July 18, 2008

Priceless

by Sylvia S Tognetti

It seems lazy to just post clips from the Colbert Report but Stephen nailed the abuses of cost-benefit analysis on Monday night, in the Word segment, "Priceless", and I'm in France... [note: the video clip doesn't seem to be working - hopefully Comedy Central will fix it soon]. The short version: "A human life is 6.9 million dollars. Gaming the system to protect industry from safety regulations: priceless."

A billboard at CDG airport says getting lost in Paris is also priceless - which is true, but this time I got lost in Brittany and found a megalithic tomb. I'm not sure if it was facing the Atlantic or "La Manche" - the French name for what I have, until now, known as the English Channel. Back in Paris, on Bastille Day, a soldier riding a tank in a military convoy on its way back from the parade, saw my companion's Obama button, smiled, and flashed a "V" sign, which says a lot about what has happened to America's image. I did a few other things but on the blog, I try to stick to environmental science and policy stuff. Speaking of which, right now, I'm hiding in a farmhouse in another region, and working on a presentation I was invited to give next week at a seminar in Germany, on water and biodiversity - more on that later. Since I will be stopping in Berlin on the way, and will finally get to see what is left of the iron curtain, I may have to also revisit the idea of a Post-Cold War Reconstruction (will unfortunately miss the Obama rally in Berlin). I may also get around to posting some comments of my own on cost-benefit analysis.

[corrected and revised, 4:48 pm]

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April 24, 2008

Science says

by Sylvia S Tognetti

The use of science as a masquerade for what is really a political debate really should be old news - when I worked at the NAS in the late '80s, I recall hearing that an agency request for a study that would say what the standards, or acceptable levels should be for toxic substances, probably under the Clean Air Act, was turned down because it was not considered a scientific question. To their credit, the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel is also clear on this in advice regarding the secondary standard for allowable concentrations of ground level ozone, necessary to control smog. But the tape continues to be replayed in assertions on blogs and elsewhere about "what science tells us we need." Yet another prominent example of this is commented on in this Nature article (sub req'd) by David Goldston, in response to criticism of the intervention by Bush to weaken regulations to control smog, and a statement by Carol Browner regarding the Clean Air Act, which she says "creates a moral and ethical commitment that we are going to let the science tell us what to do." Since the article is behind a pay wall, I'm just going to paste some snips here:

But does it? The conceit that science alone should and can dictate clean-air standards is propagated by political figures of all stripes and often by scientists themselves. Politicians always want to argue that any regulatory measure they are supporting is the only one justified by science because doing so makes their position sound objective and above the political fray. That’s especially true in today’s polarized environment, when claiming to have science on your side may be the only line of argument that can reach someone who doesn’t share your ideological persuasion.

In reality, though, regulatory decisions involve policy judgements as well as scientific determinations, and the science is often uncertain. The Clean Air Act explicitly leaves decisions to the “judgment of the administrator” of the EPA (a presidential appointee), who is advised by, among others, a scientific panel. Contending that standards are based solely on science conflates policy and science questions, muddying the debate and putting scientists needlessly in the line of fire....

Concluding:

...The debate over the new ozone standards is just beginning, but the detrimental impact of confusing science with policy can be seen by looking back at what happened in 1997, when the EPA last changed the ozone rules. The fight then was over the primary ozone standard, the one designed to protect public health. The EPA proposed tightening the standard, and Browner (then EPA’s chief) repeatedly argued that the decision was dictated by the science.

As a congressional staffer, I fought for the EPA proposal and I still support it. But what the science actually demonstrated was that for a given level of ozone, there are a predictable number of excess hospital admissions from aggravated respiratory conditions. At the time, there was little indication that ozone caused chronic health problems or deaths. Therefore the policy issue was: “How many hospital admissions are acceptable?” Needless to say, no politician was interested in engaging in that debate. The members of the EPA’s science advisory panel at the time were split over what standard to suggest, but agreed that the number was a “policy call”, not a scientific question. The science in no way told Browner exactly what to do.

All this quickly got lost in what became a prolonged and highly acrimonious debate between supporters and opponents of the new rule, in which each side accused the other of using poor science. This was bad for policy because the question of how to decide on an acceptable level of protection never got raised, never mind discussed. And it was bad for science because accusations of poor science conducted in the service of political goals can only raise distrust and confusion about the scientific enterprise.

The 1997 ozone fight, even more clearly than the 2008 rerun, was a case of a policy debate masquerading as a science debate. In such instances, scientists ought to be busy ripping off the policymakers’ masks, not donning them.

This frame works because of the perception that science provides certainty and therefore, can be called on as the ultimate authority. So it should be no mystery why the uncertainty argument works as a way to avoid policy decisions. But the idea that "we" are the ultimate authority, via the messy process of politics, remains a scary one.

[Hat tip: Inscights.]

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April 23, 2008

If only it were rocket science

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Krugman recalls some of the pitfalls of crossing disciplinary boundaries in the Limits to Growth debates that took place in the 1970s, when its author, Jay Forrester, decided to try his hand at economics. The result earned a scathing review from William Nordhaus, for whom Krugman worked as an assistant at the time. He gives an important rule of thumb:

The general rule to remember is that if some discipline seems less developed than your own, it’s probably not because the researchers aren’t as smart as you are, it’s because the subject is harder.)

Kudos to Krugman, and also to Environmental Economics for recognizing that this can go both ways, and that "economists do the same thing to sociologists and political scientists" or "x-ologists." In fact, Nordhaus himself is among the better known culprits, as discussed in the classic paper by Funtowicz and Ravetz, The worth of a songbird (pdf), revisited by Paul Baer here on PNT in The worth of an ice sheet , with further comments from Jerry here. (Nordhaus' role in climate science also surfaces in this paper by Naomi Oreskes et al about which I have another post in progress, but in the meantime, see what the Rabett  has to say.]  Long time readers of this blog who have been following the discourse on post-normal science can skip the rest but, a few highlights worth reiterating for everyone else:

F&R made the case that predictions made by Nordhaus in 1991 regarding the costs and benefits of climate change are based on arbitrary guestimates with extremely high uncertainty, e.g., his estimated impact of climate change on farms ranges from -10.6 to +9.7, billion $. This is acknowledged with caveats in the paper, e.g., "we now move from the terra infirma of climate change to the terra incognita of the social and economic impacts of climate change." However, it is not reflected in his conclusion that "climate change is likely to produce a combination of gains and losses with no strong presumption of substantial net economic damage." You would think that since the 1990s, knowledge might have progressed. But as Paul Baer points out, even the degree of risk implied by the "flaming arrows" diagram in the Stern report, which suggest that there is little to worry about until the average temperature rises by around 3 degrees C, can be traced back to a survey of Expert Opinion on Climate Change done by Nordhaus in 1994 in which "unsurprisingly, the estimated damage consequences of various temperature scenarios were significantly skewed between economists and natural scientists, as discussed in the original and in Roughgarden, T. and S. H. Schneider (1999)." As Paul also explained:

the specific risks implied by the "flaming arrows" are nowhere quantified directly. Instead, there is a single number calculated for "catastrophic impacts," based on a probability distribution for the temperature threshold at which the risk begins, and for the “value” (in terms of lost GNP) if the catastrophe occurs. The parameters of this "damage function" are in turn based on an expert survey done by William Nordhaus in 1994. According to Stern (p. 153), "When global mean temperature rises to high levels (an average of 5°C above pre-industrial levels), the chance of large losses in regional GDP in the range of 5 - 20% begins to appear. This chance increases by an average of 10% per ºC rise in global mean temperature beyond 5°C."

