Author: Art Hunter, Ottawa.
Introduction: Early meetings concluded that CACOR would undertake a Foresight exercise on Climate Change. The result of further meetings produced this document which provides the background leading up to the main event on 8 and 9 August, 2016.
This is the first of a series of 6 articles on this topic.
- Mandate of the CACOR Foresight exercise
- Four reports from the four quadrant spokespersons
- A final report from the facilitator.
For more information concerning operational questions please contact David Harries (our facilitator) at [email protected] or Peter Meincke (chair of the group) at [email protected] or Madeleine Aubrey at [email protected] .
Important Links to Articles and Reports
Reference A:
In a 2,000-page report, the Climate Change Committee says flooding will destroy bridges – wrecking electricity, gas and IT connections carried on them. The committee also warns that poor farming means the most fertile soils will be badly degraded by mid-century.
Heat-related deaths among the elderly will triple to 7,000 a year by the 2050s as summer temperatures rise.
The UK is not prepared, the committee says, for the risks posed by climate change from flooding and changing coasts, heatwaves, water shortages, ecosystem damage and shocks to the global food system.
The projections are based on the supposition that governments keep promises made at the Paris climate conference to cut emissions – a pledge that is in doubt.
The committee says if emissions are allowed to spiral, London summer temperatures could hit 48C (118F) in an extreme scenario, although the advisers say they don’t expect that to happen.
The report from 80 authors is the most comprehensive yet on the potential impact of climate change on the UK.
Read more… (Climate change: Advisers warn of climate change domino effect)
Reference B:
CACOR Planning Meeting 10 June – Climate Change (CC) Foresight Exercise
Introduction – Assumption – Provocation – Questions
Introduction: Foresight definitions
Richard Slaughter – New South Wales: “Strategic Foresight is the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherent and functional forward view, and to use the insights arising in useful organizational ways. For example to detect adverse conditions, guide policy, shape strategy and explore new markets products and services. It represents a fusion of futures methods with those of strategic management.”
Foresight Canada (FC): (Strategic) Foresight is the integrated capacity to see, think through and do what needs to be done NOW in the light of history-altering implications of the weak signals of change, while there is still time to act pro-actively and creatively and before hidden opportunities are lost and unseen threats have become crises.
Assumption
That an open Foresight exercise (a variety of futures), not a normative one (on one typically preferred future) is to be carried out.
Provocation
CC is an Infrastructure challenge. Infrastructure is a CC issue. CC is a Security (actually ‘insecurity’) driver. It impacts four of the five[1] security domains. No country on earth – not one – is prepared for median-estimate CC consequences with necessary and sufficient infrastructure.
To properly scan, and therefrom to know enough to effectively study and analyze CC, all/all scanning lenses must be used: S T E E P L E S
Social
Technological
Economic
Environmental
Political
Legal
Ethical
Security
CC is …everybody’s business… everywhere. Once-clear and strong boundaries among communities, among sectors, between private profit and public well-being, between rich and not-rich, and even between war and peace are history, in no small part because of CC. For better or worse, everyone is now a CC stakeholder and more often than is recognized, a CC participant.
Context is ‘king’.
– It is what is.
– It determines what can be done, and not done, now.
– It is the start point for what can be done, and not done, next and thereafter.
The Cost of ‘WILLFUL BLINDNESS’ – ignoring context – is rising, quickly…
….quickly because the threats/challenges to assumed/known context are multiplying and strengthening. Three are most powerful: Context Compression (time) – Climate Change (WMD) – Space wars (shrinking living space).
CC is
– a force-multiplier of wicked problems
– a multi-dimensional ‘W’ M D *
*Destruction, Destabilization, Degradation, Disruption, Decay, Displacement
“We are the last generation that can do something about climate change.” UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon.
“ On Monday, 26 Jan 2015, the Calgary Zoo cancelled its popular penguin walk because it was too warm for the birds.” Calgary Herald
The (global) people-movement crisis – from ~40 millions to more than 75 millions – is a preview of the global-warming future. Millions more will have to leave their homes/move/go somewhere else due to CC, even if CC is their only major problem, which a rising percentage of the global population will never (again) ‘enjoy’.
