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https://reneweconomy.com.au/were-thinking-about-climate-risk-the-wrong-way/>
"There’s a huge difference between asking “what’s most likely to happen, and
how could that affect us” versus “what’s the worst that could happen, and how
likely is that.” While the latter is the traditional risk management framing,
the first approach is how most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
reports are presented, at least at the summary level that is consumed by senior
policy- and decision-makers.
No wonder then, that many people still see physical climate risks as gradual,
with extremes worsening incrementally and linearly. And why most climate risk
assessments seem to make the same assumptions.
There are two problems with this. The first is that we’re already seeing abrupt
and discontinuous changes, such as the unexpected and persistent material
upward shift in average ocean temperatures in mid-2023, which has now seen
every day for over a year at unprecedented levels.
The second is that physical risks often have natural break points given
differing vulnerabilities and exposures, where damage suddenly tips from being
negligible or manageable, to significant or catastrophic. For example,
residents of the Australian city of Lismore discovered this when they suffered
unprecedented flooding in 2022. While many had experienced previous inundation
of the lower level of their properties, this event drowned entire buildings.
People who had stored their belongings on an upper level, expecting them to be
safe, were left devastated.
In fact, as the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries put it in their recent paper
Climate Scorpion, “the sting is in the tail risks”: the unlikely but high
impact events occurring in the tails of a probability distribution. Climate
change is shifting extreme weather distributions to the right and, at least in
the case of temperature extremes, is flattening the bell curve, with longer and
fatter tails. What were once highly unlikely events but within the distribution
curve are now more likely; and what were once inconceivable are now possible."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
