{"id":539,"date":"2012-11-12T10:53:46","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T18:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leiss.ca\/?p=539"},"modified":"2012-11-12T17:12:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T01:12:24","slug":"embracing-risk-manipulating-chance-will-it-all-end-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leiss.ca\/?p=539","title":{"rendered":"Embracing Risk, Manipulating Chance: Will it all End Well?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lecture at the Risk@Humanities Conference<\/a>, 26-27 October 2012 By William Leiss Senior Invited Fellow (Fall 2012) Society for the Humanities, Cornell University wcl54@cornell.edu<\/p>\n

Leiss Conference Talk<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Embracing Risk, Manipulating Chance: \u00c2\u00a0Will it all End Well?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Risk@Humanities Conference, 26-27 October 2012<\/p>\n

By<\/p>\n

William Leiss<\/p>\n

Senior Invited Fellow (Fall 2012)<\/p>\n

Society for the Humanities, Cornell University<\/p>\n

wcl54@cornell.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

From the Domination of Nature to Risk.<\/em><\/p>\n

My doctoral thesis in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, completed in 1969, was the last act of my decade-long apprenticeship with Herbert Marcuse.\u00c2\u00a0 It later became my first book, entitled The Domination of Nature<\/em> (first published in 1972, and, I am pleased to say, still today in print). \u00c2\u00a0At the end of my thesis oral, my supervisor announced that I was being awarded my degree for the single sentence that concluded the thesis, where I had reversed a famous Hegelian maxim, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the cunning of reason.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

[Hegel was fond of metaphors, and my favorite is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 What he meant was, we can only truly understand a historical epoch after it is over, when the life has gone out of it.]<\/p>\n

Using a history-of-ideas approach, to which I had been introduced at the graduate program of that name at Brandeis University, I traced the development of the idea that humanity seeks to master or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153conquer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nature through the progress of the modern sciences of nature and its technological applications.\u00c2\u00a0 Arising in the Renaissance, this idea was given its definitive formulation in the writings of Francis Bacon during the first quarter of the seventeenth century.<\/p>\n

The eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thinkers took further Bacon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inspired vision, as expressed best in Condorcet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s masterpiece, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit<\/em> (1795), a profound humanist tract written while its author was in hiding from the Terror.\u00c2\u00a0 Condorcet, himself both a great mathematician and a social progressive, and a colleague of Lavoisier, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153father of chemistry,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d recognized the import of the natural sciences in promising an end to grinding poverty through economic progress; but he also championed the role of the sciences in dispelling the hold of ignorance and superstition over the human mind, through which regressive social practices and institutions were maintained.\u00c2\u00a0 Condorcet saw the internal connection between the applications of what we would today call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153evidence-based reasoning\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in both a mastery over the powers of external nature and a growing self-mastery over human social behaviors.<\/p>\n

With the help of an extraordinarily perceptive one-liner written by Walter Benjamin, about the need to achieve mastery over the mastery of nature, I identified a potential internal contradiction in this grand historical adventure. For the species which seeks to master \u00e2\u20ac\u0153external\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nature \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the physical environment, its resources and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153powers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has failed miserably so far to achieve self-mastery of its own nature.<\/p>\n

The mastery over external nature takes the form of discovering an endless series of new powers and characteristics within nature that are turned through technologies into potent new capacities for action in the world.\u00c2\u00a0 These new technological powers are placed at the service of a species still riven by atavistic hatreds and ancient superstitions, where the rivalries among national and social groupings threaten to break out into unrestrained mayhem at any time.\u00c2\u00a0 If you will allow me to refer to just a single image to illustrate what I mean, think of the nation of Iran, the locus of one of the oldest continuous stories in human civilization, whose President rehearses apocalyptic religious fantasies in his speeches before the United Nations, while back in his homeland, in thousands of highly-sophisticated spinning centrifuges, hidden deep underground, uranium oxide is being enriched so that either nuclear energy plants, or nuclear bombs, or both, can be supplied.\u00c2\u00a0 Lest I be misunderstood here, I hasten to add that the Iranian mullahs have no monopoly on this juxtaposition of scientific modernism and atavistic motivation.<\/p>\n

In his phrase the cunning of reason, Hegel alluded to the notion that the impulse of rationalism can work \u00e2\u20ac\u0153behind the backs\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of historical actors, bringing into being forms of progressive thought through a developmental process of which those actors would remain blissfully unaware.\u00c2\u00a0 In my reversal, looking at mastery of nature through the lens of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the cunning of unreason,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I imagined that the hidden drivers of history might work in the opposite direction as well, supplying irrationalistic impulses with the requisite means to pursue truly cataclysmic destructive goals using the products of rationalism\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s glory, modern science and technology.\u00c2\u00a0 The point was not lost on the philosopher whose closest colleagues had produced the work entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>(see further Leiss 2011).<\/p>\n

