The Trouble with Predictions

The trouble with predictions is that they are mostly wrong. But is there a way that forecasting can be used to help us confront climate change, world peak oil production, and other critical environmental policy issues?

Predicting the path of a comet is far more likely to meet with success than predicting the future course of world food supplies, oil production, climate change or economic growth. For the comet, of course, we need only concern ourselves with the laws of physics. For the other trends we are obliged to consider a complex set of data that might include technological change, political decisions, corporate actions, social customs, economic conditions, commodity prices and so on. The array of factors we must consider is so great that almost all projections that go beyond a few months or a year quickly veer off course.


And yet, humans are planning animals. We are now dependent on complex systems that require us to make forecasts for planning purposes. It is hard to imagine highway planners, for example, designing a new highway without first consulting traffic projections. Still, no matter how hard we try, the future course of such complex systems almost always eludes us. In the 1960s Pan Am sold tickets for future flights to the moon, and its model of a future space plane became the basis for the one depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey which opened in 1968. Today, however, we seem no closer to regular flights to the moon than we were when the film was released. And, Pan Am itself collapsed in 1991, 10 years before the year in the movie’s title.

Given all this, why do policymakers, corporate chieftains, and the public put so much faith in such prognostications? The answer is twofold. First, they fail to understand the nature of risk. Second, they fail to understand the role of forecasting.

Scitizen