Among his main concluding points:

"catastrophic damage function" doesn't adequately capture all the reasonable interpretations of the likelihood and value of melting the Greenland ice sheet, to say nothing of other potential "catastrophes." Thus, it follows that the upper bound on damages for any different stabilization level has not been established. This alone should be enough to conclude that the economic justification for the lower-bound of 450 ppm CO₂-e stabilization can't be robust.

Lest anyone dismiss this as a rant against economics - it is not. I have no problem with economists who recognize the limits of their methodologies, and are clear about this in their conclusions. There are some. To be fair, I'll end this with a quote from Gregory Bateson, who sees the same pitfall in the entire relationship between science and society:

“I have been playing recently with the idea that the position of the scientific community vis-à-vis nature is comparable to the position of one complex culture in contact with another. In such a culture contact there are various tendencies towards oversimplification. The themes of the other culture which are actually complex patterns tend to be reified, and, especially the modes of interaction tend to become quantitative (money, trade, etc.)”

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January 3, 2008

Bert Bolin

by Sylvia S Tognetti

When the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, I wondered why Bert Bolin wasn't standing next to Al Gore. As it turns out, he would have been, had he not been too ill to travel - at least he lived long enough to enjoy the honor (hat tip Climate Science Watch).

Which brings me back to a post I started awhile back, but never got around to finishing, about the important role of synthesis in science, which is rarely mentioned - not at all for example in this article by scientific historian Naomi Oreskes on the history of the consensus of climate change. To be fair, there are only so many things one can say in an op-ed, but in between the work of those she mentions was a report from a workshop led by Bert Bolin in 1977, under the auspices of the ICSU Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE), at which 66 scientists from 22 countries tried to nail down the "missing carbon." An excerpt from the preface of SCOPE report number 13:

One major problem, which constantly cropped up in the discussions, concerned the carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere. This issue is very significant because the potential increase of CO₂ in air remains substantially unpredictable as a factor in climatic variations. For us, the CO₂ question is only one of many important issues concerning carbon. It also appears that an answer to the build-up of CO₂ in the earth's atmosphere can only be found by placing the CO₂ problem in its proper environmental context, that is, the global cycle of carbon. Consequently we have tried, in a series of articles, to treat the carbon cycle by dividing it into various segments, i.e. hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere. Rather than concentrating on the accumulation and compilation of the data alone, we were guided by the intention to reveal the mechanisms of the carbon cycle in terms of sinks and sources and the kinetics of transfer and exchange.

Subsequently, in 1981, he led another interdisciplinary team that examined interactions among all of the major biogeochemical cycles: carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus that resulted in SCOPE 21. And then, another review in preparation for a 1985 UNEP/WMO/ICSU International Conference on The Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and of Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts, held in Villach Austria, that produced the following recommendation:

Recommended actions: Major uncertainties remain in predictions of changes in global and regional precipitation and temperature patterns. Ecosystem responses are also imperfectly known. Nevertheless, the understanding of the greenhouse question is sufficiently developed that scientists and policy-makers should begin an active collaboration to explore the effectiveness of alternative policies and adjustments. Efforts should be made to design methods necessary for such collaboration. UNEP, WMO and ICSU should establish a small task force on green- house gases, or take other measures, to: Help ensure that appropriate agencies and bodies follow up the recommendations of Villach 1985. Ensure periodic assessments are undertaken of the state of scientific understanding and its practical implications. Provide advice on further mechanisms and actions required at the national or international levels. Encourage research in developing countries to improve energy efficiency and conservation. Initiate; if deemed necessary, consideration of a global convention.

which appears in SCOPE 29, The Greenhouse Effect, Climatic Change and Ecosystems. Following which, the IPCC was formed.

I started to learn about all of this around 1991, when, as an employee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, I was assigned as staff to the US Committee for SCOPE - an international body that was established to provide this kind of synthesis on emerging global environmental problems - which is how they get on the radar screen. Much of the credit for the establishment of SCOPE goes to Gilbert White, who very much influenced my decision to become a geographer, after many years of frustration doing interdisciplinary work in institutions that at best, seem intentionally designed to make it difficult. At worst, such endeavors get dismissed as "academic moonlighting." So I appreciate what a feat it must have been, both to create SCOPE and the IPCC - and remain in awe. They have both served not only to advance knowledge, but to build the capacity for international collaboration in science, which can be a starting point for collaboration in addressing global problems. A few quotes from Gilbert White:

"What is important is where we stand in relation to the tasks of society . . . What shall it profit [the profession of geography] if it fabricates a nifty discipline about the world while that world and the human spirit are degraded?"

"I feel strongly that I should not go into research unless it promises results that would advance the aims of the people affected and unless I am prepared to take all practicable steps to help translate the results into action."

Added note: One of the reasons the SCOPE reports were obscured to those outside the scientific community involved in producing them, was because they were once outrageously expensive, and the internet did not yet exist. But volumes 1-59 are now available for download in their entirety. Newer volumes are now published by Island Press at much more reasonable rates.

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October 26, 2007

Rotten Pumpkins

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Its getting harder to laugh given what is in the news - e.g., droughts, wildfires, higher carbon emission rates... but it is Friday, and at least where I am, we are finally getting some rain. The Colbert Report is in re-runs this week but this clip remains timely, and would have been even more appropriate this evening anyway.

Update: Joe Romm has more on Global Warming's Halloween Horror - with links to frightening news about impacts of drought and in other cases, extremely high rainfall, on this year's pumpkin crop.

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October 5, 2007

One of the most important developments in the history of science?

by Sylvia S Tognetti

So says Andy Albrecht, as reported in the New Scientist. In a post that must have disappeared into one of those parallel universes, but that shows up in my rss feeds, David Appell asks what they could possibly be talking about. Stephen Colbert explains:

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July 1, 2007

Reality has become a black swan

by Sylvia S Tognetti

An article by Denise Caruso in today's NYT discusses the policy implications of new scientific perspectives on how genes function, reported in findings of ENCODE - a human genetics research consortium that is part of NIH. From this perspective, "genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood" rather than as a “tidy collection of independent genes.” The policy problem is that intellectual property laws, and products of recombinant DNA, e.g., GloFish, and the entire $73.5 billion biotechnology industry, are all based on the "one gene, One protein" principle.

