By Roger Williamson

In 2015, the world's governments are meant to sign up to a binding climate change agreement and a new set of development goals, to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals.

At the start of each year, the Economist predicts what to expect in the coming 12 months. This year's edition, The World in 2015, finds a few - actually very few - pages to discuss the prospects for the two agreements. [1]

Yet the most instructive parts are the spaces where The Economist owns up to some of its failed predictions from the year before.

Many different people seem to have been the first to warn us about the dangers of making predictions; especially about the future, because - as the joke runs - those are the ones that often go wrong.

One example is Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman, who said: "Economists ... are quite good at explaining what has happened after it has happened, but rarely before." [2]

It is impossible to predict the outcome of climate change negotiations or calculate the odds of their success with mathematical certainty. The future is open and will surprise us. Wild cards often crop up in policymaking and new political constellations emerge.

But spotting those wild cards as they emerge can suggest the direction negotiations are heading in. I want to identify two such developments, and show how science figures within each.

How science's role is understood by big policy players makes a political difference. To say: "Yes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is giving us yet another 'last chance' to save the planet", as news media often do, decreases the chances of international agreement by fuelling cynicism or, at best, agnosticism. That message suggests: sit on your hands and wait and see. But once the proof is in, that this was indeed the last chance, it will be too late.

There are better ways to use science than to frighten people into learned helplessness. And the two new sources of policy influence that I see illustrate this, while offering hope and momentum.

View post:
Africa: The Wild Cards Offering Climate Hope

Agnosticism God(s) Science Mathematics Explanation Of Everything
Agnosticism God(s) Science Mathematics Explanation Of Everything.

By: Adam Stanway

See the original post:
Agnosticism God(s) Science Mathematics Explanation Of Everything - Video

There is only one playwright on the planet who could change the way you think about human existence in 90 minutes and leave you wishing there was a bit more to his new play. And that playwright is the great Tom Stoppard.

The Hard Problem comes with an almost unfair weight of expectations: its Stoppards first play in nine years; it follows 2006s Rock n Roll, which WAS an unqualified success, and there is, face facts, every chance that itll be the 77-year-olds final stage work.

The Hard Problem follows Hilary (Olivia Vinall), a young psychology researcher who is attempting to unravel the riddle of whether there is such thing as a truly good person something she has personally attempted to be ever since a trauma in her teens. Much of the play is set at the Krohl Institute, a high-powered research centre where Hilary is hired and taken in under the wing of the eccentric Leo (Jonathan Coy). Hes a cranky professor who rejects better qualified candidates because he likes her spirited some might say naive determination to pick away at the questions science seems incapable of answering. Namely, the hard problem: if existence is only matter, what is consciousness?

And theres, er, not really much more to the plot than that: Hilary occasionally indulges in bickering sexposition with Damien Molonys hunky cynic Spike; there is a slightly hard-to-swallow (though partly justified) resolution to her trauma; and in the background the economy tanks. Vinall is a compelling actor, and Hilarys not a total drip, but you kind of wish there was more to her than earnest goodness and background sorrow, while the other characters barely scrape two dimensions between them. As a drama, I couldnt help but think its overshadowed by Lucy Prebbles not dissimilar The Effect, which played the same theatre a couple of years back.

But no playwright does ideas like Stoppard, and the arguments he places in his characters mouths both for and against the possibility of something more to our existence are lucid, digestible, immaculately researched and at moments almost dazzlingly audacious in one scene he appears to make a case that the collapse of the stockmarkets is evidence for the possible existence of God. With typical Stoppardian mischief, The Hard Problem is probably the most eloquent case for agnosticism youll ever see. And Nicholas Hytners old-fashioned, light-touch production is the perfect vehicle.

Not champagne Stoppard, but still quintessentially Stoppard: if this is last act of his stage career, then he goes out undimmed.

'The Hard Problem' will be broadcast live to cinemas on April 16

More:
Sites in English