I Am 100% Certain That I Might Be Right...

I actually read an essay once, where the author said there was 'Probable certainty..." Huh?

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Maybe I’m weird, okay, probably I’m weird, but I had a thought concerning two seemingly unrelated issues.  Economics and climate change.  Certainly, they are related, to an extent.  Climate change affects economies, to be sure.

But here’s an interesting conundrum that nobody has considered, until now. Economies are man-made.  Without man, there would be no economies.  Yes, nature affects our economies, but they are essentially man made, created and controlled by man. Yet man can not predict his own man-made economies.  Even experts are mostly guessing when they make predictions about stock markets rising or falling. There are various other markets, commodity markets and so forth, and same thing.  Prediction is a crap shoot.

How can something created by man and nearly fully under his control be so incredibly unpredictable? The wise, intelligent answer is:  I have no idea.  Nobody does. There are too many variables.  Too many people moving in too many different directions. In reality, much of life is random.  We can predict likelihoods but can not necessarily predict actualities.  So, I can predict the likelihood of rolling a seven in craps, one in six, but have NO idea what will actually come up until I roll the dice.

But are economies just a roll of the dice? Can’t we foresee all of the factors and predict a result, based on controllable factors and not mere chance?  You’d think so, wouldn’t you?  But you would be wrong.  It just can’t be done.  Even in communist economies with full government control of the economy, they STILL can’t predict results.

Now, how about climate change?  While economies are nearly fully under the control of man, with some influence by nature, climate change is nearly fully determined by nature, with only some influence by man.  Work with me here:  If we can’t predict something that is nearly fully under our control, why do we presume to be able to predict something that is mostly beyond our control?

Any government, and its politicians, would love to be able to control that country’s economy. Their predictions, their regulations and inputs, never work out quite the way they planned.  Often, they make things worse, not better.

You know what comes next. Since we know that governments can’t control economies that are theoretically fully under our control, what in the HELL makes anyone think governments can control climates that are nearly fully BEYOND our control? Is there any evidence, after half a century of political posturing, and the spending of TRILLIONS of dollars on energy infrastructure and such, that our governments have succeeded at anything at all concerning controlling climates?  No.  Just plain, no.

To some extent, we can spot trends in our economies.  We know likelihoods, just as when we roll the dice.  But we can never be sure what number will really come up. Investors become rich, not by predicting the specifics, but by calculating likelihoods. By spotting trends and watching them, and investing accordingly.

Shouldn’t we do that with climate change?  Instead of deciding that we want ‘seven’ to come up and trying to make it come up, shouldn’t we recognize that we must plan around likelihoods and ‘invest’ accordingly?

About two centuries ago, researchers were just on the cusp of realizing how changeable the planet is.  They were beginning to quantify the extent of that change. Today, we know much more, but can only speak to trends with a degree of uncertainty.  No, we DON’T know what’s next, but we know the odds.

We are coming out of an ice age.  Overall, it’s been getting warmer for over ten thousand years.  The likelihood is that it will keep happening. Does that mean we all die?  No, why should it?  Does it mean that there might be migrations, as there have ALWAYS been, as climates change?  Of course. Polar bears and penguins do not live the same life they lived ten thousand years ago.  And they probably will not be living today’s life ten thousand years from now. Well, that’s life.

Neither do we live in the same environment as people ten thousand years ago; and our future environments will almost certainly be different. Does anyone pine for the old days of the continental glaciers that covered half of North America?  I don’t. Whatever comes next, economically and climatologically, smart people will work it out.  Not-so-smart people will follow along.  Government will screw it up.  Some things never change.

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