As a blogger on environmental science and policy who has actually worked in this field for over 20 years, I have done my share of grumbling about the quality of coverage of this complex subject, but have also come to appreciate just how time consuming it is to provide quality coverage, on a daily basis, and how much we need good journalists who are actually paid to do this full time. So it was with great sadness last night, while winding down from a very long day in which I scarcely even had time to look at the blogs, much less post anything, that I found out CNN just axed the entire science and technology team at CNN. That would be science correspondent Miles O'Brien and six executive producers, among them, Peter Dykstra, who focused on science and environment, and who I had the pleasure to know in person, before he moved to Atlanta. That was a long time ago so I suspect this team is the last of the Turner era CNN crew.
I have watched much less of CNN ever since they followed that infamous white van. But I have been reading Peter's excellent posts to the SciTech blog, and wonder who will be finding and reporting answers to all of the good questions he has raised, now more critical than ever in what is expected to be a post science-war reconstruction period. And, via dotearth, we are reminded of when Miles O'Brien managed to put Sen. Inhofe into context, rather than "balance" a broadly held scientific consensus with denialist rants:
We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit. Now that the bulk of our environmental coverage is being offered through the Planet in Peril franchise . . . there is no need for a separate unit.
First, Anderson Cooper does a fine job of drawing attention to melting glaciers, or whatever he happens to be standing in front of. But that is not a substitute for quality in depth coverage that viewers will be looking for once they are hooked. Somehow, I can't quite see Cooper providing the same depth of background reporting, in a way that draws more attention to the work of scientists and those affected by change, than to himself.
Second, "integration" at the expense of more specialized in depth reporting and diverse perspectives is an abuse of the concept, and is really just a way to control the narrative and eliminate news that doesn't fit. Which is what you would be getting more of here at The Post-Normal Times, were I able to make a living at it. Exposing the sham arguments made by climate denialists always made good fodder for blogging, and was a relatively easy target. Making sense of various policy proposals for addressing rapid changes, not only in the climate, will be much more challenging, and will only increase the need for skilled science journalists. And also for scientists who can explain what we know and don't know, and the trade-offs between different choices, in plain english.
Stephen Colbert weighs in on the McCain's "better way" of addressing human induced climate change, which may literally turn the entire world into a melting pot. It is indeed, a national, or what I would call human security issue, but, as Stephen so eloquently points out, if calling it that would bring it into McCain's domain of expertise, lets call some more things national security issues (e.g., the economy - which he admitted to not knowing much about, and the sociology of Iraq - where he does not know the difference between Sunni and Shia).
For a more detailed analysis of McCain's speech, see Romm's 4 part series, in which he reminds us also that it is because of McCain and his fellow conservatives that the United States is now a bit player in the wind industry that the United States invested in heavily in the 1970s, which is presumably why McCain made his climate speech in front of Danish wind turbines:
President Reagan cut the renewable energy R&D budget 85% after he took office and eliminated the wind investment tax credit in 1986. This was pretty much the death of most of the US wind industry. While President Clinton worked to increase funding for wind, the Gingrich Congress blocked that effort beginning in 1995. President Bush is another conservative who fail to see the importance of wind power in the need for consistent support of the tax credit.
(Note to the youth climate movement: please stop blaming boomers and environmental groups. Howz about "we" work together on this...)
And that McCain's pledge to support an adaptation strategy is at odds with his small government rhetoric. Romm also argues that his proposed offsets approach would not accomplish very much. I personally think it depends on how it is done, and think carbon credits can be an important way to generate the kind of revenue that will be needed to support a transition, and development strategies that incorporate adaptation and help to reduce poverty. Lastly, (part 4) McCain doesn't seem to be able to bring conservatives along with him, so it is unlikely he would actually be able to do anything if elected.