As for my own perspective, I regard the spirit of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enlightenment,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d along with the modern natural sciences through which it is enabled, as the<\/em> defining characteristic of modernity.\u00c2\u00a0 And I believe that the fate of both \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Enlightenment and modernity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c hangs in the balance today.\u00c2\u00a0 But I will not pursue this theme further here; if it interests you, you might take a look at a book of mine entitled The Priesthood of Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Instead I want to focus now on the story of risk, and try to demonstrate to you that it is the same story under a different name.\u00c2\u00a0 In a nutshell, risk management is the applied version of the mastery of nature.\u00c2\u00a0 It is the practical dimension of the great adventure I have referred to, the attempt to increase human welfare by, first, understanding how nature \u00e2\u20ac\u0153works,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and then, using technologies to change the odds in our favor with respect to the contest of our species with natural forces.<\/p>\n

Embracing Risk, Controlling Chance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Risk \u00e2\u20ac\u201c simply put, the chance of harm \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is everywhere.\u00c2\u00a0 For every moment of existence, for every individual, family, community, nation, and for the world as a whole, the chance that some type of harm might strike unexpectedly is ever-present.\u00c2\u00a0 One-third of all first heart attacks are fatal and occur with no prior warning; global financial catastrophe appeared without warning, like a mighty flash of lightning, in mid-September 2008; and on average once every hundred-million years during our planet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history, a massive asteroid, arriving seemingly out of nowhere, has wreaked havoc on our planet.<\/p>\n

There is an almost infinite array of diverse types of harms.\u00c2\u00a0 This has always been true.\u00c2\u00a0 What is relatively new is describing the imminence of potential harm as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153risk.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 To call something a risk means that we understand the threat in a quite specific way, namely, as a source of potential harm that is (except in relatively few cases) which is potentially<\/em> controllable by our conscious acts.\u00c2\u00a0 So the understanding of our environment as a source of multitudinous risks is not, as some believe, an expression of a pervasive, debilitating fear and unease about existence (Beck 1992).\u00c2\u00a0 The truth is exactly the opposite:\u00c2\u00a0 A risk-based understanding of the world implies, not a dread of uncontrollable forces but rather a confidence that a much higher proportion of our life-outcomes is amenable to rational control than was ever the case in the past.<\/p>\n

For example, for women in pre-modern times pregnancy and childbirth were usually the leading causes of premature mortality (women then experienced in addition, \u00c2\u00a0with all others of their species, the additional scourges of accidents, rape, famine, disease, war, violence, plunder and dozens of other calamities).\u00c2\u00a0 All of them were experienced as simple fate and happenstance, to be endured and outlasted if possible but not to be avoided.\u00c2\u00a0 Explanations for them were most commonly found in the deeds of supernatural entities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c spirits, benevolent or otherwise \u00e2\u20ac\u201c acting directly upon events or using human agents as their surrogates.\u00c2\u00a0 [How very far we have advanced since then!\u00c2\u00a0 If only we could figure out whether God really intends rape to be a good opportunity for creating human life on earth.]<\/p>\n

The systematic idea that harms have causes rooted in the characteristics of natural and social systems, and that no supernatural entities are complicit in them, is the product of the Enlightenment of the modern West.\u00c2\u00a0 From its earliest beginnings this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153simple\u00e2\u20ac\u009d idea was both a theory (seeking confirmation through experimental evidence) and a program of action (seeking changes to existing practices and institutions).\u00c2\u00a0 Harms with natural causes, such as diseases, would be amenable to reduction through the discoveries of the new sciences of nature, first chemistry and later physics and biology.\u00c2\u00a0 Harms with social causes, such as criminality or the gross injustices of the legal and penal systems, would be amenable to reduction through reforms to political institutions and improved insight into the determinants of human behaviors.<\/p>\n

The champions of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, building on the passions of their revered predecessor, the English Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, sought to replace fate with a chain of causation that was open to rational analysis and the gathering of evidence.\u00c2\u00a0 Changing the prior conditions would alter the ultimate outcomes in predictable ways for the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153betterment of the human condition.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

So the first radical idea in the new natural philosophy was to see life-outcomes as resulting neither from unalterable fate nor the intervention of supernatural agents, but rather from conditions that could be understood and potentially manipulated to our benefit.\u00c2\u00a0 The second radical insight was to see that, collectively, such outcomes were distributed across a range of specific end-points (such as average age of mortality in a population) which could be represented as probabilities.<\/p>\n