On Competence
A vision, or a strategy, or a mission, OR A POLICY, or a plan, is only as good as the competence that exists, or that can be created, to achieve it. If the competence does not exist or cannot be developed when it is called for, all that exists is intellectual fluff.
There are at least 30 elements of competence.
On good practices
‘best practices’, which may have become an oxymoron, have short half-lives these days due to Context Compression
Think T.O.W.S. not S.W.O.T.
Promote LEADINGSHIP over LEADERSHIP
Put INTEROPERABILITY before INTEGRATION
RESILIENCE to CC determines PROGRESS io HUMAN SECURITY
CC Infrastructure plus Infrastructure SECURITY
LEARN from both CC Believers and CC Deniers
Rhetorical Questions
What if? We are already beyond CC redemption?
See: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/19052016/global-co2-emissions-still-accelerating-noaa-greenhouse-gas-index
What if? Trump becomes POTUS?
What if? ‘acceptable’ CyberSecurity is not achieved? Cannot be achieved?
What impact will long-term international energy contracts have on CC action?
What if? “synchronous failure” ((Homer Dixon)), or, convergent, simultaneous catastrophes become a new normal?
Who are ‘stronger’ going forward: CC believers or CC deniers?
Climate Change concurrent with Air (and water) Pollution. Which is worst? Which to handle first?
“”Michael Greenstone, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who has studied air pollution, said …..there is no greater current environmental risk to human well-being than airborne particulate matter,” he said. “So shining a bright light on that is especially important.” “”
Climate Change concurrent with faltering progress on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Disarmament. Whither their collective Threat? Whither their collective Opportunities?
[1] The four: homeland security, public safety, appropriate competence to deal with disasters, existential threat to the state, such as an asteroid strike. The fifth, mostly military in nature; defence of the state against foreign aggression.
Reference C:
- Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false
- Scientific inevitably takes wrong turns on its search for truth. (Library of Congress)
Olivia Goldhill http://qz.com/638059, March 13, 2016 - In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University,published a paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings, and found that, of 34 that had been retested, 41% had been contradicted or found to be significantly exaggerated.
Since then, researchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced. - Researchers have recreated prominent studies from several scientific fields and come up with wildly different results. And psychology has become something of a poster child for the “reproducibility crisis” since Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, coordinated a Reproducibility Initiative project to repeat 100 psychological experiments, and could only successfully replicate 40%.
- Now, an attempt to replicate another key psychological concept (ego depletion: the idea that willpower is finite and can be worn down with overuse) has come up short. Martin Hagger, psychology professor at Curtin University in Australia, led researchers from 24 labs in trying to recreate a key effect, but found nothing. Their findings are due to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in the coming weeks.
- Why are they getting it wrong?
No one is accusing the psychologists behind the initial experiments of intentionally manipulating their results. But some of them may have been tripped up by one or more of the various aspects of academic science that inadvertently encourage bias.
For example, there’s massive academic pressure to publish in journals, and these journals tend to publish exciting studies that show strong results.
“Journals favor novelty, originality, and verification of hypotheses over robustness, stringency of method, reproducibility, and falsifiability,” Hagger tells Quartz. “Therefore researchers have been driven to finding significant effects, finding things that are novel, testing them on relatively small samples.”
This has created a publication bias, where studies that show strong, positive results get published, while similar studies that come up with no significant effects sit at the bottom of researchers’ drawers.
Meanwhile, in cases where researchers have access to large amounts of data, there’s a dangerous tendency to hunt for significant correlations. Researchers can thus convince themselves that they’ve spotted a meaningful connection, when in fact such connections are totally random.
- A sign of strength
The idea that papers are publishing false results might sound alarming but the recent crisis doesn’t mean that the entire scientific method is totally wrong. In fact, science’s focus on its own errors is a sign that researchers are on exactly the right path.