Last night Stephen Colbert explained the "efficiency" of corn ethanol, which has presumably "solved" the climate crisis - or at least provided a good introduction. You can fly across the Atlantic and wipe out an amount of land equivalent to 30 soccer fields! What he didn't say is that conversion of land to soccer fields also emits carbon stored in vegetation and soil. And that it isn't just the Brits raining on the petro parade. Last week I attended the AMS seminar on Biofuels, Land Conversion and Climate Change, in which several of our own American scientists - Joseph Fargione, Timothy Searchinger, David Tilman, and Daniel Kammen, provided a good overview of this topic (powerpoints here; podcast and vidcasts expected to be up shortly). A few highlights from my notes:
Previous research findings that corn ethanol reduces emissions by 13% did not consider land use change.
Use of land to grow corn for ethanol raises crop prices, not only for corn. So it is creating pressure to take land out of the Conservation Reserve Program - the amount of acreage in the program was reduced by 2.3 million acres in 2007, and >4.5 million are set to expire in 2010, but they could leave sooner if the farm lobby is successful in getting penalties waived for breaking their contracts.
It also creates pressure to convert native prairie grass to corn fields - native prairie grass fields store 286 tons per hectare of carbon, which is 160 more tons/ha than cornfields. From 2002-2007, >500,000 acres were converted in Montana and the Dakotas. The amount of carbon released is 93 times the amount "saved" by using ethanol.
But most new corn crops come from the displacement of soybean crops. This raises the price of soybeans, which leads to deforestation in the Amazon rather than here. The Amazon stores even more carbon than prairies (927 tons/ha), which is 815 tons/ha more than a soybean field. The amount of carbon released is then 319 times the amount "saved" by using biodiesel from soy. The worst case scenarios is palm oil from peatlands....
Then there is the issue of forgone ongoing carbon sequestration services that soils and vegetation would have continued to provide, and the indirect effects, which can be even more significant (e.g., food prices, algal blooms, biodiversity loss, water consumption....), not to mention the land that will be needed to double food production to feed the expected population of 9 billion.
Land use change overall is estimated to account for 1/5th of global emissions of greenhouse gases but my guess is that that estimate has yet to include increased pressure on land from biofuels.
The good news is, that not all biofuels fuels are alike and we shouldn't be lumping them into a single category. Obtained instead from waste biomass, from switchgrass, and from other perennial crops grown on degraded lands, use of biofuels can be efficient and even carbon negative, and can provide an economic incentive to restore those degraded lands. Prices and markets alone won't bring about the needed transition. As Kammen said in the final presentation, "there is no peak dirty energy."
Via Inscights - a presentation given by Jeroen Van der Sluijs on the Changing relations between Science and Society: PNS and STS 1988-2008, reflecting on 20 years of the Science Technology and Society group at Utrecht University, in which he contrasts approaches to uncertainty under the different science and policy models. In one example that involves a decisions about protecting a strategic fresh-water resource, he asks how one might act, faced with 5 different answers from 5 different consultants, who were all asked the same question:
"which parts of this area are most vulnerable to nitrate pollution and need to be protected?”
Here are some possibilities:
Bayesian approach: 5 priors. Average and update likelihood of each (but oooops, there is no data and we need decision now)
IPCC approach: Lock the 5 consultants up in a room and don't release them before they have consensus
Nihilist approach: Dump the science and decide on another basis
'Rita Verdonk' approach: open a wiki site and let the people say and vote what they feel is the truth and take that as guidance
Precautionary approach: protect all grid-cells
Precaution light: protect those grid-cells that are red according to at least one consultant
Academic bureaucrat approach: Weigh by citation index (or H-factor) of consultant.
Select the consultant you trust most
Real life approach: Select the consultant that best fits your policy agenda
Normalized post normal: weigh them by pedigree score
Post normal: explore the relevance of our ignorance: working deliberatively within imperfections
I wonder what we might add to the list from first hand experience? Or better yet, by elaborating on examples of the last bullet. (perhaps to be continued...)
