The only certainty is uncertainty, and I’m not even sure about that.

Here’s another piece from the Better Catastrophe cutting-room floor. It takes up the question: how do we stay grounded, how do we make meaningful plans, in the face of the radical uncertainty of our moment in history. I imagine this question is on many readers minds given our nail-biter of a Presidential election year, and the recent parade of announcements (most recently this one from the Wall Street Journal, featuring the Climate Clock) that we are already crossing the red-line of 1.5C warming that scientists have for decades been warning us not to cross. As per usual, I try to be of service here by tracking all the convoluted things my own not-up-to-the-task brain and heart do in face of this dilemma. Hope it helps!

The only certainty is uncertainty, and I’m not even sure about that

“Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” | “Man Plans, and God Laughs.”

              —old Yiddish adage

Do you sometimes go to sleep on Monday thinking we’re doomed, then wake up on Tuesday feeling like the future is again bright with possibilities? Or at least dimly lit with a possibility or two? I call this experience “apocalypse whiplash.” And if it sounds familiar, blame reality, not yourself. 

AI & automation are an epic black box of utopia and dystopia; in a swirl of death and bad data, global pandemics can literally “go viral” — or not; and even our most on-target climate prediction models include enough degrees of uncertainty to send anyone on an emotional-ontological rollercoaster. 

You’re not misunderstanding reality; you’re just experiencing several completely accurate versions of it in quick succession.

I’m especially susceptible to this doom!-not-doom!-whiplash when it comes to our climate future. There’s three intertwined reasons: one, I’m not a climate scientist; two, I respect the science; three, I think many of these scientists are holding out on us. I suspect they’re not telling us how bad things really are.

So, when I hear a climate scientist — or a responsible journalist who’s just interviewed a string of climate scientists — say something quite worse — even shockingly worse — than the consensus view, I tend to believe that we’re finally getting the whole sorry truth of the matter. But it doesn’t end there, because my heart doesn’t want to believe it. And, furthermore, being a non-scientist with a high regard for science, I ultimately doubt my own technical ability to check the math one way or the other. 

All this leads to a rather unfortunate — you could say, schizophrenic — push-me-pull-you sensitivity to our many possible fates. I try to cut myself some slack. It’s not me; it’s reality. 

See, we know it’s going to be bad, but even the scientists and professional scenario-planners don’t know exactly how bad it’s going to be. In fact, a few things might even be good. And, so, we are faced with a puzzling question: how do we live with — and plan around — the high degree of uncertainty unavoidably wired into our future?  

On the planning side, let me cook down a terabyte of complexity into one over-simplified thought experiment: If our best climate models say there’s likely to be somewhere between 1 and 2 meter sea-level rise by 2100 (and by “likely” they mean there’s also a small but not insignificant chance it could rise as much as 5 meters), do we build a 1-meter seawall and hope we get lucky? Or a 2-meter one to cover most of the outcomes? Or a 5-meter one because the worst case scenario actually has a non-trivial chance of happening, and the potential waste of effort and money from overbuilding would be small compared to the catastrophic consequences of underestimating?

“We still haven’t figured out how to talk about uncertainty,” says Daniel Zarrilli, New York’s very first Chief Resilience Officer. For many years it was his job to prepare New York for our climate future, all the while not being able to tell New Yorkers what was going to happen. Because, give or take a few degrees centigrade, he didn’t know! I don’t envy him. It’s hard to talk to others about something we don’t even know how to talk to ourselves about. Here’s me trying to talk to myself about it:

“Hey,self, if it’s all the same to you,                            I’m gonna assume it’s all going to work                           out for the best, and not worry about it.”

“But it’s not going to work out 
for the best, you know that."

“Fine, then. I’m gonna assume it’s all                            going to work out for the worst, and                              not worry about that either.”

It’s hard to live at the mercy of radical uncertainty. We want to make plans; we want to get on with our lives. If assuming the best — or even the worst — gives us something more solid to hold on to, who can blame us for choosing an artificial certainty over the muddle of not knowing. 

While we’re free to set our sights on one possible future (full of light, or of darkness, that’s also up to us), and live now as if it were sure to come, maybe the more difficult task, and also the more necessary one, is to learn to straddle the unknowns, and still act.

I believe this is what climate activist Tim (interviewed in IWABC) DeChristopher would counsel. He seems to have kissed all certainty goodbye, and fearlessly lowered himself into the dark river of our unknowable future, guided by one overriding ethos: to maintain his humanity through whatever lies ahead.

For her part, wisdom teacher Meg Wheatley,whose “Beyond Hope and Fear” workshop I attended during my research for IWABC, would tell us to feel in our own bodies the full reality and radical uncertainty of what’s happening, no matter how uncomfortable this makes us. Don’t get attached to outcomes or results, she would counsel, resist the illusory comfort of certainty, and instead try to acknowledge — even embrace — the inherent groundlessness of our situation. 

Our wisest response to the impossible era we’re living through might be to avoid belief and disbelief altogether, and instead marshal what Keats called “Negative Capability” — the ability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” Could this approach steady us during our bouts of “apocalypse whiplash”? Could it help us face the truth, when several radically different versions of it are all true-ish? 

In the end, life itself may be our best guide here. We don’t know what cards we’ll be dealt or when death will come. This uncertainty is part of the essential adventure — the radical wildness — of being alive. Maybe it’s not so different that we also don’t know how fast the ice will melt or how high the seas will rise or how hard the harvests will fail — or if we humans can pull it out in the clutch.

Consider this: every one of us — individually — is already doomed. And what life we do get we must live in the teeth of extreme, every-day uncertainty (the proverbial awareness that we could get hit by a bus tomorrow.) Yet look at us: we still make plans. Existentially, that’s pretty ballsy — even if those plans are just for lunch. Simply to be human, we’ve had to cultivate a graceful, almost nonchalant courage. It gets each of us through the day, and maybe, writ large, it can get our whole species through the century, no matter how dark or uncertain.