Among other things, according to Caruso, this "evidence of a networked genome shatters the scientific basis for virtually every official risk assessment of today’s commercial biotech products, from genetically engineered crops to pharmaceuticals." But an assessment of risks that arise from network effects would require access to proprietary gene profile data for which there are no reporting requirements, so it is no surprise that challenges to the safety of these products are dismissed as "unscientific."

As Caruso acknowledges, this network view is not entirely a new idea. What this case illustrates is a contrast between two different scientific frames that I refer to as deterministic and adaptive. The deterministic view has long been outdated but that has taken of a life of its own because it is reinforced by the economic interests invested in it, and by a way of life that seems increasingly delusional. The only way reality will ever fit into a world that values GloFish will be through social learning, as part of an adaptive approach... I wrote more about the contrast between these frames in a 1999 journal article, on Science in a Double-Bind, in which I revisited the work of Gregory Bateson. I have also raised similar issues regarding the development of "markets for ecosystem services," as a way to make environmental costs part of the cost of doing business, and to create economic incentives for conservation management practices (last year in this post). Since ecosystem services are not yet a $73.5 billion industry, the rules of the game are still a work in progress - so there may be an opportunity to design a new business model that is consistent with a more complex reality, and supports human well-being.

Update: Denise Caruso adds a bit more detail and a correction on her blog, hybridvigor.net

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June 27, 2007

How do we know?

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Although most of my regular work is on land and water, I tend to gravitate towards climate issues on the blog because they make it easy to illustrate archetypal problems in science and policy, and it is all related anyway. However I will be gravitating more towards land and water, which become more relevant in any discussion of adaptation and responses and to climate change. In the meantime, for anyone who still needs convincing that humans have become geological agents, a new paper by Naomi Oreskes not only explains how we know the scientific consensus on climate change is not wrong. It also takes the reader step by step through the various ways that knowledge is validated, whether the subject is climate change, the germ theory, the movement of tectonic plates or even evolution,  Science is ultimately about validating knowledge and, as she points out, there is no single sacrosanct "scientific method"-  but she reviews the way that different kinds of reasoning and evidence all point in the same direction. With respect to climate, she makes a convincing case that I dare any trial lawyer to poke a hole in, that while scientific consensus could be mistaken, no one has come up with a reason to think that it is. It is worth a read even if you don't need convincing. She also makes up for whatever climate scientists are lacking in communication skills.

Because of other obligations, I missed her presentation hosted by the American Meteorological Society last week - it was on my calendar, but hat tip to Andrew Dessler for the reminder and the link to the paper and to her presentation.

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June 19, 2007

Science and journalism

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Given that the blogosphere has formed largely in response to the inadequacy of the media, it was only a matter of time before scientists started grumbling about science journalism. Chris Mooney seems a bit miffed, particularly at a comment on Tara's blog that suggests journalists are entirely unecessary - and that scientists just need good editors. This could easily be read and dismissed as a fight about who gets the byline  but there is of course much more to it. I have put off weighing in on these and related framing issues because there is way too much I want to say and, since I am not a journalist by training, it still takes too long to write briefly - but here goes some of it...

Science journalists aren't all useless but it does seem awkward and pretentious to have journalists - even when they have scientific background - calling the shots about who is "reasonable" and where the "middle ground" is in technical scientific debates. The entire scientific enterprise is set up to examine reasonableness of scientific claims via peer review of individual papers and more broadly, via assessments that evaluate science relevant to policy decisions. I speak from experience, not as a journalist but as someone who once upon a time served as staff for committees at the National Academy of Sciences, and even identified participants for some of those committees, at a time when I had only a BA in environmental studies. It was a humbling experience in that I was well aware of this paradox so I spent a lot of time doing homework and on the phone to scientists in search of overlapping recommendations and finding out what perspective different experts might contribute to a particular study. Then I disappeared to graduate school - and, being hopelessly interdisciplinary,  thought more about what happens when scientists from one particular discipline decide what is relevant. That is another can of worms but it is also where the need for broader participation comes in, and why scientists should be challenged from outside their profession. So the public should be more engaged in the assessment process and can and should raise questions about relevance of the science to a particular problem and context, inconsistencies with other sources of knowledge, as well as contribute contextual knowledge and to problem framing. This is where journalists can play an important role.

But science at its best is also about constructing new frames of reference when old ones are inadequate. (One major fallacy is to treat "science" as a monolithic entity. At its worst, science is guilty of the same kind of sin - of assuming it can provide a universally applicable silver bullet.)  Much of the tension with journalism comes not from misquoting scientists but from from trying to fit even accurate quotes, and new ways of thinking, into old and inadequate frames. What if, instead, journalists saw their role as finding ways to connect new to existing frames, or to compare and contrast them. Journalists aren't all alike either and some of them do at least strive to do that. (in other words, this is not a comment on Chris, who has learned a few things along the way).  Challenging existing world views is hard work and is not highly valued but is badly needed and will take all of the skills we can collectively muster. More to come on different frames within science....

 

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April 18, 2007

Science Skeptics?

by Sylvia S Tognetti

I have not yet had time to wade through all of the heated discussion sparked by Chris Mooney's and Matthew Nisbet's articles on Framing Science (article links are in the side-bar, for a round-up of discussion links see Coturnix), much less weigh in on it. I probably will. Not like I haven't written about the subject before. For now, I just want to call attention to perhaps a new way to frame the so-called climate skeptics. It may have been inadvertent or subconscious but, in this PBS Frontline interview with the infamous Frank Luntz, the interviewer refers to skeptics - not of climate, but of science. That sounds about right! If one rejects a consensus shared by all major scientific bodies, one is rejecting not the science of climate change, but the process of science as a way of knowing anything.  In other words, the "science"  frame is used deceptively, as a fig leaf for value conflicts.

[unfortunately, the video was removed from YouTube but the Frontline show, Hot Politics, airs next Sunday the 24th at 9 pm]

I found this via a link on the DeSmogBlog in a post by Kevin Grandia, who only calls attention to Luntz' admission of having changed his beliefs since writing the infamous memo. In that memo, Luntz essentially advocated a deceptive use of the uncertainty frame.   As for that, here is a relevant excerpt from my earlier post about framing:

What concerns me even more is the use of familiar frames and nice-sounding concepts, like sound science, data quality, CO2 is life or intelligent design to manipulate and deceive. (For more commentary on the CO2 is life ads put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, see posts by the usual suspects: RealClimate, Tim Lambert, Chris Mooney.)

This can make it difficult or impossible to talk about some important ideas that fit almost too well into a grossly distorted and misleading narrative. For example, any talk about uncertainties in climate science inevitably gets distorted by the likes of Benny Peiser who doesn't pretends not to know the difference between uncertainty of the magnitude and significance of climate change, and uncertainty regarding policies to address climate change, and whose debunked study nevertheless continues to be cited by denialists of human-induced global warming. And then we wind up with confused scientists blaming social theory altogether, rather than the misuse of it by those who seek to discredit the science that provides justification for environmental and other policies that protect public safety and health, and that have broad public support. Odd that they don't blame Einstein for the atomic bomb, or Darwin for policies of Social Darwinism. Nor was Machiavelli a Machiavellian. More constructive than attacking social theory would be to provide some transparency to its misuse for purposes of social manipulation. So I'll wrap this up with a quote from Erving Goffman's book on Frame Analysis (1974) where he refers to the work of Gregory Bateson, who began to talk about framing in a paper first presented in 1954:

The very useful paper by Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Phantasy," in which he directly raised the question of unseriousness and seriousness, allowing us to see what a startling thing experience is, such that a bit of serious activity can be used as a model for putting together unserious versions of the same activity, and that, on occasion, we may not know whether it is play or the real thing that is occurring. (Bateson introduced... also the argument that individuals can intentionally produce framing confusion in those with whom they are dealing...