[Reference for figure: Refsgaard, J.C., van der Sluijs J, Brown J., and ven der Keur (2006) A framework for dealing with uncertainty due to model structure error. Advances in Water Resouces 29 1586-1597 doi link]
A brief supplement to my last post, from: ‘Ratings game: As housing boomed, Moody’s opened up’, by Aaron Lucchetti, Wall Street Journal - Europe, April 14, 2008, pp. 16-17.
Bond issuers, knowing that a higher rating means they pay a lower interest rate, have an incentive to shop around among rating agencies. And they have clout as they shop: They are the ones paying the bill...
…“There never was an explicit directive to subordinate quality rating to market share,” says Mark Froeba, a former Moody’s analyst who recently started a bond valuation company that may compete with rating firms. “There was, rather, a palpable erosion of institutional support for rating analysis that threatened market share.” An example would be raising too many legal issues on deals, slowing them down unnecessarily.
The two new words, Eye-rack and sub-prime, sum up the crisis in the American empire and its ideology. And they will help us to dispense with the three neo’s.
In both cases, there is the classic cycle of fantasy, mendacity, corruption and incompetence. The details differ. For Eye-rack, the fantasy has its obvious start in the ‘Project for the New American Century’ of 1995. In that neo-con manifesto, the prospect of absolute American domination in all spheres and dimensions was given as both a necessity and a plan. Then other fantasies came in, most famously the one where a ‘high White House official’ told the writer Ron Suskind that we no longer need to be reality-based (just as we no longer need to be faith-based); our will is supreme. The mendacity of March 2003 needs no rehearsing here, the corruption of the American occupation is legion, and its incompetence is acknowledged even by its supporters. Now we have a war that we cannot win and dare not stop.
For sub-prime, the fantasy has been that what goes up must go up indefinitely. The sophisticated mathematical models whereby traders moved their bets around simply did not have facilities for dealing with bad news (Alan Greenspan has confirmed this). Even when the U.S. housing market softened two years ago, the system could not recognize the change or its potentially lethal consequences. As to corruption, the shyster practices that were indulged in by the whole American financial industry, from the bottom to the top, are now known to all. This involved large-scale mendacity, as securities of junk quality were promoted and traded as if they had real value, rather than being just the numbers pasted on by the universal mutual con-job. And the incompetence needs no description, as we may all yet be engulfed in its consequences.
The effects on the American empire, both its power and its ideology, will be drastic. As the rest of the world decouples from its economy, they will surely decouple from its politics and military as well. Since South America has effectively declared independence, Africa has gone Chinese, and the oil has gone to the Iranians and the post-Soviets, there is little left for America’s super-profits or even security. As to GB, we can say that Gordon Brown’s journey to the east, with top businessmen as pilgrims, and shouting the message “Come and buy up whatever you want” was an early sign of a declaration of independence.
The consequences of sub-prime and Eye-rack for our ideas about society should be profound. The evil pair of neo’s, -liberal and -conservative, cannot survive this debacle with their plausibility intact. After the steady degradation of the Socialist and Statist ideals in the post-war period, the right-wing reaction really did seem like a liberation to many. ‘Regulation with a light touch’ along with the stripping down of the state, has remained the constant in British politics from Thatcher herself through the three Thatcherites who have followed. And now we find all those ardent apostles of free enterprise, with all their contempt for the nanny state, running to mummy for protection against the consequences of their own criminal folly. Can anyone now say, with a straight face, that Business Knows Best, that the profit motive is the way to get things done all through social institutions, and that we should all praise and welcome our millionaires?
The neo-conservative ideology has long since been in tatters. All those who have depended on it, including the right-wingers who control Israeli politics, will find themselves exposed. As the dollar sinks and the Sovereign Wealth Funds of the Gulf states increase in influence, the balance of power can shift only one way. It is impossible to tell how all this will work out, but the old assumptions can no longer be sure to hold.
