Improving the way we think about projecting future energy use and emissions of carbon dioxide |
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| Authors: | M Granger Morgan David W Keith |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;(2) Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada |
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| Abstract: | A variety of decision makers need projections of future energy demand, CO2 emissions and similar factors that extend many decades into the future. The past performance of such projections has been
systematically overconfident. Analysts have often used scenarios based on detailed story lines that spell out “plausible alternative
futures” as a central tool for evaluating uncertainty. No probabilities are typically assigned to such scenarios. We argue
that this practice is often ineffective. Rather than expanding people’s judgment about the range of uncertainty about the
future, scenario-based analysis is more likely to lead to systematic overconfidence, to an underestimate of the range of possible
future outcomes. We review relevant findings from the literature on human judgment under uncertainty and discuss their relevance
to the task of making probabilistic projections. The more detail that one adds to the story line of a scenario, the more probable
it will appear to most people, and the greater the difficulty they likely will have in imagining other, equally or more likely,
ways in which the same outcome could be reached. We suggest that scenario based approaches make analysts particularly prone
to such cognitive biases, and then outline a strategy by which improved projections, tailored to the needs of specific decision
makers, might be developed. |
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