I am, like just about everyone in the US, eager to know how the election will turn out in November.
I am obviously hoping that my preferred outcomes come to pass, but I’m worried they won’t. And I see anxiety everywhere, on both sides, and in almost all states.
The country seems littered with polls at the moment: Politico, fivethirtyeight, NYT/Siena College, NBC, Quinnipiac University….and the list goes on. So many polls, all designed to help give us insight into who will win.
But we don’t know.
And we won’t know until November 9th or maybe even later for some races.
At the moment, I am also working on a mini climate assessment for a client. I am summarizing projected climate conditions for a few decades out in parts of Europe.
The climate models are pretty good these days. We know a lot about what is already happening in the climate and what will come to pass and why. But we don’t know all the details, and we will definitely be surprised by something not quite turning out as predicted. It will be wetter than we think, or drier, or the heat will come sooner, or the sea level later.
When talking about the future, we tend to give ranges of climate conditions, attached to various levels of likelihood and confidence, with lower confidence the more specific you try to be about the future. We say things like: It is certain that temperatures will continue to rise (very high confidence); it is very likely that temperatures will exceed 1.3-3.0C by the middle of the century under a range of emissions scenarios (medium confidence).
All these words like very likely and medium confidence also have precise statistical ranges.
So we try to give people a sense of what will happen and how confident the scientific community is about that, based on the evidence. But if, like my client, heatwaves would present challenges, you need to know when they will happen - how intense and how long they will be. And of course, we can’t predict with any accuracy at all, what years we will have heatwaves and precisely how many days or weeks they will last, any more than we can predict if we will have a landfalling hurricane in Miami, Florida next year. We can only say that heatwaves are getting more frequent and hotter, and that strong hurricanes are getting more intense with more rainfall.
It’s all very unsatisfying.
But it’s also perhaps our most human challenge - to tolerate uncertainty. Most other creatures don’t have to contend with uncertainty, because they don’t think about or imagine the future very much.
I’m all for looking into the future, but my contention is that in order to create a next chapter that we generally prefer, we have to imagine one that is better and then work to create it. Instead, what we tend to do when we try to predict a future in troubled times, is that we become pessimistic.
You have a be a strong person to believe in a better future these days. We worry and wring our hands that ‘bad things’ will happen. And indeed they might….especially if we believe they will. A pessimistic view of the future tends to make us turn away from acting instead of diving into the business of implementing a more hopeful vision.
In a New York Times opinion article recently, Lydia Polgreen considered what she had learned from the death of her father. In the article she writes:
“We all want to know what happens next, to fix upon some certainty as an anchor in the rough seas of our times. But to tolerate uncertainty is to become buoyant, able to bob in the waves, no matter the tide.”
I like this image of being able to ride the uncertainty as if floating on the ocean. If you fight the bobbing up and down, you sink. Best to accommodate the ability to float, even if it’s not a smooth process. Ms Polgreen goes on:
“We live in a time dominated by pessimism and cynicism. These poses are a kind of armor against the vulnerability of hope. To be cynical is to close the door to the possibility of disappointment. To be pessimistic is to foreclose the risk of being made a fool by optimism.”
Hope and optimism do require vulnerability, and we may indeed be disappointed sometimes. But if we don’t choose to engage in those possibilities at all, humanity will assuredly suffer.
I choose to believe it’s possible ‘my people’ will win in the election and that we can avert the worst of climate change while preparing for what we do know is changing.
I might be wrong, but my actions in the meantime will help get out the vote, and build smarter, and reduce emissions.
And, I will be happier, and more….buoyant.