The second was at least as important as the first, because it meant that one could take a strategic approach to the matter even if the pattern of outcomes itself could not be influenced.\u00c2\u00a0 The best example is insurance, and indeed commercial marine insurance was one of the first applications of the risk-based approach (see generally Bernstein 1996).\u00c2\u00a0 Following a risk-sharing strategy, and accumulating enough reliable evidence about the chance of a ship\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cargo being lost at sea from a variety of causes, such as bad weather or piracy, meant being able to set appropriate levels of premiums for insured losses. \u00c2\u00a0Assembling accurate national mortality tables meant that Scottish churches could determine the premiums needed to establish the necessary financial reserves for providing family support to the widows of ministers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which is why there exists, still today, a life-insurance company in the UK with the name \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Scottish Widows.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 And a momentous breakthrough known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bayes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Rule\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (after an eighteenth-century English clergyman and mathematician), showed how to deal with the uncertainties that bedevil risk:\u00c2\u00a0 in the face of inadequate knowledge, take a guess about what is the case, and then ask yourself what evidence you could look for that would increase the likelihood of your being right about it, and keep repeating the exercise to increase your confidence level in the result.<\/p>\n

These straightforward examples from the early modern period illustrate the simple truth that the risk-based approach represents not an exacerbation of existential fear but rather the rational hope that either the nature of the outcomes themselves, or just their consequences (that is, losses of various kinds), or both, can be controlled to some extent.\u00c2\u00a0 In almost all cases the objective of risk management is not to abolish the sources of harms but to limit the adverse consequences of our exposure to them, especially to help us to avoid catastrophic losses, that is, losses so great that it is difficult or impossible for us to recover from the encounter and rebuild our fortunes.<\/p>\n

Being able to represent a type of harm accurately as a risk, therefore, means knowing how to manage our encounter with it in such a way that losses are minimized and gains are maximized. \u00c2\u00a0According to a well-known aphorism, we can only manage something if we can measure it, because we only know if our management is successful by examining the results we get for our expenditure of time and resources.\u00c2\u00a0 The metamorphosis of harm into risk \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for risk is measurable harm \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is the key step in our ability to take control of important aspects of our continuous encounter with our environment, including our genetic inheritance, rather than to submit meekly to fate and chance.<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, the steady growth of scientific knowledge about natural and social systems magnifies the number of risks we face, because it turns mysterious harms into known risks.\u00c2\u00a0 This is a simple function of having an increasingly sophisticated and precise picture of underlying cause-and-effect relations and also of developing advanced technological tools for risk control, which inevitably introduce new risks of their own.\u00c2\u00a0 The overriding idea is that the substitution of risks for harms will yield very substantial net benefits \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in terms of longevity, better mental and physical health throughout life (with all of the associated benefits that good health brings), less pain and suffering, and the capacity to recover well from serious adverse events.<\/p>\n

Thus the modern world is indeed riskier than was the past:\u00c2\u00a0 But the right conclusion to draw from this truth is that this greater riskiness is a good thing, because it follows that the scope of our potential<\/em> control options over life-outcomes has been enlarged.<\/p>\n

I emphasize the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153potential\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because both harms and risks are tricky in nature and the cause-effect relations underlying them can be subtle and hard to detect.\u00c2\u00a0 The long latency of some diseases, such as smoking-related lung cancer, and the even longer timelines of environmental risks, especially climate change, allows us to deny the potential for substantial harm, if we are so inclined to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Moreover, we are always exposed simultaneously to many different types of potentially harmful agents, and sorting out the dominant causative factors is onerous.\u00c2\u00a0 As a result, risk management is almost always a difficult business and requires the application of a methodical and highly-disciplined analytical paradigm.<\/p>\n

Essentials of the Risk Management Paradigm.<\/em><\/p>\n

Risk management, simply stated, is the attempt to anticipate and prevent or mitigate harms that may be avoidable.\u00c2\u00a0 Its essential steps are foresight<\/em> (using risk estimation), precaution<\/em> (spending some money in advance, such as purchasing insurance), and prudence<\/em> (seeking to avoid, not all losses, but catastrophic losses, that is, being wiped out, from which future recovery is difficult and sometimes impossible).\u00c2\u00a0 Since risk management is also, by definition, decision-making under uncertainty<\/em>, when we take precautionary steps we cannot know whether we are wasting our money \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but at least we can be reasonably certain that we have protected ourselves from catastrophic loss.<\/p>\n

Thus, for example, we have an insurance scheme to protect people from losing most or all of their money in case their own bank fails, something that did not exist in the early 1930s, when many people lost all their savings, reducing consumption and helping to sink the economy into the Great Depression.\u00c2\u00a0 It costs society remarkably little to maintain such a scheme.<\/p>\n

