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.
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.
Itβs 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).
