Assessing risk

We will be affected by both how often and how much a challenge is.

An action that does not happen often, and does not affect us much is not going to present much of a risk. Conversely, something the that happens often and affects us greatly when it does is something the we must find a way in our routines to handle it so that we minimise the risk of it interfering with what we want to do. Something that happens often, but does not affect us much, is something we will find irritating, but may be able to live with, or find a way to make it easier to deal with.

However, something that happens rarely, but could affect us greatly can be the most difficult to deal with, just because it may cost a lot to mitigate, but if we don't know the timeframe of when it will occur, we may be outlaying for something that might be unnecessary, especially in the face of more immediate concerns that might be more disruptive in the short-term. It is these types of risks that can be the subject of the most debate and there will be many opinions about what should be the priorities among the various challenges.

Those opinions will largely be defined by the agendas and priorities of those making them, and in the current climate of competing ideologies, misinformation and spurious and misleading division-creating, consensus is hard to find. We have to have a way to ground the realities so that there is less chance for being distracted from finding appropriate way to handle the challenges, but there is no guarantee that even those will be effective at moving people from their intractable positions, especially when many just plain deny any evidence.

We have to detect and understand what may affect us and why they do, if we want to manage them or our lives around them.

Finding out why something happens is often not very easy, especially in complex systems, like the earth's climate. That requires an understanding of the causal relationships between the many elements in the system, which can often only come about through long study of the interplay between those elements. We have to have a way to discern if a situation might be causal, and that requires being able to know if there even might be a relationship between particular states of those elements.

Of course, first we have to at least know the most significant states, and that requires some to have actually studied them. However, sometimes that study is prompted by the failure of elements or the systems involving them, requiring sometimes rush analysis to find a way to deal with significant adverse effects quickly. And this process can be severely thwarted by those with a significant investment in there being no change to status quo, as we have seen by the decades of misinformation and denial by tobacco and fossil fuel companies about the detrimental effects of their products.

In the face of such suppression of their own evidence of the damage their product make, and the disinformation they spread to divert attention from what they were hiding, researchers had to find clues as to what to look for to break through the veil of secrecy. This required doing research and seeing what the data showed about which effects were produced under which circumstances. What was being looked for were correlations, being the predictability of conditions when other conditions occurred. While these are not guarantees of causality, they may indicate they may at least have a common cause.

It is only the painstaking tabulating of these correlations that there was a means of knowing where to direct research into the mechanisms of how they may be related. That is needed to establish culpability for when companies have created problems, but also for managing systems that may need curation to control their outcomes, perhaps because they might now present disruptions to other systems we have come to relay upon. The world we live in is complex, and we don't often know how fragile some systems are until they are pushed into states that they might not be able to self-control.

As human activity has increased to the point of severely affecting the earth's systems, and thus what we can do with our lives here, we need to be able to learn how to live within what the earth can handle. This is despite many that want to pretend that there are no limits, because catering for those might severely limit what they expect out of our societies. We have to counter such objections to ignoring ours and the earth's limitations, and that needs grounded thinking in solid evidence and understanding of the controlling systems.