Overconfidence Leads To Bias In Climate Change Estimations

According to their study, past scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions can miss as much as 40 percent of probabilistic projection, missing a large number of low-probability events. The omitted scenarios may include low-probability, high-impact events.

“If low-probability, high-impact events exist, such as threshold responses of ocean currents or ice sheets, omitting these scenarios can lead to poor decision making,” says Keller. “We need to see the full range of possible scenarios, because the actual outcome may not be contained in the central estimate.

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