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April 11, 2007

How to embrace a monster

by Sylvia S Tognetti

 

In case you were wondering, you can now watch a lecture together with a ppt presentation on Post-Normal Science: Working Deliberatively within Imperfections, given by Jeroen P. van der Sluijs  as part of a series on Science, Policy and Complex Phenomena, held at Wageningen University on March 21st. The ppt can also be downloaded here. In addition to being a member of the PNT Advisory Board, Jeroen is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Science Technology and Society (STS) at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development and Innovation at Utrecht University, where he coordinates a research cluster on Environmental Risk Management.

Also available is a lecture given the following week by Arthur Petersen, on Climate Change as a Post-Normal Science. Arthur Petersen is the Director of the Methodology and Modelling Programme at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

 

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March 21, 2007

Not Normal Times

by Sylvia S Tognetti

I have a question for Kevin Vranes, who maintains that Gore is "representing scientists in a more prominent way than any scientist": How could anyone represent "scientists"? Has he ever heard the phrase "herding cats"? (It was my informal job description when I worked at the NAS.) When you need a herded group of cats to then agree on a report, there is a lot that is going to be left out, which can be much more interesting than what stays in. Writing those reports is an art.

There is a good reason for this. Scientists have an incentive to be conservative and skeptical. Professional reputations are at stake and are at greater risk from accepting a false correlation than from rejecting a true one - as was explained in greater detail by Jerry Ravetz in this earlier post, but he credits Kristen Shrader-Frechette for first bringing this to public attention. In basic scientific research, chances are, nobody will ever hear about what was missed. Not so in the use of science to inform policy.

Assuming the objective of policy is to avoid harm, the greater risk is that of rejecting a true correlation. In a policy context, use of the more stringent standard used in laboratory research makes it more likely that danger will be overlooked. Those who have to actually respond to a crisis will therefore have a greater incentive to consider a worst case scenario as the basis for decision-making, at least in theory. In practice, sometimes it takes the actual occurrence of a worst case event to start planning for one. For example, according to Pat Mulroy from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, who was among the speakers at the symposium I recently attended regarding the Colorado River Compact, water planning for SNV had been based on models that demonstrated a zero probability of a drought of the magnitude of the current drought in the western US. Now they plan based on worst case scenarios, and will never believe probabilities again. The drought also provided an opportunity to put in place permanent water conservation measures for which western water law notoriously creates a disincentive. (The water used to maintain a virtual reality in Vegas is considered an investment).

The notion that Gore exaggerates is consistent with the stories told about him by The New York Times in their continuing War on Gore, and by Sen. Inhofe who defines anyone who believes the debate is settled that humans are causing global warming, as an alarmist. But Gore did not say the sighting of one manatee far up the Atlantic coast is a sign of warming, any more than I proclaimed 73 degree weather in January in Muddy Spring (in the DC area), and the flowers in my yard to be a clear indicator of it. (I'm not the only one who noticed.) Nor is every statement that comes from the mouth of a scientist a scientific one. We read about such abnormalities now on an almost daily basis. When Gore referred to out of place manatees, more fires in the west that have accompanied the warmer temperatures and drier soils, and to other unusual things, he was making general observations, and was probably just voicing a common perception that these are not normal times, rather than making a scientific statement. Actually, these are Post-Normal Times, and if we had to have a full study for every statement, policy would be irrelevant - we would probably all be dead first. This was among the points made most forcefully by the Native Alaskan speakers at the Climate Crisis Action Day rally yesterday - if you want to find out what is going on, just ask their hunters! Even scientists come to them to find out what is going on. So, while valuing good science, lets give some credit to the local and experiential knowledge that we all have, which can also serve to validate science.

My thoughts on the hearings overall - I was glad to hear greater emphasis on bold response options. I hope it doesn't take a worst case scenario to make them feasible to implement. I was disappointed not to hear more emphasis given to improving public transportation infrastructure, which he did not address until the very end, when asked about it by our new Maryland Senator, Ben Cardin. Thank you Ben. And thank you Al. I don't see anyone else up to the challenge of making it all happen...

If you are still with me, go to DraftAlGore.com and sign the petition...

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March 16, 2007

Excerpts from The No-Nonsense Guide to Science

by Jerry Ravetz

[Editor's note: In follow-up to the last post, and others commenting on Post-Normal Science, we are posting some excerpts from Jerry's new book, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science. But, of course, you should really read the whole thing. It provides a concise history, and lots of examples. To top it off, it concludes with a set of questions rather than recommendations.]

The decline of the illusion of objectivity

Over the last half-century, science has experienced great transformations in its scale, size, power, destructiveness, and corporate control and social responsibility. There is lively debate over many policy issues concerning health and the environment, and over proposed innovations such as those in the GRAINN set. But until we get over the illusion of objectivity of science, as embodied in its supposed certainty and value-freedom, those debates will be hindered and distorted. So long as each side in a debate believes that it has all the simple and conclusive facts, it will demonise the other, and dialogue will not be achieved. We need not fall into some nihilistic philosophy of total subjectivity or power-games. That is not the only alternative to the lost illusion of perfect objectivity of science. To find a viable alternative we will need to examine why scientific objectivity is no longer common sense.

The process is already well underway. Towards the end of the last century, just too many things began to go wrong for science. First we discovered how mankind has been polluting the environment. And sometimes the pollution was worse when the science was the strongest. The first big pollution scare came in 1963 with Silent Spring, where the death of the songbirds was explained by their being poisoned with agricultural pesticides. Then we had the accidents in civil nuclear power. Of all industries this was the one most completely based on science. We might have expected that an industry created and run by scientists would not be vulnerable to sloppy workmanship and elementary blunders; but we were wrong. In both those cases, as in many others, the pattern was that even where science had defined the situation, something would unexpectedly go wrong, leading to an accident or disaster. Then science would be brought it for the attempt to understand the accident and to prevent its happening again. It was as if science was chasing after itself in the cleanup jobs, retrospectively correcting its own mistakes.