There is yet another neo that might hopefully be a casualty of this whole affair. Along with –liberal and –conservation, we have –classical. The ‘science’ of economics, in its neo-classical variety, has for long been the great rhetorical resource of the big business ideology. Critics of all sorts have attacked it for its built-in bias, its lack of reality-testing, and its pernicious effects on policies at all levels. But it has been hard to land that knockout punch, since it presents as a closed system of ideas with a certain initial plausibility and enormous political clout. Now we may have seen its fatal weakness: quality.
The present predicament of the Western banking system might be seen as a malign echo of Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic, as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For, as we all know only too well, the banks have gargantuan sums invested in products whose value they cannot determine. This is not some ethereal conception of value as a reflection of The Good; it is an estimate of the cash that might be realized if the product were put on the market. And no one knows, and cannot know; there are just too many of those products, starting with dodgy ‘subprime’ loan-shark mortgages, which were then chopped and scrambled ad infinitum.
The banks could not have entered into this madness without help from the regulators, and this is where the fatal weakness of neo-classicalism is exposed. For the neo-classical theory of the market involves only sellers and buyers. For understanding regulation we need recourse to Institutional Economics, a field which was bombed during the McCarthy period and never recovered since. So, in the best neo-classical spirit, the products of the regulators, the quality ratings from AAA downwards, became objects of buying and selling just like any other product! Why shouldn’t Quality be a commodity like any other? Outside the neo-classical framework of ideas, this would be called corruption. But inside, it is just business, which always Knows Best.
Thus the neo-classical conception of the market has now come perilously close to destroying the object of its analysis. Where will its gurus go from here? How will they apologize for this process where everything went totally according to plan and then exploded?
The interaction of ideas with politics is always messy and confused. Just now we know that neo-conservatism has collapsed, neo-liberalism is on the defensive, and neo-classicalism is threatened with total refutation. How that will all work out, remains to be seen.
Via ThinkProgress - Al Gore on the NBC Today show, in response to a question from Meredith Viera, regarding a predictable op-ed by so called climate skeptic John Christy:
But, Meredith, part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the on the one hand, on the other hand approach. There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, but when you’re reporting on a story like the one you’re covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don’t take — you don’t search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time.
To be fair, perhaps Christy should get a kudo for recognizing that there is indeed indeed uncertainty about climate change, but it isn't just in science. In the second post on this blog, I even gave kudos to the Bush administration for recognizing and pointing out that changes in climate are uncertain, pointing out that, under a business as usual scenario, which assumes the continuation of current trends, the climate itself will only become more uncertain. Christy goes on to recite the usual fallacies that aren't even worth responding to, even confusing weather with climate....
Less predictable is the sensitivity of the climate itself, as is explained in this must read RealClimate post that discusses a new paper by Gerard Roe and Marcia Bakerk, which explains certainty of uncertainty in the relationship between climate forcing and the range of potential temperature changes. Perhaps even more uncertain is whether all obtainable scientific information would actually make any difference in policy decisions and whether we have the capacity to actually make high stakes policy decisions in which uncertainty and value conflicts are part of the equation. But we do know that the earth is round, and that even small changes can make a big difference.
For more discussion of this and other recent and noteworthy climate papers, you might want to listen to last week's edition of Science Friday, in which guests included Gerard Roe together with Chris Field, Steve Rayner and Eileen Claussen.
Addendum: this morning I found this YouTube video which has the complete interview. Gore still doesn't "have plans" to be a candidate, but asked about whether he might serve in some high-level capacity in an Obama administration, he added that he has "no plans to go back into government service in any other capacity." I have nothing against the other candidates, but next to Gore, they just seem very small. I realize it could have something to do with how demeaning the campaign process has become. All the more reason to Draft Gore. Running by not running provides an opportunity to change that too, and to start evaluating candidates on their merits.