All risk management costs money, either because some opportunities for individual gain must be renounced or because corrective risk control measures (such as regulations) demand new expenditures, or both.\u00c2\u00a0 Thus risk management initiatives usually encounter determined resistance from entrenched economic interests, and attacks on the scientific and statistical calculations supporting a newly-measured risk are commonplace.\u00c2\u00a0 From resistance to the earliest regulatory measures in food safety and workplace hazards, over a century ago, to the fifty-year battle waged by the tobacco industry against the epidemiology of smoking-related diseases, to today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fierce opposition to effective regulatory control over systemic financial risk by the banking industry, to the sowing of doubt about climate science, any major initiative in risk control can expect opposition from powerful interest groups.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless the general reach of risk management in modern society expands steadily.\u00c2\u00a0 Both professional risk managers and ordinary citizens have ready access to information and analytical tools that, when properly deployed, allow them to modulate their exposure to harms and to incur reasonable costs to achieve targeted levels of risk control.\u00c2\u00a0 There are literally hundreds of cases where reliable information exists, easily-accessible, that you can use to improve your chances for yourself and your children \u00e2\u20ac\u201c because something like 75% of our lifetime health outcomes are dependent, at least in part, on the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lifestyle\u00e2\u20ac\u009d choices we make in terms of such risk factors as diet, exercise, alcohol and drug intake, and so on.<\/p>\n

Yet here we come to the first in a series of paradoxes in risk management; this one I call the paradox of too much information.\u00c2\u00a0 Let me give you a couple of examples, the first from the area of blood safety.\u00c2\u00a0 Relevant information includes the risk estimate in Canada, at present, for the chance that one person will be infected with HIV, in any year, from a unit of donated blood.\u00c2\u00a0 The answer:\u00c2\u00a0 1 in 8 million donations (ten years of donations).\u00c2\u00a0 The bottom line is, since almost certainly blood has never been safer than it is now, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t worry about it.\u00c2\u00a0 But if you insist on more information, I could tell you that, at the 95% confidence level, the uncertainty range varies from 1 in 3 million to 1 in 20 million (Leiss et al. 2008, Appendix:\u00c2\u00a0 What is Risk Estimation?).\u00c2\u00a0 You ask:\u00c2\u00a0 What does that mean?\u00c2\u00a0 The answer is, technically, that we are a lot more confident that the risk is somewhere between those two outer bounds, than we are that it is exactly 1 in 8 million.\u00c2\u00a0 Then you might conclude, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well, that says to me that you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really know what the risk is, right?\u00c2\u00a0 So, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll make up my own mind.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Or take the case of the HPV [human pappilomavirus] vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer for women.\u00c2\u00a0 You can take your advice from the CDC in Atlanta, which will tell you that the vaccine itself is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153safe.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Does this mean that there are no side effects?\u00c2\u00a0 No, but the bottom line is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t worry about it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Or you can go on the Internet, and find a huge stash of anecdotal evidence, including many pictures and videos, about individual (alleged) cases of serious adverse reactions, including paralysis and death.\u00c2\u00a0 What would you like to believe?\u00c2\u00a0 Have you heard of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153confirmation bias,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an area of research where it has been shown that many people structure their information search in order to find support for their prior belief?\u00c2\u00a0 [See the PBS Frontline <\/em>program, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Vaccine War<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d broadcast April 27, 2010.]<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another paradox.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Our increasing sophistication about risk control induces in some players a propensity to deliberately seek higher levels of risk.\u00c2\u00a0 Some people who know that ABS systems in their cars increase driving safety tend to drive faster.\u00c2\u00a0 Practitioners of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153extreme sports\u00e2\u20ac\u009d react to safety enhancements in equipment and techniques by pursuing exotic alternatives, such as skiing out of bounds at resorts where the ski runs have been evaluated by professionals.\u00c2\u00a0 Undersea drilling for hydrocarbons extends into far deeper waters and more fragile environments, such as the Arctic, where existing safety protocols may not necessarily remain robust.\u00c2\u00a0 And bankers deploy arcane mathematical models in order to make large bets on novel financial instruments that test the limits of their own capacity to avoid so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tail risk\u00e2\u20ac\u009d where catastrophic losses lurk.<\/p>\n

Risk-taking feeds on itself:\u00c2\u00a0 The very same reasoning that once turned unknown levels of harm into calculable levels of risk threatens to flip back again into its prior state.\u00c2\u00a0 In the Fall of 2008 all of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s major financial institutions had been operating with formal models known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153value at risk,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d designed to put a number on the maximum possible loss resulting from each day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s operations; when the abyss opened and their risk calculations were proved worthless, none of them knew where the contagion of incalculable loss and bankrupt firms might end, or which of them would survive it:\u00c2\u00a0 The risks they thought they understood had reverted to unknowable harm (Leiss 2010).<\/p>\n

