EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Navigating confidence–precision trade-offs in assessment

Richard Bradley (), Casey Helgeson () and Brian Hill ()
Additional contact information
Richard Bradley: London School of Economics and Political Science
Casey Helgeson: Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State University
Brian Hill: GREGHEC, CNRS

Climatic Change, 2025, vol. 178, issue 5, No 20, 6 pages

Abstract: Abstract In this reply, we address a comment on our paper “Combining probability with qualitative degree-of-certainty metrics in assessment” (Helgeson et al. Clim Change 149(3):517–525, 2018). Our original paper proposes an incremental systematization of confidence and likelihood language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our goals were to improve consistency across findings and support use of confidence judgments in decision making. The comment critiques our proposal and recommends against its adoption. We argue that this recommendation is based on two misunderstandings. The first concerns trading off confidence against the precision of a finding (our proposal endorses and systematizes the practice). We defend this practice and attribute opposition to an overzealous Bayesianism inapt for the IPCC context. The second misunderstanding concerns our purported commitment to a specific procedure for producing confidence judgements. We clarify that our proposal makes no such commitment. We also note, contrary to the comment’s claim, that a version of the procedure in question has been used in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report.

Keywords: Confidence; Likelihood; Precision; Uncertainty; IPCC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-025-03935-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:178:y:2025:i:5:d:10.1007_s10584-025-03935-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-025-03935-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-16
Handle: RePEc:spr:climat:v:178:y:2025:i:5:d:10.1007_s10584-025-03935-2