The challenge of communicating policy relevant science is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than this statement made by John H. Marburger III, as reported in the Washington Post, seemingly to justify White House rejection of the goal of limiting the global rise in temperature to 2 C, although, according to Stephen Schneider, it is entirely possible Marburger's remarks were taken out of context:
The president's top science adviser said yesterday there is no solid scientific evidence that the widely cited goal of limiting future global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avert dangerous climate change, an assertion that runs counter to that of many scientists as well as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
John H. Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a news conference that the target of preventing Earth from warming more than two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, "is going to be a very difficult one to achieve and is not actually linked to regional events that affect people's lives." ...
..."you could have emerging disasters long before you get to two degrees. . . . There is no scientific criterion for establishing numbers like that."
Regardless of what Marburger intended to say, it is reported as if there is a debate with legitimate opposing views as to whether there are or could be scientific criteria for establishing what is essentially a policy decision. Then, since he acknowledges the possibility of disasters at a rise of under 2C, it isn't clear what he means when he said this target is "not actually linked to regional events that affect peoples lives." Fortunately, Alden Meyer from UCS had a good answer: "The question for [Marburger] is, if not two degrees, what?"
Marburger should know better than to make such statements, and if that is what he actually said, journalists should know better. I was going to say they get away with this kind of shoddy journalism because of a lack of public appreciation of the the scientific process, but I think most people know that life is uncertain and that science is not a crystal ball. So the best explanation I can come up with at the moment is that they get away with it because it is more convenient than debating acceptability of risks for which there is no data on probabilities, and because too often, such statements go unchallenged.
Scientists, and others who do know better and seek to use science for policy, often sigh knowingly at such statements - as happened when the article was held up in opening statements of the Science for Nature symposium I attended yesterday at WWF regarding forests and climate. So during the next break, I took the opportunity to discuss it with Stephen Schneider who was also at the symposium - and who is seen in the picture above along with Chris Field, both standing next to Al Gore when he made a statement about receiving the Nobel Prize. Schneider was among those whose work led to the establishment of the IPCC and who have been part of it from the beginning. The person who actually took the most leadership to bring about the establishment of the IPCC and who also belongs in that picture is Bert Bolin.
Noting that he has had enough experience with journalists to know how often things are taken out of context and misrepresented - Schneider said the statement might not have been as bad as it was made to sound, and that it could have been a great statement if Marburger had only clarified that the selection of a target is a policy decision. However, it would be necessary to see the full text of his remarks to determine what he actually meant. After all, Marburger did acknowledge that there could be dangers even with a temperature rise under two degrees. According to Schneider, the IPCC selected the 2C target because there is a realistic shot at being able to achieve it.
In a presentation Schneider gave on Thursday morning in the opening session of the symposium, he talked about the issue of whether the "jury is still out" which depends on the standard of evidence. Science and policy have different standards and ways of looking at the world, and there is no probability data for the future. That is why scientists build models, and why Cost Benefit Analysis is meaningless outside the OMB - the trade-offs are political. Asked whether they thought the science was settled or unsettled, I was relieved that most in the audience waited to raise their hands until asked whether they thought that was a dumb question - which it is. So, when it comes to policy, we have to rely on informed judgments, and on trust. Schneider's judgment is that it is not too late to prevent the big stuff, such as the melting of Greenland, but that it will be necessary to address the problem as fast and as fair as possible. For Greenland, there is not a long enough time series and there is a lot of noise, but the degree of melting sure looks like a trend.
In a previous post about The Lomborg, in followup to a previous one, I had a bit of a disagreement with Michael Tobis, over whether Lomborg is just adhering to the principles and presumptions of conventional economics, and whether what he believes, or at least says he believes, is wrong - coherently or stupidly. While I fully agree with Tobis that values are embedded in scientific methods, and that there are limitations on cost-benefit analysis (CBA), my point was that Lomborg is misusing CBA. To which also I added: "I hope we will hear from some environmental economists on this" - and also get statements from those experts listed as signing off on his "Copenhagen Consensus." So far, no word that I know of from the latter, but Sir Partha Dasgupta - a well-known and respected environmental economist, backs up my point in a a book review published in Nature - the key quote:
Economics helps us to realize what we are able to say about matters that will reveal themselves only in the distant future. Simultaneously, it helps us to realize the limits of what we are able to say. That, too, is worth knowing, for limits on what we are able to say are not a reason for inaction. Lomborg’s seemingly persuasive economic calculations are a case of muddled concreteness.
