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“The Worst-Case Scenario is the Least Probable” and Other Cognitive Biases: Global Drought, Catastrophic Monsoons and Floods and “Zombie Ice”

09/01/2022 | Written by: Daniel Pereira

Our editorial approach here at OODA Loop is an optimistic approach, based on the influence of ‘solutions-based’ journalism and a belief in the American “mission” writ large, including years of experience with deeply humble, remarkably talented people that make up American agencies, departments, and institutions. We try not to be blindly optimistic, however and steer away from the Silicon Valley-fueled “techno-utopianism” that has us in trouble with some of the unintended consequences of the internet, i.e. misinformation or bullying via social media platforms.

And because of the personal and professional histories of our founders, we are always looking for a fresh perspective in an open-source, flattened hierarchical fashion on the fringes of global hacker culture or through speculative and science fiction. Or we have a conversation with that truly original iconoclast who tells it like it is – a straight shooter who also happens to have a mindblowing history of service inside the USG, the global cybersecurity community, or the technology, business, and innovation investment communities.

It is this unique worldview and perspective you will experience firsthand here at OODA Loop. It is also part of our job, however, to position some negative metrics and trends as part of our overall sensemaking on behalf of the membership. And we consider even our own aversion to bad news part of our research discipline as well, and we have mechanisms to break through it and achieve something resembling a stoic, balanced stance on most information we are handling at any given time. OODA Network Member Dr. Lisa Porter describes” a risk-based approach that recognizes I am always making a tradeoff. And to do it with my eyes open.” We think that captures what we are trying to provide here on a daily basis. We also use scenario planning to tell the story of the future as we are seeing it – to influence risk strategies and decision-making processes for our member organizations.

So, with that: Are you sitting down? Because I have some bad news, along with a mental model through which to analyze its implications.

Background: Cognitive Biases

OODA CTO Bob Gourley and OODA Network Member Carmen Medina had a brilliant OODAcast conversation about scenario planning and how, invariably over the course of their careers, they have experienced three distinct patterns in human behavior, collective intelligence, and decisionmaking:

The Pessimism Bias

Without fail, worst-case scenarios are interpreted as the least probable (or as simply not going to happen). Medina explains it this way:

Carmen Medina: I think that we all have a, for lack of a better word, neurological disposition. I mean, we are learning a lot about how our brains are wired, and then our experiences affect how we think. And so, we all have tendencies, and it is very important that no one, nobody can be objective with the idea, the goal of a perfectly objective analyst is just fallacious. It is a dream. The best we can get is to try to achieve objectivity about our own biases, you know, to come to understand them. So, I have a bias that I am an optimist by nature, and it is very hard for me to accept pessimism. For example, something I got wrong: I just did not see how Yugoslavia was going to break up in the early 1990s. I could not figure out why people who had McDonald’s would fight a war.

That was definitely my pessimism bias showing up. A bias that I think has affected us during this COVID-19 period is this bias I think almost all of us have, which is to just assume that worst-case scenarios do not happen. You know, worst-case scenarios are unlikely. And in reality, the impact of a particular situation is independent of its probability. So, there are two variables that are independent of each other. And yet in common thinking, well, not just in common thinking among policymakers, it is very normal to think, oh, well, that is the worst-case scenario, so it is not going to happen. And that is what happened with COVID-19. People could see what was happening in China and then Italy, Iran, and then Italy, and for reasons that completely escape me, they assumed it would not occur in the United States. Now in retrospect cannot really explain it, but we lived through it. So, we know that happened, right?

The Paradox of Warning

People do not like to be the bearer of bad news. The reasons for that behavior are complex. Gourley and Medina discuss this concept:

Bob Gourley: …you write about the paradox of warning…

Medina: Yes. So, the paradox of warning is that essentially:

If you are a warning analyst, you are hoping to be wrong.
In other words: by warning, you hope that the policymaker will take action, that will prevent the bad thing from happening.
But then: if you do take the action and the bad thing does not happen, then people will say, well, you were wrong. You should not have warned anyway.

So that is The Paradox of Warning. And you are seeing that right now [September 2021] with a disease where sadly actually the best-case models have proven to be wrong because we already have more than 60,000 deaths and we are easily headed in the U.S. to 100,000, I think by sometime in June. But there are still people who are going to say it was not as not so bad because we have not had 2 million deaths yet. And that is the paradox of warning. Hopefully, we will not get anywhere near 2 million deaths because we will have taken appropriate actions. But once you take appropriate actions – the person who you warned is at risk of being labeled wrong.

