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Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) – PART 1: Nicolas Wuethrich, Casey Helgeson

4 June 2015, 2:00 pm4:00 pm

Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) – PART 1: Nicolas Wuethrich, Casey Helgeson

Nicolas Wuethrich

Conceptualizing uncertainty: An assessment of the latest IPCC’s uncertainty framework

We are facing severe uncertainties regarding the phenomenon of climate change. To address these uncertainties, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has introduced a new version of its framework for communicating uncertainty which involves a confidence and a likelihood metric to qualify findings. In this paper, I critically assess this framework. First, I look at the meta-documents which explain the uncertainty framework and argue that there are substantial conceptual issues which need attention. Secondly, I explore how the uncertainty framework is put into practice and show that the conceptual problems of the framework manifest themselves in concrete practical problems for the authors and readers of the assessment report. Based on these observations, I suggest, thirdly, improvements for the framework. In particular, I argue that the confidence metric needs to be constructed in a different way which involves the clarification of the two sub-metrics agreement and evidence.

Casey Helgeson

Low confidence in extreme probabilities

Qualitative notions of ‘confidence’ are used by the IPCC and other organisations to indicate the strength of evidence behind a claim. Sometimes the claims themselves are probabilistic, meaning that the overall characterisation of uncertainty is spread across the claim and the confidence qualification. This divided uncertainty characterisation raises questions like: Do all combinations of probability and confidence make sense? Kandlikar et al. (2005), and Risbey and Kandlikar (2007) say, without much argument, that low confidence in extreme probabilities (near zero or one) are incoherent. I present some considerations for and against their position.

Details

Date:
4 June 2015
Time:
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Event Category:

Venue

LAK 2.06
Lakatos Building
London, WC2A 2AE United Kingdom
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Website:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/