The New York Times has published an interesting piece  by William Gail.  He argues that we can't adapt to "unknown unknowns" because we are not prepared to handle them.  On one level he is correct but on another level this claim is false.  For generations, readers have loved reading science fiction.  Authors such as Jules Verne and Issac Asimov expanded our imagination with their visions of our future.   We live at a time of unprecedented literacy (billions of people) and unprecedented access to information curated by Google. 

There are countless scientists and popular writers seeking to build a reputation for publishing interesting writing.  I'm trying to do that with this blog post!  For example, think of the success of David Wallace-Wells and the recent success of his book The Uninhabitable Earth.    The whole point of his scary book is to stretch out our complacent imagination so that we can be aware of scary fat tail risky scenarios. He hopes that will nudge the middle class to support a carbon tax now and I certainly would be happy with that political outcome.

More importantly, I think that "mind expanding" publications such as Wallace-Wells' book helps us to adapt to climate change. If we become aware of scary scenarios then risk averse people and forward looking entrepreneurs will begin to make investments to address such future pain and scarcity.  Mr. Gail is making an extreme assumption that all 7.4 billion people on this planet lack imagination about our future.

A more nuanced view of educated adults is that many of us are aware that there are unknown unknowns and this leads us to search for clues and have a pathway to knowledge to discover these.  This discovery process is accelerated by improved data collection (the Big Data revolution) and faster computers and better statistical methods (AI and Machine Learning) for detecting new patterns that we have not see before.

Mr. Gail has a "Titanic" model in mind that we the big ship don't see the iceberg and then we sink after we hit it.  An alternative model of humanity that embraces the Hayek decentralized freedom vantage point is that we are spending more of our time "looking for the iceberg" because we are aware that GHG emissions continue to rise and scary possibilities could unfold.  This awareness of the unknowns is what distinguishes us from monkeys and other creatures.  Our human capital -- and this key capital stock grows every day is at the heart of what allows us to adapt to this challenge.

Of course, some claims about our future will be wrong but let's allow the scientific process to evaluate them.  In this sense, the "doom and gloomers" help us to adapt as their "Paul Revere" cries will be subject to formal scientific methods.  We have the data collection capacity and the tools and the computing power to analyze all of these claims.  We just need to show sufficient imagination about the full set of possible futures.  Given that there are 7.4 billion people on the planet, we can uncover many different paths to this big chess game.