First up, there’s risk. Likelihood multiplied by consequence. And sometimes, like for example when the future of huge swathes of humanity is at stake, the size of the consequence means that, no matter how small the likelihood, we ought not to ignore what’s going on.

Second up, when the problem at hand is a wicked one, the best – some might say, ‘only’ – way forward involves managing the unknowns. All the stuff we don’t know about a situation (including as best as possible all the things that are today ‘unknown-unknowns’), we work out what to do, and then go do it.

Its been my working assumption for coming up to three decades now that there’s a global climate change problem. Its been my working assumption for the last two that the climate scientists have been busy managing the unknowns, doing their level best to work out whether the problem is an actual crisis, and what we need to do about it. Its been my dawning realization for the last few years that this second assumption is poorly founded.

“97% of climate scientists agree.” That’s what we’re all being told. 97% of climate scientists agree that the Earth’s climate is reaching a tipping-point, beyond which the consequences will be catastrophic. And there begins my problem. All of the TRIZ research tells us that smart people run towards contradictions, and that solving contradictions is just about the only way to make meaningful progress. Full-stop. Climate scientists aren’t exempt from this rule. If I want to build a better, more meaningful, prediction about how our climate might change in the coming years I would be well advised to seek out those people – the 3% in this case – that are drawing different conclusions to the ones my model is generating. Look for the differences, understand them, build a better model.

Except that’s not what I see happening with the 97%. Like so many things in life these days, what I see instead is a great big climate-science echo chamber. One that automatically excludes the minority that don’t agree with the consensus view. Papers written by a member of the 3% don’t get listened to, don’t get published in recognized journals and, instead – and even worse – get adopted by the other echo chamber. The ‘climate-denier’ chamber. Which then puts the two echo chambers even further apart. Looked at from outside and all I see is the world’s biggest case of confirmation bias. One that, by its very nature, prevents anyone from making any kind of meaningful assessment of what’s going to happen in the next ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years.

Ah, but, a voice from the climate-catastrophe echo chamber shouts, look at some of the idiotic comments coming out of the other echo chamber. The idiots that say, ‘look there’s only 412 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, how can such a small proportion make any difference’ (to which my answer is usually, let’s put 412ppm of potassium cyanide in your double-shot latte and see how that grabs you). Not to mention the biggest idiot of all, Donald Trump, who’s pretty much made a game now out of saying something even more ridiculous than he said the last time. I’m still in awe of the one about the ‘tremendous fumes’, ‘Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.’ This on the subject of wind-turbine manufacture.

Idiots. I get it. But how about the fact that there are the same % of idiots in the other echo chamber? The virtue-signalling vegans, for example, insisting that we all need to move away from a dairy-based diet because cows are massive contributors to CO2 and methane emissions. So massive tracts of land get turned over to almond production. The almond trees need bees to pollinate them, so millions of bees get brought in to do the job (I know, I know, ‘real vegans won’t drink almond milk either because it ‘exploits bees’). But there are too many mock-vegans and so an almond monoculture gets created, and all the bees get sick and start dying out.

Or, how about the climate models that ignore any and all of the difficult issues that might complicate their calculations. Next time you meet a climate scientist, ask them how they incorporate solar activity in their models. Or the fertilization effect that increases as CO2 levels increase. Or how adaptation factors have been built into the models. These are questions I’ve been asking for a few years now, and I’ve not heard a single coherent answer. All I get instead is a curled lip and a dismissive comment along the lines that I sound like the enemy and that, if I know what’s good for me, I’ll shut up.

Yet again, the core problem concerns contradictions. In the same way that we had a blinding flash of the obvious twenty years ago with our TrenDNA work on consumer and market trends. That it’s not the trends themselves that help us to see the future, but rather the relationships between those trends. And particularly the relationships where one trend conflicts with another. The exact same thing applies when trying to predict climate. You can’t simply extrapolate along a CO2 prediction or a temperature prediction and hope to have any chance of achieving any kind of accuracy, because that’s not how complex systems work. You can’t just look at one attribute. There’s no such thing as a ‘root cause’ in a complex system. CO2 isn’t a root cause of global temperature rise. Neither is methane or NOx or SOx. Or industrialization. Or fossil fuels.

The only meaningful way to model a complex system is bottom-up, from first principles and taking into account ‘every’ aspect of the system. And if that means your computer’s not big enough to make such a calculation, that’s the unknown you’d better start managing… by, no surprise, solving the contradiction.

Time and time again, the human inability to look beyond single-parameter ‘root causes’ ends up creating way more harm than good. My recent favourite involves attempts to try and rid the world of malaria. A noble ambition. Mosquitoes are more than just a pest – they can be downright dangerous carriers of disease. One of the most innovative ideas to control populations of the bugs has been to release genetically modified male mosquitoes that produce unviable offspring. But unfortunately, a test of this in Brazil appears to have failed, with genes from the mutant mosquitoes now mixing with the native population.

The idea sounded solid. Male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were genetically engineered to have a dominant lethal gene. When they mated with wild female mozzies, this gene would drastically cut down the number of offspring they produced, and the few that were born would be too weak to survive long. Ultimately, this program should have cut down the population of mosquitoes in an area – up to 85 percent, in some early tests.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. Researchers from Yale University have now examined mosquitoes around the city of Jacobina, Brazil, where the largest test of this technique has taken place over the last few years. Not only did numbers bounce back up in the months after the test, but some of the native bugs, they found, had retained genes from the engineered mosquitoes.

“The claim was that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die,’’ says Jeffrey Powell, senior author of a study describing the discovery. “That obviously was not what happened.”

Worse still, the genetic experiment now appear to have had the opposite effect and made mosquitoes even more resilient. The bugs in the area are now made up of three strains mixed together: the original Brazilian locals, plus strains from Cuba and Mexico – the two strains crossed to make the GM insects. This wider gene pool looks set to make the mozzies more robust as a whole.

All this was totally predictable. Or at least it was if you used something other than a one-dimensional prediction model. It’s not the trends, it’s the relationships between the trends that determine the emergent outcomes of a complex system.

So, where does this leave us? Is there a climate emergency? Do we have ‘twelve years to save the planet’?

No-one really knows. Which, on the one hand takes us back to rule one. Risk equals likelihood times consequence. We can’t afford to do nothing. But that then takes us to rule two. Manage the unknowns. Both sides of the climate ‘debate’ need to climb out of their echo chambers, start listening to the contradictions and use them to build better models. Until that happens, not only are we not solving the problem, we’re not getting any closer to understanding what the problem is.