The Streetlight Effect

We sometimes only use the information we can “see” to make decisions:

Gourley: Carmen, I just know that the average business leader or CEO would really appreciate your perspective is one something you talk about, which is the streetlight effect?

Medina: Well, the streetlight effect, that is an old joke and it’s usually told that there is a drunk person on their hands and knees looking for something it’s night. Then the policemen find them and say, “what are you looking for?” And this person says, “I lost my car keys.” And the policeman says, “is where you lost them.” And the person says “no, but it is the only place I can see.”

So, it’s just another reflection on this problem of evidence that sometimes we just take the evidence that is available to us and use only that to make a decision, and that at a minimum, you need to go through the thought exercise of asking yourself, okay, this is all the information I have. What percentage of reality does it represent? Right? People might say it represents 10% of reality or someone might say 50%, but just asking yourself that question, I think we will give you some perspective on the streetlight effect.

Bob Gourley: Yes. The streetlight effect is just so relevant for business people because you know, they will look to their internal databases and if that is all you are doing at this particular time of crisis, you know, you need to be expanding your horizon.

The Climate Crises: Global Updates

The following recent events shatter any remnant of the abovementioned cognitive biases which have cropped up in various forms in response to Global Warming (“Climate Change”), along with decades of – what is now clear – a lack of strategic action relative to the impact of man-made greenhouse gases on the delicate ecological balance of the planet. This post is a reminder that “we are human” – and we have been reacting in classically human, biased-filled ways to this bad news for decades. It seems we were going to be in this position until the ecological system started to provide the following dramatic feedback loops and clear metrics, thereby crushing all previous cognitive biases that were “clouding” all the global risk assessments and decision-making to date.

Joe Walsh at Forber captured the ‘top-level background best: “Over the last year, the world has faced a string of increasingly dire predictions about the expected toll of climate change—much of which will be tough to reverse. The United Nations said earlier this year global temperatures could climb by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next two decades even if earth-warming carbon dioxide emissions are slashed. The Arctic regions are warming faster than the rest of the planet, according to one study, making the threat to Greenland’s ice sheet even more acute. Many experts think climate change has contributed to a recent stint of droughts and heat waves, and a handful of studies find future warming could lead to large-scale extinction events and make it easier for some infectious diseases to spread.” (8)

The Current Floods in China

Unimaginable heat in China 🇨🇳

The longevity and intensity of the heatwave is hard to comprehend. Too many heat records to count, both day and night.

Beibei hit 45°C for two consecutive and some places not falling below 34°C at night.

The heat is ongoing… pic.twitter.com/pxWgaMDZQ0

— Scott Duncan (@ScottDuncanWX) August 20, 2022

What has been also been counterintuitive, but true all along, is that global “perpetual drought” conditions would prove a ‘tipping point’ in the frequency of floods and fires in the domestic U.S. and globally, with unheard-of forest fires and devastating floods, in scale, intensity and impact. What has been more troubling and hard to wrap one’s brain around is the “innovation” of the ecosystem in the intensity and frequency of climate phenomena such as heat domes, [iii] dry lightning, [iv] and wet bulb conditions [vi]. Here is what the global ‘streetlight’ is now revealing to us, from the New Zealand Times by way of tracking via Twitter by OODA Network Member John Robb

“‘There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China,’ weather historian Maximiliano Herrera told New Scientist. ‘This combines the most extreme intensity with the most extreme length with an incredibly huge area all at the same time.’

It’s the most extreme heat event ever recorded in world history. For more than 70 days, the intense heat has blasted China’s population, factories, and fields. Lakes and rivers have dried up. Crops have been killed. Factories have been closed.

More than 900 million people across 17 Chinese provinces are subjected to record-breaking conditions. From Sichuan in the southwest to Shanghai in the east, temperatures have been topping 40C. In the Sichuan city of Dazhou, an air raid shelter has been converted into a heat refuge. In Chongqing, subway stations are opening to offer subterranean recovery stops.