The public's experience of values, priorities, choices and exclusions has come through debates on science in fields relating to health and the environment. For a very long time, supporters of 'alternative energy' have pointed to the vast disparity between the meagre funds doled out to them for research and development, and the huge sums still lavished on the moribund nuclear power industry. In medical research, patients' groups have observed how the lion's share of the resources, even those collected and allocated by charities, goes on that 'basic' research which someone hopes and claims will solve the problems of cause and cure of the disease. At the same time, research on the quality of treatments and of care is left on the margins. The reasons are plain: everyone hopes for a 'magic bullet' which will kill the pathogen that makes us sick. Also, that sort of research is also useful in building a career in the relevant research science. By contrast, treatment and care are the 'soft' sciences, in which there are no Nobel prizes. It doesn't take much imagination to see how particular sets of values are built into the ruling criteria of quality in science.

Why science is now post-normal

In all these ways, the public are becoming aware that values influence both the shape of what we know, and the selection of what we might know. And this can happen because science can no longer promise to deliver certainty when we need it. The old illusion of objectivity is passing into history. We should not reject it completely, for there is a good core of truth there. Instead, we should explain why it works where it does, and then present a modified, enriched version of objectivity for those other cases. The need for understanding is urgent. In an ever increasing number of policy issues we find science where the uncertainties are gross and the value-commitments are dominant. Looking at issues like global climate change, gender-bending pollutants, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and species extinction, to say nothing of the GRAINN technologies like reproductive engineering, we have the shape of the new policy predicaments. In such issues, we can say that in total contrast the to objectivity we once thought we had, the facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. Indeed, whereas for generations we contrasted hard objective scientific knowledge with soft subjective values, now we have policy decisions that are hard in every way, for which our scientific knowledge is irremediably soft. Where do we go from here?

…. (Description of Post-Normal Science)

Post-Normal Science isn't a theory; we do better to see it as an insight. The image of that rainbow-quadrant tells us something about our current predicament. There are hosts of urgent policy problems involving science, for which routine expertise is totally inadequate, and for which even the best professional knowledge and judgement are insufficient. This is when, as in the outer strip, either or both of systems uncertainties and decision stakes are large. But if all the trained people can't tell us what to do, how are we ever to make good, correct decisions on these difficult and urgent issues?

There is no easy answer. It's most likely that we will make many mistakes, perhaps some of them disastrous. But with the insights of Post-Normal Science we can avoid even worse ones, by refraining from putting our trust in methods that are irrelevant or misleading. In both of the traditional cases, there is an assumption that The Expert Knows Best. It might be the researcher or the professional, or even the technician. He has the training, and he can spout scientific technicalities that leave the layperson totally bemused. In the ideal model of the process, the expert person starts with the science, and then deduces what should be done in practice. This model assumes that the world of practice is sufficiently like the world of science, so that the deduction is accurate. For 'applied science', it works routinely; for 'professional consultancy', it needs some skill and judgement in interpretation. In those traditional cases, those without expert training would seem to have little to contribute to the process of inquiry or decision.

When we come to the situations where Post-Normal Science is appropriate, where uncertainties and value-loadings cannot be denied, that old model of scientific deduction is inappropriate. Instead we need dialogue. In this, everyone has something to learn from everyone else. Of course the experts will have a special command of technical issues. But others can know better how well, or how badly, the scientific categories fit in with the reality that they experience. Many policy debates hinge on 'safe limits'. It doesn't need a Ph.D. to be able to ask intelligent questions about safety tests, and whether they are truly realistic in relation to practice. Thus, we need to know whether the sample populations included (for example) children and pregnant women, or animals that breathe air close to the soil. We need to know whether the specifications for safe use are likely to be respected in real industrial or agricultural situations (in Third World locations, it is prudent to assume they are not). Epidemiological data can be subject to errors and omissions in their collection, and distortion and bias in the definition of their categories. Local people can spot such flaws more effectively than experts from a faraway centre. All such issues can be put by people who have independence and common-sense. They can also query whether lab tests, even if performed quite properly by 'applied science' turn out to be irrelevant or misleading if applied uncritically in a Post-Normal situation.

Instead of an 'objectivity' that requires a denial of uncertainty and of value-commitments, we should cultivate 'integrity'. For our dialogue on policy issues, we just need participants to engage in a 'negotiation in good faith', each advancing their case on the basis of their own perspectives and commitments, but respecting the integrity of those with whom they disagree. Those with a less expert but broader perspective can ask the sorts of questions that never occur to those who are scientifically trained. For the experts work and think inside a paradigm of scientific problems that can be tidily solved, Policy issues are inherently messy, complex and unpredictable are outside their training. The question, "What about ...?" can inject something totally new into the dialogue. It amounts to reminding us all of Murphy's Law, something that is totally absent from scientific training, but totally necessary for survival in the real world.

Appreciating the vital role of those others in the dialogue, we call them the Extended Peer Community. For they are full participants in the process, learning and also teaching. And they bring with them what we might call 'Extended Facts'. For scientists will necessarily and justifiably focus on the information that is certified by their quality-assurance programmes. This is usually publication in refereed journals; but it can also include data produced in-house by respected research agencies. All this is produced under the standardised, idealised conditions that are necessary for successful research. But the Extended Peer Community has other sources. In policy issues, investigative journalism is a key resource, as are documents that were not originally intended for public view. In addition, there is local knowledge, including the place, its inhabitants of all sorts and species, and its history, traditions and special values. All these 'extended facts' are vital to the policy processes. They are excluded from the perspective of the 'normal' experts and professionals; it is the post-normal extended peer community that introduces them as valid contributions to the debate.

As we consider the essential role of the extended peer community, our vision of post-normal science reminds us of a great variety of endeavours to adapt science to the needs of a modern democratic society. People have spoken of 'critical science', 'citizens' science', 'civic science', 'community research', 'action research' and 'open science', as well as 'environmental', 'ecological' and 'sustainability' science. Each title has its own flavour, and its own authentic perspective on the whole problem. We offer 'post-normal' as one in that family. For us, it expresses two key insights. First, that these times are far from 'normal'. Second, that 'normal', puzzle-solving science is now totally inadequate as a method and a perspective, for the great policy issues of our time. Uncertainty now rules political as well as environmental affairs. And the value-commitments of people, reflected in their lifestyle choices, will determine whether the human race makes it through to sustainability, or not.

Finally, by focusing on the science itself rather than on the political processes, our insight brings reassurance and legitimacy to two important sorts of participants. The scientists themselves can be liberated from the confusion and self-doubt resulting from their discovery that some scientific problems cannot be solved by 'normal' methods. The failure to produce conclusive information about pollution or climate change is not the fault of the science or the scientists themselves. It is because we live in a new age where science is necessary but not sufficient. And for the extended peer community, they are no longer relegated to second-class status, and their special knowledge is no longer dismissed as inferior or bogus. They are full partners in the dialogue, who have much to teach as well as to learn. Both sides benefit from the dispelling of the illusion of scientific objectivity. That is the way forward, as expressed in the title 'post-normal'.