Ivan Oransky, producer of the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions printed in journals, tells Quartz that ultimately, the alarm will lead to increased rigor.
“There’s going to be some short-term and maybe mid-term pain as all of this shakes out, but that’s how you move forward,” he says. “It’s like therapy—if you never get angry in therapy, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. If you never find mistakes, or failures to reproduce in your field, you’re probably not asking the right questions.”
For psychologists, who have seen so many results crumble in such a short space of time, the replication crisis could be disheartening. But it also presents a chance to be at the forefront of developing new policies.
Ioannidis tells Quartz that he views the most recent psychology reproducibility failures as a positive. “It shows how much effort and attention has gone towards improving the accuracy of the knowledge produced,” he says. “Psychology is a discipline that has always been very strong methodologically and was at the forefront at describing various biases and better methods. Now they are again taking the lead in improving their replication record.”
For example, there’s already widespread discussion within psychology about pre-registering trials (which would prevent researchers from shifting their methods so as to capture more eye-catching results), making data and scientific methods more open, making sample sizes larger and more representative, and promoting collaboration.
Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University, tells Quartz that several funding bodies and journals seem to be receptive to these ideas and that, once one or two adopt such policies, she expects them to spread rapidly.
- Doing science on science
Each scientific field must adopt its own methods of ensuring accuracy. But ultimately, this self-reflection is a key part of the scientific process. As Bishop notes, “Science has proved itself to be an incredibly powerful method.” And yet there’s always room for further advancement.
“There’s never an end point,” says Bishop. “We’re always groping towards the next thing. Sometimes science does disappear down the wrong path for a bit before it corrects itself.”
For Nosek, who led the re-testing of 100 psychology papers, the current focus on reproducibility is simply part of the scientific process.
“Science isn’t about truth and falsity, it’s about reducing uncertainty,” he says. “Really this whole project is science on science: Researchers doing what science is supposed to do, which is be skeptical of our own process, procedure, methods, and look for ways to improve.”
Reference D: Useful books
Heffernan, Margaret. 2011. “Willful Blindness -Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril”. Walker and Company, New York
Ramo, Joshua Cooper. 2009 “The Age of the Unthinkable – Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It”. Little Brown and Company, New Yor
Reference E:
We never see Trump or Brexit coming because we drown in data and biases
MIKE ROSS, DAVIDE PISANU AND BLANCHE AJARRISTA
Contributed to The Globe and Mail Published and Last updated Monday, Jul. 04, 2016 5:00AM EDT
Markets were sent reeling after Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the European Union. Less discussed in the analysis that followed this result was what lessons we can all take from our collective failure to predict it. The Brexit shock is a perfect instance of two crucial decision-making failure modes: overreliance on data and the presence of biases.
In this era of analytics and data, it’s almost refreshing to see how wrong our celebrated predictive machines can be. Bookmakers, who stood to lose real money (and who thus invest a lot in getting this sort of thing right), were predicting with 90-per-cent certainty that the Remain side would win, right up until the polls closed and the results came in. Social-media analysts were celebrating how their real-time, enormous sample sizes were the most accurate indicator of how the vote would go, and were also strongly predicting that Remain would triumph.
While these groups rapidly backpedal, looking for the faults in their algorithms – that too many rich people and millennials skewed the data sets seems to be the latest justification – we look at this as a lesson in the dangers of overreliance on analytics to predict the future. Yes, data and analytics are important. But such information is by nature based on historical fact (a dangerous tool for predicting the future) and limited samples (a poor indication of the intentions of a homogeneous group).
Biases are another important part of the reason so many predictions called this wrong. Just as we missed the “impossible” rise of Donald Trump, Brexit caught us by surprise because most of us (and most of the people who work in the news media) wouldn’t have voted for either one. Our own views and desires bias us to expect others to act in the same way we would, and as these often stem from our own geographical and socioeconomic backgrounds, they can be particularly dangerous when we’re looking at political or economic decisions.
