I have been asked frequently on how to deal with climate change in connection with the Black Swan idea and my work on decision-making under opacity. The position I suggest should be based on both ignorance and the delegation to the wisdom of Mother Nature since it is older than us, hence wiser than us, and proven much smarter than scientists.
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We do not understand enough about Mother Nature to mess with her --and I do not trust the models used to forecast climate change.
Simply, we are facing nonlinearities and magnifications of errors coming from the so-called "butterfly effects" we saw in Chapter 11, actually discovered by Lorenz using weather forecasting models. Small changes in input, coming from measurement error, can lead to massively divergent projections --and that, very generously, assumes that we have the right equations.
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war) --these are the ones now trying to impose the solutions on us.
But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the same conclusions as the ones endorsed by anti-environmentalists, pro-market fundamentalists, quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, super-Green, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That's the sound policy under ignorance and epistemic opacity.
To those who say "we have no proof that we are harming nature", a sound response is "we have no proof that we are not harming nature either" --the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.
Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
One practical solution I came up with, based on the nonlinearitities in the damage (under the assumption that harm increases disproportionally with the quantities released), and using the same mathematical reasoning as the one that led to my opposing the "too big" concept, is to spread the damage across pollutants --should we need to pollute, of course. Let us carry a thought experiment.
Case 1: you give the patient a dose of cyanide, hemlock, or some poisonous substance, assuming they are equally harmful (and no synergetic, superadditive effect
Case 2: you give the patient a tenth of a dose of ten such substances, for the same total amount of poison.
Clearly we can see that Case 2, by spreading the poison ingested across substances, is at the worst equally harmful (if all the poisonous substances act in the same way), and at the best close to harmless to the patient.