The greatest and most fateful paradox, which is actually generated by in part by those already mentioned, is that the scientific basis of risk-taking and risk management may carry within it the seeds of its own spectacular, ultimate failure.\u00c2\u00a0 For each successful targeted intervention in manipulating our relation to our environment on a minor scale makes us ever more dependent on being able to perpetuate the process of manipulation indefinitely into the future, on an ever larger scale.\u00c2\u00a0 Each round of short-term, successful intervention induces the need for more extensive ones later on.\u00c2\u00a0 Think of antibiotics and the development of microbial resistance to them.\u00c2\u00a0 Or the case which I shall discuss more thoroughly in a moment, our inadvertent manipulation of the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s climate system, from the burning of fossil fuels, which may require us to experiment with massive geo-engineering experiments in the future.\u00c2\u00a0 We cannot jump off this treadmill.<\/p>\n

Moreover, driven by the economies of scale and comparative advantage, the globalization of production of economic goods integrates the fates of nations and regions every more tightly; now all want the additional industrial development pioneered by the West \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and why shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they?\u00c2\u00a0 But this fact introduces the added complexity of requiring coordinated action through international agreements, something that in itself has been shown to have its own treacherous difficulties.<\/p>\n

All of this leads to enormously increased pressures and impacts on the globe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s key biophysical resources, including potable water, energy, agricultural soil, unpolluted air, ocean productivity, and others (again, I will come back to this issue in a moment). These impacts must be managed in order to ensure that the productivity of these resources can be sustained over long time-frames.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the unintended consequences is the globalization of the associated risks, which results directly from our successes in risk management on a smaller scale.\u00c2\u00a0 With respect to diverse threats from zoonotic diseases to climate change to systemic financial risk, we are forced to acknowledge that only a coordinated international effort will be adequate to the task.\u00c2\u00a0 But it is not at all certain that our social institutions will ever be sufficiently robust to mount such an effort in any or all of these domains.<\/p>\n

Managing Nature.<\/em><\/p>\n

The general point I want to make is this:\u00c2\u00a0 The long quest to exploit nature\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s resources intensively for human benefit threatens to reach its own internal limit and may collapse under its own weight.\u00c2\u00a0 (I will explain what I mean by \u00e2\u20ac\u0153internal limit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a moment.)\u00c2\u00a0 The reason is that this exploitation has unintended consequences that themselves must be managed, and that this management can only be done collectively, by all nations acting together; however, it is not at all certain that the will to do so can be mobilized.\u00c2\u00a0 If it cannot, the consequences of this failure may turn out to be catastrophic for humanity as a whole.<\/p>\n

There is an interesting attempt being made by environmental scientists to define a set of so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153planetary boundaries\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for human transformation and exploitation of the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s natural systems.\u00c2\u00a0 In a nutshell, these boundaries determine the amount of the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biological productivity that can be sustainably harvested by human societies.\u00c2\u00a0 Here the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sustainably\u00e2\u20ac\u009d has a precise meaning, namely, ensuring that natural systems are capable of regenerating themselves as we use them, so that future demands on them can be met indefinitely into the future.\u00c2\u00a0 As presented in the journal Nature<\/em> in 2009, by Johan Rockstr\u00c3\u00b6m and colleagues, these boundaries include freshwater use, ozone depletion, land use changes, the nitrogen-phosphorus cycle, ocean acidification, and climate change.\u00c2\u00a0 The authors try to show that human demands on these systems either already exceed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153safe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d levels of exploitation, or are close to doing so; meanwhile, of course, human numbers and levels of exploitative demands are increasing steadily.<\/p>\n

A more recent article, in the journal Science<\/em> in 2012, by Steven Running, combines these determinants of planetary boundaries into a single indicator, namely, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153terrestrial net primary plant production\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (abbreviated as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153NPP boundary\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).\u00c2\u00a0 He notes that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153plant matter [from solar energy, water, and atmospheric CO2<\/sub>] \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 sustains the global food web and becomes the source of food, fiber, and fuel for humanity.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 He concludes:\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Consideration of current land use patterns and the projected rise in the human population suggest that human consumption may reach the global NPP boundary within the next few decades.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 (This is in a way an updated version of the famous Limits to Growth<\/em> argument from 1972; contrary to what many believe, as shown in a recent review [Turner 2008], events in the intervening forty years have validated much of the business-as-usual scenario presented there.)<\/p>\n

We have no \u00e2\u20ac\u0153political\u00e2\u20ac\u009d process in place, at the international level, that could even pretend to manage the future course of the human impacts on the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biological productivity.\u00c2\u00a0 So let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just hope that these scientists are deluded.<\/p>\n