This has been a particular problem in Sichuan province. It gets some 80 percent of its electricity from hydropower. Now thousands of factories have been ordered to close. Among the global corporate players affected by the Sichuan shutdown are car manufacturers Toyota, Volkswagen, and Tesla. It’s home to major Intel and Apple assembly plants, as well as the world’s largest battery maker, Amperex Technology (and a major source of Lithium).” (1)

Monsoons and Floods (1/3 the Land Mass of Pakistan)

Footage shows the Honeymoon Hotel in Kalam, Pakistan, being washed away by floodwater. Reportedly, the hotel was already evacuated and no injuries were noted.

More than one-third of Pakistan is underwater after monsoon rains and more than 1,000 people are dead. pic.twitter.com/XlQ8CoEALg

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) August 29, 2022

Note: The comments in response to this Twitter link are an interesting sampling of the cognitive biases discussed above. Uncanny, quick qual and quant sampling.

Scientists and science fiction authors alike have been trying to break through the “pessimism bias” towards climate change for years, specifically the toll on the country of India. including the opening scene in the now seminal and influential The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

It seems India’s regional neighbor – Pakistan – is in fact taking the first catastrophic, historical “hit” – at a dramatic scale. According to the WP:

The South Asian country of about 220 million people is now facing an unprecedented crisis after eight consecutive weeks of heavy rainfall.
The floods have killed 1,100 people, affected more than 33 million residents, wiped out 1 million homes, and destroyed about 2,200 miles of roads, Pakistani officials said Tuesday.
Nearly 500,000 people are in displacement camps, and many others have nowhere to go.
Pakistani officials said Tuesday that the country experienced a slew of abnormal weather events this year. Four heat waves came immediately after the winter, leading to a year “without spring.” The heat scorched crops.
But in recent weeks, parts of Pakistan experienced about four times more rainfall than the 30-year average. In Sindh, the city of Karachi has seen 48 inches of rainfall in the past two months. The financial hub, which has a desert climate, usually sees less than 10 inches of rainfall per year.(3)
The financial toll is almost unimaginable: According to Pakistan’s finance minister, the damage so far is likely to exceed $10 billion, or 4 percent of the country’s annual gross domestic product. (2)

“Glacial outburst floods: It’s widely accepted that there is more glacial ice in Pakistan than in any other nation outside the polar regions (although border disputes add some uncertainty to the tallies).

Long-term warming has led to increasing numbers of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), whereby a meltwater-engorged lake bursts through its boundaries and floods areas downstream. In the Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, part of the Kashmir region, there are roughly 3000 glacial lakes.” (4)

Greenland’s Melting “Zombie Ice” Will Raise Sea Levels 10″

A report published on August 29th in Nature Climate Change entitled Greenland ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-level rise “focuses on what researchers call “committed” sea-level rise, a measure that takes into account the warming that has already occurred. That approach differs from most earlier research, which has been based on computer modeling and has generally predicted much lower losses of ice from the Greenland ice sheet (known as “Zombie Ice”). The latest assessment from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, projects somewhere between two and five inches of sea-level rise by 2100. The 10-inch increase forecast in the new study, which does not give a timeline, could be much higher if temperatures continue to rise…” (7)

A summary of the report from the NYT, Forbes, and NBC News:

“Most earlier research….has been based on computer modeling and has generally predicted much lower losses of ice from the Greenland ice sheet. The latest assessment from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, projects somewhere between two and five inches of sea-level rise by 2100.
In the new study, researchers examined what’s known as the climatic snow line, or the boundary between a snow-covered and snow-free surface, on the ice sheet. The line fluctuates every year in response to cooler or warmer temperatures, and when one area grows larger than the other, the ice sheet moves away from “equilibrium.” In a high-melt year, the snow line is pushed farther up the ice sheet, which means the area that accumulates snow is smaller, resulting in a smaller ice sheet.
The major issue with the new study is the lack of a time horizon attached to the predictions, said Sophie Nowicki, an ice sheet expert in the University at Buffalo’s geology department who was not involved in the research. Do you get that number by 2100, she wrote in an email, ‘or in thousands and thousands of years?’
The conclusions indicate that even the most conservative estimate of melting ice could have dangerous human effects, Dr. Walsh said. While 10 inches may not seem like much on average, the sea level does not rise equally everywhere. Some regions, especially lower-lying coastal areas, could be hit with disproportionately devastating flooding.” (NYT)
The Greenland ice sheet could lose about 3.3% of its total volume—leading to a large jump in sea levels—if the ice keeps melting at the rate recorded from 2000 to 2019.
Researcher Jason Box called the 10.8-inch estimate a “very conservative rock-bottom minimum” that assumes the planet won’t continue to warm: If Greenland’s ice melts at the rate recorded in an especially hot year like 2012, sea levels could rise by 30.8 inches.
The paper used satellite images and observations to estimate where Greenland’s mile-thick ice sheet is melting faster than it can be replenished by snow, distinguishing it from many other sea-level rise studies that rely on mathematical models. (8)
“Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. That’s because the parent glaciers are getting less replenishing snow. Meanwhile, the doomed ice is melting from climate change, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. ‘It’s dead ice. It’s just going to melt and disappear from the ice sheet,’ Colgan said in an interview. ‘This ice has been consigned to the ocean, regardless of what climate (emissions) scenario we take now.'” (9)

