All toddlers are clumsy, but our son Max was at risk of a sidewalk face plant each time he toddled out the front door. Time and again, he’d run outside expecting the best, but it was a coin flip whether he’d make it to his destination or stumble and slap the concrete with outstretched arms once more.

The saving grace was his attitude: he’d pop back up butt first, surprise us with a smile, and say, “What good is!” Maybe he’d avoided a bloody nose or lip this time, or a skinned knee. Things might have been worse in a number of ways, so, really, he’d been lucky again.

His attitude reminded me of Ned in my favorite children’s book “Fortunately” by Remy Charlip. Ned receives an invitation to a distant birthday party and makes his way through one calamity after another to get there. Fortunately, a friend loans him an airplane; unfortunately, the engine explodes. Fortunately, there’s a parachute; unfortunately, it has a hole.

When good things are happening to Ned, the book uses color illustrations. When a threat appears, the pages are black and white. Page by page, Ned perseveres through one challenge after another until he digs his way into a ballroom where people are celebrating someone’s birthday - his!

The lesson was clear: things would always be changing, for better and worse, and the trick was to make the best decision that you could at the moment, knowing that a solution might contain another problem, and a problem might lead to a new solution.

Unfortunately, the challenges in real life are usually more ambiguous than the ones Ned faced. The information we need to make decisions is complex, and it may be awhile before we know the results.

In helping us digest complex information quickly, though, our mental shortcuts distort it, much as our eyes refract, or break up, light and then focus it on our retinas for us to see. This works pretty well for deciding whether to run the last few steps to avoid the bicyclist bearing down on you. It’s a disadvantage when trying to see the bigger picture and make decisions about things that must play out over the long term.

About fifteen years ago, a young attorney presented on the topic of “peak oil” at a noontime speaker series, explaining that the world’s finite oil supplies were being depleted more quickly than predicted. Sometime in the next decade or two, the oil wells would run dry and we’d be left living in a world without electricity, since renewable energy couldn’t develop fast enough to save us.

The room was quiet as he clicked through one data-laden PowerPoint slide after another to make his case for the coming peak-oil apocalypse. At the end, when someone asked what we could do to avert the crisis, he shook his head and said, “The best you can do is to develop new skills for a new world.” He himself was studying acupuncture and had begun to ride his bicycle everywhere.

The concerns about peak oil crescendoed over the next few years. Friends and clients forwarded articles about it. A documentary called “Blind Spot” showed images of rusted farm machinery and abandoned towns to underscore its points. Colleagues discussed the investment implications.

Does this mean we should ignore the pessimists? No, the alarms raised by environmentalists in the 1970’s spawned important legislation, raised public awareness, and curbed corporate excesses, which contributed to the improvements we enjoyed in the following decades.

Rather, it’s a cautionary tale about overconfidence and basing decisions on too-certain forecasts. When we gaze into the future to decide what to do today, it’s better to think in terms of probabilities and ranges, not certainties.

A couple of months ago, there was an article in “The New Yorker” by Jonathan Franzen called “What If We Stopped Pretending?” where he criticized the “expressions of unrealistic hope [that] continue to abound” about fighting climate change.”

Instead, he said, anyone under the age of sixty should prepare to witness “the radical destabilization of life on earth -- massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”

If you click through a news article with an alarming headline to the scientific study it describes, you may be surprised. Instead of dramatic assertions, you’ll likely find a document that spends as much time discussing the reasons for why certain analytical tools were chosen and the limitations of the tools and data as the analysis and findings themselves.

Scientists know better than most of us how difficult it is to get to the truth of the matter. Unless we’re content to operate on blind faith, not everything can be proven, since we’re limited by what we can observe and measure. For this reason, the proof required to support a theory is more about extrapolation and reasonable inferences than absolutes, with the understanding that theories will evolve as new evidence arrives.

This propensity to think in terms of probabilities and “more likely than not” is the hallmark of good science. It’s also what makes it vulnerable to predatory self-interest, since it’s easy to exploit the caution and incompleteness in scientific findings as “inconclusive evidence.”

This is the realm of pseudo-science, lobbyists and PR firms that tell us why we should ignore melting ice caps and signs of ominous climate feedback loops and wait for “clearer understanding” to emerge. Where imaginative doomsayers extrapolate too much from the scientific record, the hired guns skew in the opposite direction to sow doubt and contend that we should avoid drawing any inferences at all.

“Let’s not be hasty,” they say in Ent-like fashion, arguing, as the tobacco industry did, for more time, more data, and more certainty before making any decisions to address our latest threat. Doesn’t science itself value a good skeptic?

Yes, but the skepticism must be justified in order to be reasonable. If skeptics want, like a good criminal defense attorney, to “keep the system clean,” they must do more than cross their arms and say, “I don’t believe.”

They must engage with ever-mounting evidence from studies of things like weather, animal migrations, plant adaptations, global temperatures and polar ice -- evidence which suggests that the Industrial Revolution, as marvelous as it was, also planted the seeds of present-day problems. At some point, the burden of proof shifts back to the them to justify their doubts and inaction, particularly where it favors their pocketbooks.

Fortunately, when we speak in terms of probabilities, rather than absolute proof and certainty, it becomes easier to find common ground where we can make decisions. But as with most of life’s important decisions, we’ll just have to make them with the best information we have on hand. Or risk having them made for us.