Extended Peer Communities have a vital role in exposing issues that the official establishments do not, or choose not to, notice. A famous case in point is the addictive properties of the diazapam tranquillisers. On their introduction in 1963, they were hailed as the new 'magic bullets', of the sort that our superstitious pharmacological culture seems to crave. There were plenty of voices of caution and concern about addiction and long-term effects, but they were ignored by prescribers and by regulators alike. Then in 1979 a popular British consumers' TV programme, Esther Rantzen's That's Life, told the story of mass addiction, long-term and incurable, to the drugs. She did not need to understand the biochemistry of the drug. It was enough for her to pay attention to, and then verify, the reports that she was receiving from desperate victims. The scandal broke, sales declined immediately, and some nine years later the official U.K. Committee on Safety of Medicines issued guidelines for safe use of the drug.

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February 19, 2007

Great expectations

by Sylvia S Tognetti

In this previous post, with some conditions, I offered AEI a deal - to write a review regarding the utility or not of numerical mega-models for purposes of informing policy, for just $5,000 - which is half of what they offered to more preeminent scientists. So far they haven't asked but I'm taking it back. I just found an NYT book review of Useless Arithmetic: Why Scientists Can't Predict the Future, by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, which seems to say it all - and which they can read for just $29.50). An excerpt from the actual book can be found here. The problem is not so much with the models as with lack of transparency, how they are used, a failure to understand their limitations - evident in expectations of quantitative predictions accurate enough to be used for engineering purposes. An expectation which was implicit in the letters AEI sent out to solicit critiques of climate models. As the Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis explain in the book excerpt:

The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.

Addendum: When I put this up, I thought about also digging up links to some of Roger Pielke's pronouncements on the subject but he has done one better - he also posts excerpts from the above mentioned book and adds mention of another book that he co-edited with Daniel Sarewitz and Redford Byerly Jr: Prediction: Science, Decision Making and the Future of Nature, - This one costs $40 but is still a bargain compared to what AEI was prepared to pay, and has a collection of papers from a number of eminent scholars, all of which appear to provide the kind of guidance AEI is in need of.

Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 11:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2007

Food vs nutrients

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Sometime in the 1980s, upon arrival in Italy after an absence of probably over 10 years, I was greeted at the airport with the question of what brought me back and "why now?" I mumbled something about being hungry and about not being able to find any food in the United States. I was half joking of course. But now, Michael Pollan explains it in this lengthy New York Times article:

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing.

Although mostly about food and flaws in nutrition science, the arguments made in the article are extended to the environment, connecting the health of humans to that of ecosystems, and could also be made about environmental science or about the limits to any kind of compartmentalized, reductionist and/or decontextualized approach to science. It is also a good illustration of why we will never have and cannot wait for complete information or definitive answers when dealing with any kind of a complex problem. A few more excerpts but, read the whole thing:

The first thing to understand about nutritionism — I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis — is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen
nutrients, you need lots of expert help...

...But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist.

Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist,
“is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways... There is nothing
very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong...

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal’s needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant. Similarly, cow’s milk did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until humans who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the milk drinkers and the cows...

The last important change wrought by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern food era — and before nutritionism — people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think
of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people’s relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. ...

...The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted
by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.

...It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

Among the concluding recommendations:

Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, and

Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

In other words, it can be rational to be against GMOs no matter what Scimon or Science Says. As I discussed in an earlier post, if looking only at nutritional characteristics of food, it is possible that soylent green could be engineered to be functionally equivalent to it and keep a person alive. But it would be missing many other important functions without which life might similarly be reduced - to a chore. Among those is what I call The Puccini Factor, which refers to unique qualities of a place that would be lost forever, and of things that come from such a place, that you will never find in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and that science will probably never be able to quantify. The term was inspired by a vegetable vendor at farmers market in Pisa. As he held up a head of lettuce, he said it came from Torre del Lago and insisted that, if you eat this lettuce you will hear Puccini.

As Mario Giampietro explained, You can't make gnocchi without the yellow sticky potatoes that come only from Avezzano in the Abruzzo. If you try to make gnocchi with Idaho potatoes it will be a disaster! If you want to find out what kind of peaches are best for soaking in wine you will have to learn Italian and go ask a Roman - some things are better left not only in their own language but also in their cultural context. But according to Mario, these peaches only grow at Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the pope. There is no functional equivalent.

In science for policy, this tendency to reduce complex problems to a scientific framework that leaves out much of what people care about is the source of many of the negative public reactions towards science and experts. This is not to in any way diminish the value of science - only to make a plea for an approach that puts it into context, and for a recognition of the value judgments inherent in the framing of technical arguments. I'm not even necessarily opposed to all GMOs. I just regard it as a problem of governance rather than of science.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Often when the holidays are approaching people don't care what kind of food they serve, but by following something as simple as the food pyramid you may be surprised how much less weight you put on next Easter or Thanksgiving.

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November 23, 2006

The answer is forty-two but what was the question?

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Benny Peiser isn't the only person who continues to believe his conclusions even after the "research" supporting them has been thoroughly discredited, and after finally conceding that there were indeed errors in how he reached those conclusions. Now I'll concede that, prior to the election, with climate denialists in control of key congressional committees and being given airtime disproportionate to the merits of their arguments, I gave higher priority to commenting on bad arguments for bad causes than to bad arguments for good causes. Roger Pielke has commented extensively on the latter and this paper by Steve Rayner that he links to is absolutely worth reading. I don't have anything more to add to what I have already said on climate change and hurricanes.

Now I want to draw attention to some of the nonsense that has been circulating about the value of ecosystem services, and a paper that just won't die, no matter how thoroughly discredited. I really hate to give it yet another citation but that paper would be the infamous one by Costanza et al (1997) on The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital, that was a cover story in Nature, and that tallied up the value of ecosystem services to an average of $33 trillion. If you don't know why this is impossible as well as meaningless for purposes of decision-making, see the Environmental Economics and the Ecological Economics blogs, which both agree on this point (here, here, and here). And the full paper by Nancy Bockstael et al, which can be found here (in prepublication form). The main argument being that this is in excess of ability to pay, since total GNP that year was estimated at $18 trillion. As they point out:

While no doubt well intentioned, this estimate is, on one level, absurd; it suggests that the peoples of the world would be willing to sacrifice more than global gross national product (GNP) for these services. If interpreted literally, it suggests that a family earning $30,000 annually would pay $40,000 each year for ecosystem protection.

I could add more arguments to this but the point is that it still gets cited by those who don't know any better, or who think it is useful to waive big numbers around just to bring attention to how important ecosystem services are. And the lead author, who generally claims it is just a starting point, continues to get funding to build on this baseless approach to valuation. What those
who cite it fail to understand is that values reflect trade-offs people are willing to make among choices that they actually have. Or as Al Gore illustrated in An Inconvenient Truth, without the earth, you can't choose the gold ingots.

And yes, it is very unfortunate that, as Dave Iverson points out, those in the field of ecological economics are often dismissed as guilty by association when there are many different perspectives and approaches within that field. Full disclosure: I started graduate school in that field, and the lead author of that infamous paper was my first advisor but I switched programs after a number of irreconcileable differences that had nothing to do with that paper, that I also had nothing to do with. I give Costanza credit for creating that big tent, which allowed for some collaboration across fields that might not have otherwise occurred. But I'm much happier calling myself a geographer and note that, Gilbert White began to question deterministic approaches to economics and cost benefit analysis in 1945, in his work on human adjustment to floods, which was regarded as a major break from the deterministic school of thought often found in economics. It also addresses a major lacuna in science as well as in economics, i.e., context.

