**4. Concluding remarks**

The parallel and analogous roles of modeling to support response action in the face of two different sources of global existential risk—global viral pandemics and global human induced climate change—were the motivation for this discussion of the importance of continuing to work to improve multiplicative modeling efforts on both fronts. The rationales for choosing those sources of risk were many. Both are the source of enormous risk with distributions of impacts that are very thick, so "regressing to the tail" is the appropriate frame. Both have adopted similar risk-based approaches to decision making at micro and macro scales [49]. Both have explored similar modeling techniques and have pursued common methods for improvement. Both have faced issues with the communication of difficult subjects and concepts, and both have been subjected to misguided and manipulative attack.

The critical need to continue concerted efforts to improve the science is matched in importance by two other essential components. One is the need to improve communication to decision-makers and the public at large, not only to advance knowledge and understanding of the results at the appropriate decision-making hub and the associated population, but also to defend the results and their communication from misguided and sometime dishonest attack. Both motives are have recently been highlighted by the Working Group on Readying Populations for COVID-19 Vaccine for the Johns Hopkins Center for Health [50] in preparation for achieving wide acceptance of a vaccine that can, when it is created and acclaimed to be safe and effective, be quickly and globally distributed. The other is the recognition that global risks require global responses, and so they require collaborative work across research groups, decision-makers, and populations scattered around the world.

The World Climate Research Program has been devoted to just that for decades, trying to improve both the production of collaborative new scientific results of real social value, but also their communication to positions of power. Climate effort

**73**

*On the Value of Conducting and Communicating Counterfactual Exercise…*

on global scale is impressive so far, but its work is far from done and progress on real action vis-a-vis SDG-13 has been slow. The WCRP mission has not, however, been lost on scholars of the international health community. Chretien et al. [27] posited this assessment of the then current affairs: "New norms for data-sharing during public health emergencies would remove the most obvious hurdle for model comparison. The current situation where groups either negotiate bilaterally with individual countries or work exclusively with global health and development agencies is understandable, but highly ineffective. The EVD outbreak highlights again, after the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic and the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic, that an independent, well-resourced global data observatory could greatly facilitate the public health response in many ways, not least of which would be the enablement of rapid, high quality, and easily comparable disease-

The widely variant COVID-19 coronavirus experiences across the world brought

I gratefully acknowledge their many contributions to this work of Henry Jacoby,

Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer. I benefit and enjoy our weekly phone conversations about climate-related topics of the day. We work together on opinion pieces which we have placed in many venues. What appears here, to some degree, was drawn from the cutting room floor or our discussions, so any errors are cer-

these points to the fore just as they exposed a plethora of social, ethical, and economic realities. In a world moving toward nationalism with persistent racism, growing inequities and threats from the wealthiest nation on the planet to remove itself from the WHO, global welfare as calibrated by the metrics underlying the 17 SDGs is certainly in peril from these two cross-cutting themes. Recognition of common goals, common approaches, and common dedication to the general welfare of the planet across the climate and health science researchers may not be enough. Bringing those communities together through the matching international institutions designed to confront global crises with science and communication may be one of our best and last chances to avoid trusting universal herd immunity to

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93639*

dynamic studies."

protect us from everything.

**Acknowledgements**

**Conflict of interest**

The author declares no conflict of interest.

tainly mine.

#### *On the Value of Conducting and Communicating Counterfactual Exercise… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93639*

on global scale is impressive so far, but its work is far from done and progress on real action vis-a-vis SDG-13 has been slow. The WCRP mission has not, however, been lost on scholars of the international health community. Chretien et al. [27] posited this assessment of the then current affairs: "New norms for data-sharing during public health emergencies would remove the most obvious hurdle for model comparison. The current situation where groups either negotiate bilaterally with individual countries or work exclusively with global health and development agencies is understandable, but highly ineffective. The EVD outbreak highlights again, after the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic and the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic, that an independent, well-resourced global data observatory could greatly facilitate the public health response in many ways, not least of which would be the enablement of rapid, high quality, and easily comparable diseasedynamic studies."

The widely variant COVID-19 coronavirus experiences across the world brought these points to the fore just as they exposed a plethora of social, ethical, and economic realities. In a world moving toward nationalism with persistent racism, growing inequities and threats from the wealthiest nation on the planet to remove itself from the WHO, global welfare as calibrated by the metrics underlying the 17 SDGs is certainly in peril from these two cross-cutting themes. Recognition of common goals, common approaches, and common dedication to the general welfare of the planet across the climate and health science researchers may not be enough. Bringing those communities together through the matching international institutions designed to confront global crises with science and communication may be one of our best and last chances to avoid trusting universal herd immunity to protect us from everything.