What Next?

How can your organization further address cognitive biases which may be negatively impacting your risk strategy and decision-making processes?
What is your organization’s bias toward pessimism?
What organizational structures or cultural norms exist within your organization that reinforces the “Paradox of Warning” and “The Streetlight Effect”?
Scenario planning and foresight strategy are designed as a practice and methodology to guard against such biases with, again, the caveat, that worst-case scenarios will be interpreted as the least probable. How do you socialize a worst-case scenario narrative within your organization for it to be ‘heard’ as real-world, tangible, possible – and, most importantly, impactful if it does happen?
Strategic thinking about the climate crises should shift to include”adaptability” solutions and policies. Also, where is your emergency and disaster preparedness relative to your global geographic vulnerabilities (vendor locations, supply chain issues, and global human resources?)
Framing the failures to date on climate action as human error based on cognitive biases moves us collectively away from “blame” and further partisan framing of the issues – and towards common sense, humble collective action moving forward. All the axioms apply: There is plenty of blame to go around; Shake it off; Learn from your mistakes; Tighten your OODA Loop. What role tenacity and endurance? perseverance with purpose? Grit? Resolve? It is never too late to do the right thing. Or the geopolitical quote, per Churchill: “The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives.”
OODA Loop research and analysis continues to be solutions-based and optimistic: be on the lookout for research and analysis in the weeks ahead on the carbon capture marketplace and some really impressive efforts at the Department of Energy with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model to “support transformative science and scientific user facilities to achieve a predictive understanding of complex biological, earth, and environmental systems for energy and infrastructure security, independence, and prosperity…enabling scientific discovery through collaborations between climate scientists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians” (5), “U.S. scientists and collaborators have a powerful new instrument at their disposal—the world’s first exascale supercomputer. The international Top500 list of most powerful systems in the world named the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science system Frontier the world’s fastest supercomputer. Frontier broke the exascale limit, reaching 1.1 exaflops of performance on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark. Exascale performance is measured by calculations faster than 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second (flops), or a quintillion calculations per second. Exascale systems will provide the next-generation of computing desperately needed for the massive number crunching required for climate change research and prediction…” (6)
Finally, OODA CEO Matt Devost included in the OODA Almanac 2022 a trend the OODA Network calls Simultaneous Crisis Mode: overwhelming the system with everything hitting at once: “In 2022 our national decision-making apparatus will be significantly stressed as the U.S. tries to manage multiple simultaneous crises. A new Covid variant, January 6th investigation, China and Russia regional power projection, supply chain, cyber, and economic issues will create an opportunity for adversaries to push the envelope in hopes that capacity is diminished and distracted. Organizations will have to build decision, crisis, and operational resiliency informed by strategic forecasting.” Learning from the history of climate change risk awareness and decision-making: how do we minimize the impact of classic cognitive biases as we sort out this simultaneous crisis mode?

Carmen Medina, John Robb, Dr. Lisa Porter and other thought leaders mentioned in this post are members of the OODA Network: Join the OODA Network.

Further Resources

Omand and Medina on Disinformation, Cognitive Bias, Cognitive Traps, and Decision-making

OODAcast: 100 Episodes of OODAcast: Providing actionable insights for future risks and opportunities.

OODAcast: A Conversation With Expert Practitioner of Analysis Carmen Medina

OODAcon 2022

To register for OODAcon, go to: OODAcon 2022 – The Future of Exponential Innovation & Disruption

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