I came across an interesting example of this kind of filtering in Yale 360's The Rapid and Startling Decline Of World’s Vast Boreal Forests (October 12, 2015).

Humans filter threats in a variety of ways, with seemingly endless subtle variations, all of which are ultimately inconsequential. One common way to filter threats is to push them off into the far future, and keep doing so as time goes on. Thus the threat in question never actually arrives

On the other hand, this rational view of human risk assessment can not explain the general tendency to underestimate climate risk. To explain that, I came up with my Flatland model of human cognition , which says that understating climate risks falls under existential threat filtering, which itself is rooted in instinctual optimism bias.

What are we to make of this? It is clear that understating risks is due in part to uncertainty and ignorance. We can model how various Earth systems will respond to greenhouse gas forcing, but those models may be wrong. The models are then subject to revision as events unfold.

With each passing year it becomes more and more clear that the scientific consensus on climate change has underestimated future risks. Penn State's Michael Mann has been particularly forthright about this trend (and see the video at the end).

Let's start with what's going on in the world's boreal forests.

... Dennis Murray, a professor of ecology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, thinks the dying moose of Minnesota and New Hampshire and elsewhere are one symptom of something far bigger — a giant forest ecosystem that is rapidly shrinking, dying, and otherwise changing. "The boreal forest is breaking apart," he says. "The question is what will replace it?" Many scientists, in fact, are deeply concerned about the state of the world’s largest forest. The Arctic and the boreal region are warming twice as fast as other parts of the world. Permafrost is thawing and even burning, fires are burning unprecedented acres of forest, and insect outbreaks have gobbled up increasing numbers of trees. Climate zones are moving north ten times faster than forests can migrate. And this comes on top of increased industrial development of the boreal, from logging to oil and gas. The same phenomena are seen in Russia, Scandanavia, and Finland.

Regarding burning boreal forests, see A New Global Tinderbox: The World’s Northern Forests (Yale 360, October 1, 2015).

These disturbing signals of a forest in steep decline are why NASA just launched a large-scale research project called ABoVE — Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, a “major field campaign” with 21 field projects over the next decade. But the studies will confirm in detail what many know is well underway.

Here's the key text.

“Boreal forests have a potential to hit a tipping point this century,” said Anatoly Shvidenko of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and a co-author of a survey of a recent research on boreal forests in the journal Science. “It is urgent we place more focus on climate mitigation and adaptation with respect to these forests.” A tipping point would include the mother of all concerns: the unbridled melting of permafrost, one of the main thrusts of the ABoVE project. The permafrost in the boreal is more susceptible to thawing than in the Arctic because it’s closer to the freezing point. If large-scale melting occurs it would release more carbon dioxide and methane, which have been bound up in the frozen soil for thousands of years, and bring on more warming, and then more thawing, a dangerous loop. “Scientists call it a positive feedback, but most people call that a vicious cycle,” said Peter Griffith, chief support scientist for the ABoVE project.

Pardon this intrusion, but it seems to me that the world's boreal forests have already reached a tipping point. There's no need to wait for a tipping point sometime in the next century. Those new NASA ABoVE studies will "confirm in detail what many know is well underway."



Where did the "tipping point" occur?

Or maybe the filtering is expressed in the term "tipping point" itself. What is a tipping point? Basically, it's anything humans want it to be. The only necessary condition for a "tipping point" seems to be that it happens in the far-flung future.

Or perhaps we have not reached a "tipping point" until the process in question is irreversible. Does somebody out there (reading this or not) want to argue that the "breaking apart" of the world's boreal forces is still reversible? I'll quote this text again for your convenience.

Permafrost is thawing and even burning, fires are burning unprecedented acres of forest, and insect outbreaks have gobbled up increasing numbers of trees. Climate zones are moving north ten times faster than forests can migrate...

I don't want to get into a lot of detail here, but the "breaking apart" of Earth's boreal forests doesn't sound reversible to me

What does Jim Robbins, who wrote the article, say about all this? First, what are the risks?

The die-off of much of the boreal forest could have serious and unpredictable repercussions on the global climate system.

Could have?

When British Columbia’s lodgepole forests died, the province went from being a carbon sink to a carbon source because the dead forests released massive amounts of stored CO2. If the spruce forests of the boreal disappear they could also alter climate systems by releasing CO2. Because they are dark, they also absorb heat, but a treeless, snow-covered landscape would reflect far more solar energy back into the atmosphere.



Knowing what could happen in the next 50 or 60 years, and where, is important for conservation and other strategies...

Next 50 or 60 years? Oh, my!

Yet even as they redouble their research efforts, scientists know the ultimate answer is not about adaptation or more research, but a rapid reduction in global CO2 emissions, which so far has shown little hope of being achieved. NASA’s Griffith says the situation reminds him of his father, a small-town doctor. “Even when the patient ignored his advice over and over again, he would continue to treat the patient,” he said. “A lot of us in the climate and ecosystem world are finding ourselves dealing with a similar kind of problem.”

Yes. We've got a patient ignoring the doctor's advice over and over again. Waiting for imaginary "tipping points" is simply another way to do it. Even the doctor is fooling himself.