Deep and Shallow Uncertainty in Messaging Climate Change

Roger Cooke

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Deep and shallow uncertainty are defined and contrasted with regard to messaging the uncertainty about climate change. Deep uncertainty is often traced back to the writings of Frank Knight, where in fact it simply meant subjective probability. Although Knight envisioned a scientifically grounded quantification of subjective uncertainty, deep uncertainty is frequently invoked to disable uncertainty quantification, with attendant problems in communicating and propagating uncertainty through chains of reasoning. These issues, together with science-based uncertainty quantification, are illustrated with recent applications to ice sheet dynamics. The issues of performance assessment and validation are addressed.

Keywords: deep uncertainty; Knightian uncertainty; risk; expert judgment; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-04-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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