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Ultimately you are right, but this is basically Popper vs Kuhn. I can confidently say that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow from the East and set on the West, to pretend otherwise is sheer folly.

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Yeah you can always dumb it down to prove whatever point you want to prove but decisions like "do we spend a billion bucks building the levy one foot higher to prevent the flood or do we assume the flood will happen and spend a billion bucks on flood mitigation in our building code and emergency preparedness plans" are full of ambiguity and nobody knows the right answer ahead of time.

I was dumbing it down to prove that consensus is possible, the same can be achieved on your scenario though the consensus could well be less unanimous, I don't know enough about this area to have an opinion, though I suspect that people would prefer the former to the latter.

It’s more like spend one hundred million to make the levy higher _and_ on flood mitigation, versus spend a billion (plus maybe lose tons of money due to economic damage) dealing with the effects of the disaster.

Prevention is usually cheaper (and TFA in this case says it is).

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