Communicating Uncertainty about Climate Projections: Why Prefer Possibilities to Probabilities
Futura Venuto (University of Bern)
Abstract: There is an overlooked friction at the interface between scientific communities and policymakers regarding the communication of uncertainty about climate projections. If the current philosophical literature has been concerned with the epistemic issues arising from uncertainty and its probabilistic representation, I focus on the implications concerning uncertainty and its communication to non-scientific audiences. Given its unique institutional role, I use the IPCC’s Assessment Reports as an example to argue that assigning probabilities to assess climate model outputs’ uncertainty is not only epistemically unwarranted, as it has been extensively discussed, but also counterproductive for policymaking. I contend that qualitative approaches for uncertainty representation, such as possibilistic reasoning, may better serve this purpose. Through the conceptual analysis of Climate Risk Narratives (CRNs) employed in the Future Resilience for African CiTies And their Lands (FRACTAL) project, I argue that exploring the range of possible futures favors a thorough and explicit assessment and integration of stakeholders’ values, interests, and risk evaluations.
