are so normal. To the student of history, empirical progress is real. (4, 5) For all the laziness, brutishness, and stupid qualities of human beings, and these certainly are our real qualities, we do also have an incredible knack for acting on the facts. So many facts are now history. Ideas are like genetic mutations that get passed down from one generation to the next, where, if successful, then, spread throughout the population, which suddenly changes how business is done. (6) Many problems have been solved before, so why not climate change?

Psychology sometimes gets a bad rap. It is easy to laugh at, look down on, or criticize something that you do not understand. Just look at racial stereotypes, at how the literary person lamented technological progress, and at how doctors throughout history preferred their own judgement over experimental practices. (7, 8, 9) Being critical of things you do not understand is a fallacy, a very normal human fallacy. (10) We do this, perhaps, because we are evolved experts at making snap judgements with little information; it is a process that comes naturally to us. (11) Psychology is, and ought to be, the systematic, empirical study of what it means to be human, of behaviour, thinking, and feeling. (12) Once we understand human nature, and in doing so understand who we are, we can make better decisions in the world. (13) And despite those who look down on or ignore psychology, we have come a long way in understanding how flawed our understanding actually is.

We know the world is heating up. That is a hard, cold, boring fact. Let us now learn from psychology. Climate change is a problem of prediction. It is a problem of prediction because it exists in the future. It is simple enough to model a prediction of what will happen to the physical Earth if it heats up at a standardised rate. It is reasonable to think that if all things are equal, if we keep on going as we are, if human behaviour does not change, then here are the consequences that follow. The consequences are melting ice, rising water, extreme weather, and potentially life as we know it irrevocably changing. (14) That is the physical world, and the predictions are reasonable. But what about human behaviour? Can we predict this?

Tetlock has spent a career studying exactly this with longitudinal designs. Simply, ask people to make predictions about the future regarding complex human affairs – like events in politics – and measure their answers. (9) Do this over time, years, with thousands of people who are experts, lay people, CIA analysts, and get them to make predictions about thousands of events. What do you find? Yes, people can predict events accurately into the future! And people can use a range of intellectual tools to improve their predictions vastly. Now, what happens when the future becomes greater than 12-16 months? We fail – badly. In fact, when we make predictions beyond the 12- 16-month range, the CIA analyst is no better than the layperson, who in turn is no better than the chimpanzee. We have good reason to believe, then, that nobody knows how humans will react to climate change.

In our personal lives, we often “do not know” how we ended up in our careers or jobs. Events happened which influenced later events, and over ten or twenty years we have tried, failed, and learned an incredible amount about ourselves and the world around us. (15) Life iterates, changes as we move forward, is dynamic. (16) Indeed, scientific discovery happens when young people think creatively beyond what knowledge currently is. (17) We should, according to a spiritual perspective, live in the “Now”, because the future is a destination that does not exist except in our minds. (18) A lesson in economics instructs us that things change in the world because flesh and blood human beings implement changes themselves. (19) In psychotherapy, the person struggling with anxiety is encouraged to face what they fear head on because problems avoided multiply like bacteria at room temperature, and facing such problems makes that person stronger. (20, 10) Regarding climate change, we must act now, with human creativity, purpose, and courage.

We know the facts. Let us, as governments, corporations, and individuals, create our values. The gap may be unbridgeable, but we as human beings have a history of progress on our side. We are a technological species of problem solvers. (21) And the faster we act on things, the sooner we will be able to create novel solutions that today we cannot yet predict. We know that climate change is a problem. But we do not know how human beings will respond. Commenting on the development of writing, and hence the evolution of human knowledge, communication, and rationality, H. G. Wells made a point that echoes to our times:

“Misty it is still, glowing through clouds of dust and reek. The door is not half open. Our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge.” (22)

References

1) Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: what it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters. New York: Penguin.

2) Singer, P. (1981). The expanding circle: ethics, evolution, and moral progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3) Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. New York: Penguin.

4) Peterson, J. (2018). 12 Rules for life: an antidote to chaos. London: Penguin.

5) Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined. New York: Viking Books.

6) Dawkins, R. (2018) The selfish gene. (40th anniversary ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7) Durant, W., & Durant, A. (1968). Lessons of history. New York: Simon & Schuster.

8) Snow, P. C. (1959). The two cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9) Tetlock, P. G., Daniel. (2016). Superforecasting: the science and art of prediction. New York: Random Books House.

10) Peterson, J. (2021). Beyond order: 12 more rules for life. London: Penguin Allen Lane.

11) Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Allen Lane.

12) James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

13) Pinker, S. (2003). The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature. New York: Penguin.

14) Maslin, M. (2021). How to save our planet: The facts. London: Penguin Life.

15) Manson, M. (2016). The subtle art of not giving a f*ck. New York: Harper.

16) Taleb, N. N. (2008). The black swan. London: Penguin.

17) Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

18) Tolle, E. (2004). The power of now: a guide to spiritual enlightenment. London: New World Library.

19) Sowell, T. (2011). Economic facts and fallacies. New York: Basic Books.

20) Whittle, M., Sylvia, G. (2012). Change: profound changes to transform stress, fear, and self-doubt into new confidence and true power. Essex: Whitebeam Publishing.

21) Pinker, S. (2010). The cognitive niche: coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 107, 8993-8999. 10.1073/pnas.0914630107

22) Wells., G. H. (1932). The outline of history: being a plain history of life and mankind (7th ed.). London: Cassell and Company, Ltd.