Addendum: and sometimes it takes a flood, or some other form of "learning opportunity" for people to consider or reconsider what their values are - i.e., what trade-offs they are willing to make, particularly for those things not normally traded in markets, like, say, maintaining a cherished way of life, or say, having to choose between soylent blue and Soylent Green. In the movie Soylent Green, even that was no longer a choice... For now, we have more choices than that but, 2022 isn't that far away.

(edited 9-25-06)

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October 26, 2006

The value of communication in science

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Last Thursday on The Colbert Report, Peter Agre - winner of a Nobel in Chemistry in 2003 - offered to trade his Nobel medal - for two weeks, in exchange for two weeks of the show, so as to further the mission of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) - which is essentially to provide a platform for scientists to communicate with the public about the value of science, and thereby support the election of "public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy" (video link pt 1 and pt 2). To no avail. Stephen said "Forget it." He had originally offered to trade a Peabody award, an Emmy, a Times Most Influential People of the Year award, and a few other awards I have never heard of - that were of no interest to Agre.

Although it is significant and refreshing to see scientists begin to come to terms with the need to communicate with the rest of the public, it made me wonder what scientists would say if they did have the Colbert Report for two weeks, and whether it would make any difference. Though Peter Agre was articulate, frankly, I think Stephen is much better than most scientists at conveying the value of science for the common good. If you have any doubt about this, watch this video clip of The Word from a couple of weeks ago, when SEA was first launched. (And Stephen, should he happen to read this, has an open invitation to membership on the Post-Normal Times Advisory Board.)

The launch of SEA, was also covered by The New York Times, and sparked commentary in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, and in several of the science blogs about whether it could in fact be non-partisan, as it claims to absolutely be. Kevin Vranes correctly notes the paradox and suggests that demonstrating this non-partisanship will be their greatest challenge. However, supporting both Republican and Democratic candidates, as he suggests in a follow-up comment, would not solve anything.

This is an issue that goes to the core of the problem of using science to justify and support policy decisions, which are typically, uh, partisan. Non-partisanship might be possible when there are generally shared values that the purpose of science and any other form of knowledge is to further a particular vision of human well-being, and about what the problem is that science is specifically being asked to address. Disagreements would then be limited to technical matters regarding the most efficient way to do so - and a normal approach to science would suffice. But problems are rarely simple and straightforward enough to do that. At 3 Quarks Daily, Alon Levy posted a good discussion of Thomas Kuhn, who, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions defined normal science as as working within a particular paradigm or theoretical framework which then guides the selection of relevant facts while obscuring others - which makes it impossible to make decisions based only on evidence.

When science enters the policy arena, it is to justify particular policies or to clarify choices and trade-offs in relation to various goals and images of the good life that are often in conflict with one another and that have uncertain consequences. In an ideal world, where everybody plays by the same rules, these value conflicts would be clarified if not already obvious. But it is easier to create doubt about science with sciencey arguments about obscure technicalities than to argue that public safety and health is not a government responsibility - and also get elected. And in these Post-Normal Times, it has become partisan to believe that government should even have a role in supporting the common good, or to defend the constitution, or to believe that there should even be a government at all - and that all votes should be counted. (psst - in case you haven't noticed, in the US, a bill was just signed into law that eliminates the writ of Habeas Corpus - obscure legal text that once provided safeguards against arbitrary imprisonment and insured a right to a trial by jury - without which all other rights established in the United States Constitution are hypothetical, as is the need for public policies to be justified with any kind of evidence or rational argument. Lest I digress, for more on that subject see videos of commentary by Keith Olbermann - The beginning of the end of America and The death of Habeas Corpus). Overlooked in claims of non-partisanship is that science can be, and is being and has historically been used as both an instrument of destruction as well as of salvation - a point discussed at length in a new book by Jerry Ravetz, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science (more on that later).

The claim of non-partisanship is also a nice ploy for "the scientific community [to put] themselves above the common man" - as Stephen Colbert put it - and to stay above the fray of politics which has become a dirty word that no one wants to be associated with. Least of all politicians, who often get elected by "running against Washington" or by making a campaign issue out of not being professional politicians. Just this evening, in a debate among candidates for the US Senate, Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele accused Representative Ben Cardin of being "good at policy," as if that were a bad thing for a legislator. Then, to stay above it all, controversial decisions have often been justified by appealing to the authority of either religion or science, but these days, more to religion as scientific findings are increasingly at odds with indefensible policies of the current leadership. Conversely, conflicts of all sorts, including scientific, are sometimes dismissed as "mere politics" thus sidestepping the need to actually respond to well-founded criticism. But this just reinforces the fantasy that scientists and decision-makers are somehow outside the system that they tinker with - using policy, economic and technological instruments, rather than part of it, with the same basic needs as everyone else.

The stated vision of SEA is of "a future where wise science and technology policy can help every American live in a safe and clean environment, enjoy quality health and education, and benefit from a strong system of national defense." So they get kudos for clarifying the values they support. However, achieving this noble objective is not just about framing the message of science but has implications for the practice of science itself, and the framing of relevant research questions. This is more obvious in the field of public health, whose practitioners might be looked to as role models by environmental and other scientists who have come out of a more elitist scientific culture that has been less comfortable in the policy arena. In fact, the key example that Agre used to make a case for the value of science was Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. Doctors and others in the field of public health have a code of ethics that requires them to engage in advocating policies necessary to promote public health and the best interests of their patients - and also inspired me early in my own career.

The formation of SEA and other initiatives like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), for which the objective was to demonstrate links between ecosystems and human well-being, suggests this elitist tradition in science might just be changing. But what became apparent in the massive undertaking that was the MA was that these benefits are difficult to quantify with existing data - this is because much of existing research was not driven by these kinds of questions, and is difficult to put into the context of real places other than those actually studied. So to date, the MA has had more influence on research directions and priorities than on actual policy. In the policy arena, and in a post-normal approach to science, criteria for "good science" include relevance to context, rather than just technical soundness. Scientific knowledge that is irrelevant or that cannot be communicated to those who have a need for it could be defined as an autistic approach to science that underlies common madness. (More on autistic v post-normal science here.)

Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 12:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 12, 2006

Colbert explains how he makes a decision

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Last night, when Stephen Colbert explained to George Lucas (video link) why his entry in the Green Screen Challenge (video link) came in second after that of Bonnie R. - the winner - he illustrated one of the major blind spots in the use of science to support policy decisions. He carefully explained that there were 58 different decision criteria, which included: how heroic the video made him look, originality, and poise. But even after giving Lucas an extra point for showing up in person, and in spite of how he "really really nailed the look of those [star wars] movies," Lucas came in second. I would have given Stephen a few kudos for making at least some of those criteria explicit but then he blew it when he told George "I would have given it to you but those were the scores - it's out of my hands." In other words, he refused to take any responsibility for the decision that he made.