Consider at greater length the issue of global climate change.\u00c2\u00a0 This is part of the central story of the last few centuries, the story of the industrial revolution, because fossil-based energy sources are the principal driver and enabler of industrialism.\u00c2\u00a0 Fossil energy use has been growing since the middle of the eighteenth century; by the mid-point of the present century, three hundred years later, in 2050, it will still represent about three-quarters of global energy demand.\u00c2\u00a0 The story about the consequences of our energy use involves, first, the scientific theory of the natural Greenhouse Effect (2012), developed in the 19th<\/sup> century from Fourier (1824) to Arrhenius (1896), telling us why the earth is a full 33\u00c2\u00b0C warmer than it would otherwise be in the absence of this effect.<\/p>\n

The later theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) warming, known as the theory of radiative forcing, tells us that the massive amounts of greenhouse gases we have added to the atmosphere during the last three centuries, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, almost certainly will produce a range of adverse effects \u00e2\u20ac\u201c changes to long-term weather patterns \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of very large magnitude.\u00c2\u00a0 This insight began with a famous paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess in 1957 (Revelle 2012).\u00c2\u00a0 [I did my doctoral work at Revelle College at UCSD.]\u00c2\u00a0 Beginning in 1965, a long series of expert panel reports published by the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, followed by a series of massive reports under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on thousands of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, confirmed this original insight.\u00c2\u00a0 Almost certainly this is the largest collaborative undertaking in the history of modern science.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, it showed that our manipulation of the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s climate was inadvertent, and that we fully comprehended the nature of our actions very late in the game, making the deployment of any counter-measures both difficult and, ultimately, expensive.<\/p>\n

This is actually a very hard problem, both of precise understanding and of action based on it.\u00c2\u00a0 The earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s climate system moves massive amounts of energy around the globe and is the result of an extremely complex set of factors, including the nature of the sun\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s electromagnetic radiation, variations in the amount of solar energy, the tilt of the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s axis, its rotation around its axis as well as its orbit around the sun, the capacity of its oceans to act as a carbon sink, the function of clouds, the heat-trapping potential of various gases, and others.\u00c2\u00a0 This means that over long periods of time the earth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s climate varies substantially.\u00c2\u00a0 Thus the scientific account of climate is necessarily as complex as is its subject, and simulations \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the so-called climate models \u00e2\u20ac\u201c require the most powerful computers to run them.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, it is so complex that most of us have to take it on trust, as we do with all the rest of contemporary scientific output.<\/p>\n

This is a very hard problem for other reasons as well, the most important of which is the time-frame for climate change impacts and the lag effect of radiative forcing.\u00c2\u00a0 Lag effect means that we do not observe the ultimate results of human inputs to the climate system for a very long time, indeed, over many generations.\u00c2\u00a0 And to put the point bluntly, we are bad enough at making sensible political decisions under conditions where the evidence stares us in the fact, so to speak; when it comes to projections about what may happen far into the future, we are, frankly, quite hopeless.<\/p>\n

The massive IPCC summary of the scientific analysis of climate change at present is encapsulated in the conclusion that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the twentieth century.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 This conclusion is reported as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very likely\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to be the case (>90% probability, with high confidence).\u00c2\u00a0 Since we are still accelerating the process of radiative forcing, because our greenhouse-gas emissions are steadily rising, substantial future rises in temperature are inevitable.\u00c2\u00a0 And indeed there is some plausible probability that in the relatively near future some massive positive-feedback loops may kick in, for example additional warming induced by the release of methane stocks now locked into Arctic permafrost, leading to the possibility of a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153runaway\u00e2\u20ac\u009d greenhouse effect.<\/p>\n

At some point, likely before the year 2100, these temperature increases are likely to be very disruptive, in terms of our established life-styles, producing massive dislocations in human settlements.\u00c2\u00a0 In a recent book (Leiss 2010) I have called this a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153black-hole risk,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d meaning a risk with a potential downside so enormous in scope that we cannot even estimate how bad it might be.<\/p>\n

Climate change is a global problem.\u00c2\u00a0 It can only be dealt with in the context of an overall international agreement with specific and binding commitments, enforced by penalties, for the failure of any nation to meet GHG emissions reductions targets.\u00c2\u00a0 This year, 2012, marks the end of a twenty-year period of failure, starting with the 1992 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Rio Conference\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and continuing through the ratification and then abandonment of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Kyoto Protocol,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to achieve any such agreement.\u00c2\u00a0 Will we succeed if we try again?\u00c2\u00a0 Do we even want<\/em> to try?\u00c2\u00a0 At present the answer is a resounding \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 [It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that we haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever succeeded in doing this, as the international convention on ozone-hole depletion shows (see Leiss 2005).\u00c2\u00a0 But in that case we had a nice picture of the hole in space, and the threat of elevated skin-cancer risk, to settle the public debate on the need for risk control.]<\/p>\n