In groups, this can be even more dangerous – our own personal biases are supported by others and groupthink takes hold, with no one daring to question the group’s perspective at the risk of seeming to be foolish or an outsider.
Three ways to diminish the risk of overreliance on analytics or biased forecasting are the use of premortems, devil’s advocates and self-reflection. Tools that we all (including the market research organizations and newsrooms of the world) can implement more systematically to avoid shocks such as the Brexit result.
Premortems start with imagining that you are wrong, dead wrong, and that the worst has occurred. You then ask, what could be the cause of this predictive failure? Through this type of questioning, we can identify the limitations of the available data and dig deeper to improve the quality of the quality of the information used.
A devil’s advocate is appointed to ensure that contrarian positions have a voice at the table when groups are making decisions, but they are also useful on an individual basis. This person’s role is to argue against the group’s intention – essentially stating why everyone else is wrong. By clearly nominating someone to take this on (or by forcing yourself to question your own assumptions in this way), we free the advocate from the constraint of not wanting to go against the position of the group and in doing so allow them to highlight our collective blind spots.
Self reflection (by an individual or a group) is more of a habitual practice – ensuring that you think deeply on how your background, beliefs and socioeconomic context heavily bias your views. From the people you regularly interact with to the Facebook algorithm that pushes content to your stream, your view of the world is curated by your context. Forcing yourself to acknowledge this and actively seek out opinions counter to your own will diminish the influence your personal situation has on your decision-making, broaden your context and expand the range of data you’ll use to inform your decisions.
It’s not that data and analytics are inherently bad or that our biases are not useful in decision-making, but rather that these can be flawed.
By recognizing and using a set of tools to overcome these flaws, we can be much more effective decision-makers and avoid (and perhaps profit from) the shocking and the unexpected.
Mike Ross and Davide Pisanu are co-founders and Blanche Ajarrista is an analyst at Montreal-based boutique consulting firm Juniper.
Reference F:
Impressive visuals
To View
Link 1… (24 Overwhelming Images Showing The Effects Of Humans On Earth)
Link 2… (Scientists have found a perfect illustration of how the climate is spiraling ‘out of control’)
Reference G:
We know from examining two relatively recent interglacial periods that the global changes resulting from allowing CO2 to remain in the 400ppm to 500ppm range in the atmosphere (as current policies world-wide would predict) will result in widespread drought in the US and Mexico, South America, Asia, southern Europe, much of Africa. Sea level rise of 10 m or more is certain, although the timing is uncertain. Freshwater losses from disappearing mountain ice caps and sea water incursions to coastal aquifers is already on-going. Heat levels in some tropical areas will likely become lethal to mammals, and because grains do not grow in 40C+ conditions, much of the current agricultural areas will need to be abandoned. Disease and pest vectors are already surmounting what were barriers previously and encountering naive ecosystems where they are becoming extremely difficult to control. The combination of these factors and others will, if left unchecked, lead to a probable destabilization of civil society with more than a billion climate refugees.
Alan Emery Aug 1, 2016 1:10 PM
Reference H:
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Bio: Dr. Art Hunter is a graduate from the Royal Military College (Mechanical 1963), Imperial College (U of London – Aeronautical), and the National Defence College (XXXVIII). He was a member of the Telesat Canada’s spacecraft design team for Anik A, Deputy Manager mechanical systems for the Communications Technology Satellite (Hermes) and Project Manager for the Canadarm project at the National Research Council of Canada. As the Project manager, he did the design, development, test and evaluation of the electronics network CA*Net (now part of the Internet). He has worked with about 100 Canadian companies as an Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) Senior Project Manager and as President of Drex Engineering Consultants for over 30 years. He has a broad knowledge of many technical disciplines including Information Technology (PCs to networks), Mechanical, Electrical, Aeronautical and Civil engineering, mining machines (like Tunnel Boring Machines), cosmology, physics, healthcare non-biological technologies, biology, indoor climate control, and non-fossil fuels energy generation (emphasis on Low Energy Nuclear Reactors and its associated technologies).
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