Updated 10-17-06 to correct typos.

Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 7:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2006

Katoomba!

by Sylvia S Tognetti

Last week, while most of the blogosphere seems to have convened in Vegas, at the Yearly Kos conference, I was riding street cars in the beautiful city of Portland Oregon, which was gearing up for the annual Rose Festival - I'm not sure what "Jake the crab" has to do with it (pictured above) but he caught my eye. The streetcars took me back and forth between my hotel and the location of a conference of the Katoomba group, which I also helped to cover for the conference newsletter provided by the Ecosystem Marketplace. Now I'm going to take advantage of my blog to editorialize, and elaborate on a comment I made in one of the sessions.

First a bit of background. The Katoomba group is a gathering of people from different organizations (government, non-government, private, and inter-organizational (i.e., consultants like myself) who share an ambitious goal, of "making the priceless valuable" or, in other words, transforming the economy to one that recognizes the value of ecosystem services by actually covering their costs - for which markets are an important tool. The idea being that if farmers implement management practices that have a higher cost but result not only in food but also in clean water, biodiversity, higher carbon storage, and aesthetic values, they should be compensated also for the "service" of providing these other equally important even is less immediate necessities of life - or stewardship of the ecosystems that provide them. perhaps it would be more constructive to find a term that conveys the idea that what is being bought and sold is not the ecosystem or the water itself, but the management practices of landowners who might otherwise find it more profitable to allow land to become degraded and invest the short-term proceeds elsewhere. After all, the payments are not made to trees but to people, in exchange for adhering to an agreement. Then there is the question of who pays and what they get for it.

The concept of markets for ecosystem services is a powerful one, but carries a lot of baggage because markets, at least as we know them, often place the poor and less well off at a disadvantage. They also fail to provide any advance warning when ecosystems are degraded. In other words, contrary to the tenets of market fundamentalism, markets and private property rights do not automatically resolve tragedies of the commons but can instead create other problems, sometimes dubbed the "tragedy of enclosures." So, along with initiatives to develop such markets, a hot topic of research and debate is whether and how the playing field can be leveled and be structured to benefit the poor and those more dependent on natural resources, as well as create economic incentives for conservation and stewardship. Then there is the question of whether it is really a market when the funds used to pay farmers come from the public purse at prices established by the government - as is the case in many though not all of these kinds of payment initiatives. In a time of shrinking public budgets, the ideal is also to bring in other than public sources of funds to support an approach to conservation that goes beyond isolated parks and protected areas. There are all kinds of obstacles to putting this idea into practice and markets may be just as expensive as regulation if one could actually tally up all of the transaction costs associated with them that range from having a system of formally recognized property rights to getting the scientific information needed to demonstrate links between causes and effects of ecosystem degradation, and between ecosystem conditions and human well-being. Since the price of a loaf of bread does not include the cost of law enforcement, without which the bread probably would not be produced for sale, perhaps this is a double standard. However, in spite of the baggage, the language of markets also has a broad appeal, and seems to have value as at least as a metaphor, as we develop and agree on the rules of a new game that will be necessary to maintain systems of life support that can no longer be taken for granted.

I suspect that the problem is not so much with markets as it is with an economic system that is based on principles reminiscent of an outdated concept of Social Darwinism that fails to recognize that natural selection acts on populations rather than on individuals. This has little to do with how scientists currently understand evolution, but seems to have retained a hold on popular beliefs and ways of thinking. Not having had a course in biology or genetics since undergraduate days (a long time ago) I would particularly welcome comments from any biologist who would can take the time to put the following into the context of current understanding of evolution but, with that caveat - a bit more background.

Gregory Bateson - an anthropologist by training, who certainly believed in the theory of evolution (his father was the founder of genetics), saw this particular way of thinking about evolution as an error of logic that has contributed to the present environmental predicament and to disastrous social dogmas because of the profound influence it has had on how the modern world is organized. The error of logic was to regard the "survival of the fittest" as a struggle among individuals instead of as a process of selection that acts on populations, in which diversity among individuals is necessary for populations to adapt to changing conditions. An important difference between individuals and classes or groups is that classes are defined by convergent characteristics for which there is some degree of statistical probability. Individuals instead have divergent characteristics and cannot be expected to behave according to aggregate characteristics, as is assumed in any kind of deterministic approach to analysis of human behavior. So Bateson also saw a similar but opposite error in the ideas of Marx, in which events were seen as unfolding in a predictable sequence as a result of class structures, regardless of which individual is credited with starting the trend. Consistent with this idea, he also held that evolutionary theory might be very different today had Wallace rather than Darwin been the primary influence, because Wallace saw evolution in cybernetic terms, as a self-correcting system. Instead, in the prevailing image, evolution is characterized as a linear process, a force of progress, and a cause of material change, that fails to account for ecosystem organization or to recognize interdependent relationships between organisms and their environment, and that has supported delusional aspirations of overcoming the limitations of nature. Bateson had a cybernetic view of evolution, as the outcome of a process of learning that reflects "the wider knowing that holds together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities" in a great "pattern that connects" that also underlies aesthetic sensibilities.

What this digression has to do with ecosystem services is, that protection of ecosystems is a problem of collective action in that good management practices are not effective unless they are carried out on a large enough scale to have a significant impact on the downstream outcome. In other words, provision of clean water requires collaboration among those in an upper watershed area, or what might, from the perspective of a market fundamentalist, be regarded as collusion. In the case of New York City, the alternative would have been an expensive treatment plant. New York City was able to avoid this expense by funding better management practices upstream. but this did not happen automatically. After several lengthy meetings that enabled all of the interested parties to better understand each other's predicaments, Al Appleton, as the former commissioner for the NYC department of the environment, negotiated an agreement with the farmers in which they were given the choice of being regulated or of meeting water quality goals on their own, but with financial support. They chose the latter and more than achieved water quality objectives. But to do it, they had to get the collaboration of all or most farmers - which they also did. Similarly, you can't protect a bird migration route unless all of the sites along the route are protected. And similarly, unless there is a cap on total consumption of, say, gasoline, any amount by which one personally reduces their consumption will just go into the hummer parked across the street.

As in any other market, whether or not anyone is willing to foot the bill, will depend on confidence, not only of receiving benefits, but that everyone is playing by rules that have been agreed upon and accepted as fair.
Given the lag time between implementing new upstream land management practices and seeing their downstream results, which can be highly variable and difficult to measure, agreement on the rules will probably be more important than actual outcomes - at least initially, for getting everybody to actually play the game. It is by playing the game that people can also learn about and reconsider the value they place on services that have been taken for granted, and what trade-offs they are willing to make to keep them coming. Practices themselves can always be modified if it is learned that they don't work. In other words, willingness-to-play comes before willingness-to pay. Or, as Al Appleton put it, in another meeting I also attended, "pay your money take your chances." He also described the bulletin I write as "iconoclastic.... but factual, and without being obnoxious." But what I have written here doesn't even fit into the bulletin....

I'm ge