Climate risk mitigation requires controlling human-caused GHG emissions.\u00c2\u00a0 Like all risk mitigation this will cost money, for example, by means of a carbon tax on every person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fossil-energy use, perhaps a small tax at first, but probably quite a hefty one later on.\u00c2\u00a0 Who here today wants to start paying?\u00c2\u00a0 Remember, you have to start paying now<\/em> in order to avoid the really harmful consequences that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very likely\u00e2\u20ac\u009d may befall your great-great-great grandchildren by the year 2100.\u00c2\u00a0 Note that there is only a certain probability of these harms happening, albeit a high one (>90%).\u00c2\u00a0 Admittedly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot cheaper just to hope that it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen after all, letting your distant descendants take their chances with the outcome of the bet you make today.\u00c2\u00a0 Or to simply adopt the belief that the climate science predicting this outcome is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hoax\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as many U. S. citizens do, according to opinion polls, apparently trusting the many web-based propaganda organs that promote this canard.\u00c2\u00a0 [See the excellent PBS Frontline <\/em>program, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Climate of Doubt,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d broadcast earlier this week.]<\/p>\n

The United States is home to the largest, most lavishly-funded scientific enterprise the world has even seen.\u00c2\u00a0 The mere suggestion that one of the crowning glories of that enterprise, climate science, could be a hoax \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that is, a deliberate deception \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is, or at least ought to be regarded as, simply ludicrous.\u00c2\u00a0 But the fact is that the opposite idea, namely, that the science of climate change provides a plausible basis for starting to pay a carbon tax now, cannot even be discussed<\/em> in this country (the situation is not much better anymore in Canada, which once ratified the Kyoto Protocol).\u00c2\u00a0 Just remember:\u00c2\u00a0 Every belief we hold about the future is a bet.\u00c2\u00a0 And in another 20 or 30 years it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even matter which way we have bet on climate change risk:\u00c2\u00a0 At current and projected levels of GHG emissions growth, by around 2050 we will have reached the point where any contrary action would be pointless (see McKibben 2012):\u00c2\u00a0 Those alive at that point can all just join in singing Que sera, sera<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Everything we ordinarily believe in trusting the results of science in our lives, such as following medical routines and operating the countless gadgets we depend on, tells us that our bet against the believability of climate science is a very bad wager.\u00c2\u00a0 Some people think that the only good bet is to trust our technologies to deal with global warming later on, if we are eventually forced to conclude that we need to counteract our radiative forcing, by geo-engineering:\u00c2\u00a0 putting thousands of orbiting mirrors up in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, or producing more cloud cover by spraying huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the lower atmosphere (thus mimicking the effects of volcanos), or dumping iron into the oceans to stimulate algae growth for carbon sequestration.\u00c2\u00a0 If you think that, having failed to manage other types of human impacts on the planet, we are likely to pull off this one without a hitch, you are to be regarded as a true Panglossian.<\/p>\n

At the gaming tables, when your bets have turned against you and you respond by raising the ante, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153doubling down.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Here the size of the bet we are making, by pretending that everything is under control, with respect to our manipulation of the planetary ecosystems, is approaching the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153all in\u00e2\u20ac\u009d scenario.\u00c2\u00a0 It is in my view not an exaggeration to say that we are wagering on the future of industrial civilization itself.\u00c2\u00a0 For myself, I doubt whether this will end well.\u00c2\u00a0 [Some of you in this room will be alive in 2050, when the future course of this risk scenario will be a lot clearer than it is now.\u00c2\u00a0 Please remember to send the rest of us who are no longer with you an email message; for myself, I hope to be partying with the Devil, so you can reach me in Hell.]<\/p>\n

Humans are a clever and adaptive species and would surely survive such a catastrophe.\u00c2\u00a0 But the current revival of interest in the thinker who is perhaps the greatest political theorist of the modern age, Thomas Hobbes, should remind us that life once was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and might be so again.<\/p>\n

Conclusion:\u00c2\u00a0 The Inner Contradiction within Risk Management.<\/em><\/p>\n

The deep truth about risk and risk management has to do with our propensity to push our wholly inadequate managerial capacities to the limit, all the while protesting that no such limit exists.\u00c2\u00a0 Our reaction to encountering unforeseen obstacles is to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153double down\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on the first bet, raising the stakes dramatically:\u00c2\u00a0 If climate change risk arises from the technologies that allow us to combust fossil fuels on a prodigious scale, we are inclined not to hedge the first bet but rather to double it by envisioning using entirely new technologies on an equivalent scale to counteract the initial effect. \u00c2\u00a0To take another specific example, there is the notorious case of Bruno Iksil of JPMorgan Chase, known as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153London Whale\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for the sheer size of his bets, who apparently, earlier this year, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153doubled down\u00e2\u20ac\u009d repeatedly as the markets turned against his bet, until his bank was forced to exit his positions in the derivatives markets at a cost of $7 billion and counting.\u00c2\u00a0 This case shows that bankers reacted to the damage done by exotic financial instruments in the 2008 financial crisis by deploying risk control strategies so complex that, it seems, not even the bank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s senior management personnel and its CEO understood what their traders were doing or how much the potential hit on the downside could add up to.<\/p>\n

I remain, I confess, an incorrigible Hegelian.\u00c2\u00a0 In this failure to understand how the most exquisitely-tuned rationalism can magnify, rather than mitigate, our vulnerability to the downside risk, can delude us into imagining that we have become the unchallengeable masters of our planet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ecosystems, and can tempt us into wagering all of the accumulated gains of the last few centuries on a few final throws of the dice, I see the cunning of unreason at work.<\/p>\n

Do you recall Goethe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s marvelous poem from 1797, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Sorcerer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Apprentice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (2012), where the hapless assistant overestimates his ability to deploy safely his master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s magic incantations?\u00c2\u00a0 The risk managers I just mentioned probably think that this is an entertainment for children because Walt Disney made an animated cartoon out of it.\u00c2\u00a0 How little they know.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

William Leiss
\nSociety for the Humanities
\n211 A. D. White House,\u00c2\u00a027 East Avenue
\nCornell University
\nIthaca, NY 14853-1101
\nTel. 607-255-9279
\nFax 607-255-1422
\nwww.leiss.ca
\n<\/a>www.herasaga.com
\n<\/a>www.blackholesofrisk.ca<\/a><\/p>\n

Permanent email address:\u00c2\u00a0 wleiss@uottawa.ca<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Beck, Ulrich (1992).\u00c2\u00a0 Risk Society:\u00c2\u00a0 Toward a new modernity.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>London:\u00c2\u00a0 Sage [see Leiss, book review (1993):\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/www.ualberta.ca\/~cjscopy\/articles\/leiss.html<\/a>].<\/p>\n

Bernstein, Peter L. (1996).\u00c2\u00a0 Against the Gods:\u00c2\u00a0 The remarkable story of risk.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>New York:\u00c2\u00a0 Wiley.<\/p>\n

Iksil, Bruno (2012):\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bruno_Iksil<\/a><\/p>\n

Leiss, William (1972).\u00c2\u00a0 The Domination of Nature.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>Montreal:\u00c2\u00a0 McGill-Queen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s University Press, 1994.<\/p>\n

Leiss, William (2005).\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ozone and Climate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d:\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 https:\/\/leiss.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/ozone_and_climate.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Leiss, William (2008).\u00c2\u00a0 The Priesthood of Science.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>University of Ottawa Press.<\/p>\n

Leiss, William (2010).\u00c2\u00a0 The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector, and Other Black Holes of Risk. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>University of Ottawa Press.<\/p>\n

Leiss, William (2011).\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Modern Science, Enlightenment, and the Domination of Nature:\u00c2\u00a0 No Exit?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 In:\u00c2\u00a0 Critical Ecologies, <\/em>ed. Andrew Biro (University of Toronto Press), pp. 23-42.<\/p>\n

Leiss, William et al. (2008):\u00c2\u00a0 W. Leiss, M. Tyshenko, and D. Krewski, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Men having sex with men donor deferral risk assessment,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Transfusion Medicine Reviews, <\/em>Vol. 22, no. 1, 35-57.<\/p>\n

McKibben, Bill (2012).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 RollingStone, <\/em>19 July:\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/news\/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719<\/a><\/p>\n

Greenhouse Effect (2012):\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Greenhouse_effect<\/a><\/p>\n

PBS Frontline, <\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Climate of Doubt,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 23 October 2012:\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/pages\/frontline\/climate-of-doubt\/<\/a><\/p>\n

PBS Frontline, <\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Vaccine War,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 27 April 2010:\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/pages\/frontline\/vaccines\/view\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Revelle 2012:\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Roger_Revelle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rockstr\u00c3\u00b6m, Johan (2009).\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A safe operating space for humanity.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c2\u00a0Nature <\/em>461 <\/strong>(24 September), 472-5.<\/p>\n

Running, Steven W (2012).\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A measurable planetary boundary for the biosphere.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Science <\/em>337<\/strong>, 1458-9.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Sorcerer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Apprentice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (2012):\u00c2\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Sorcerer’s_Apprentice<\/a><\/p>\n

Turner, Graham M (2008).\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A comparison of The Limits to Growth <\/em>with 30 years of reality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Global Environmental Change <\/em>18, <\/strong>397-411.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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