I don't have access to the full article but here is a link round up to blogs on which it has been extensively excerpted and commented on:
Also linked to and commented on by Brad de Long, and by Felix Salmon at the Porfolio magazine blog, who rearticulates the argument in plain english, Megan McArdle/The Atlantic, and James Hrynyshyn/Island of Doubt. Unrelated to Dasgupta's review is one by Tyler Cowen/Marginal Revolution, and this one by a law professor Jonathan Adler in the National Review who, though generally favorable to the book, seems to agree with critics on a crucial point: that Lomborg "understates the degree of uncertainty inherent in climate-change policy" and that this "counsel[s] against pretending cost-benefit analyses can be conducted with any degree of precision."
Other noteworthy posts, not necessarily focusing on flawed application of economics, Climate Progress, Richard Littlemore/DeSmog, and Chris Mooney @DeSmog. Then there is this review by ecologist Tim Flannery in the Washington Post who, given Lomborg's assertion that the Stern report was not peer reviewed, wonders whether Lomborg's book was. It is being done now....
It is important to keep hammering away at this not so much to beat up on a dead horse as to take advantage of the opportunity to clarify what is a common misunderstanding and misleading misuse of economics in the policy arena, on both sides, regardless of whether those doing so have good intentions. Even more productive for policy purposes would be to focus on finding agreement on what the trade-offs actually are, and the range of possible outcomes that Lomborg conveniently ignores by using point estimates in the Mythical Middle.
Lastly, now that I am back, I watched the Colbert clip again and as always, he manages to articulate complex issues more concisely than anyone. After Lomborg dodges the question of how often the expected 4.7 rise in temperature happens (if you accept the middle figure from a wider range of possible outcomes), Colbert asks a follow-up: "How can we say it won't be a problem if it has never happened?"
Dave Iverson at Ecological Economic blog, has a post with excerpts from Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan one of which highlights a fallacy that explains not only what I think is a key problem in framing scientific messages, but also the stated purpose of this blog - to provide news that doesn't fit:
We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters. The … narrative fallacy… is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event. …
The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently forcing a logical link, and arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impressions of understanding. …
We … have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our [strictly limited "working memory]. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same conditions that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is.
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. … A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience." …
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. (pp. 63-70)
A problem that many (though not all) scientists have is that they tend to use the term "myth" strictly in a pejorative sense, and just see their role as shattering existing ones. Some build their entire career on shattering a particular myth. But if, as Taleb also suggests, myths and stories are how humans cope with complexity, another fallacy is to think that myths can be avoided. Whenever I write that in reports that debunk the myth that forests increase the flow of water, it always gets promptly crossed out - so I also write a blog.... But the challenge in communicating science for policy is to create new more appropriate myths, when the existing ones are no longer adequate. That may be a role better left to comedians (as discussed in this previous post). Not long ago, Taleb was interviewed (video link) by Stephen Colbert, who pointed out that he himself is a Black Swan that could not have been predicted. Precisely!
I was pleasantly surprised to find Jerry Ravetz quoted in an excellent article by Denise Caruso, that actually fit into the New York Times this morning (Sunday) regarding the risk of growing crops in open fields that are easily mistaken for food, but that have been genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals. In the middle of this controversy,
...balancing economic benefit and public safety, are our appointed arbiters of risk, the government regulators.
Controversies over biotech risk are caused by a crisis in “official scientific expertise,” according to Jerome Ravetz, an associate fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the University of Oxford.
The crisis, he said, stems from the conflicting roles of government. On one side, businesses provide regulators with scientific evidence about the risk and safety of their product innovations. On the other, suspicious citizens demand that regulators challenge that evidence.
The side whose expertise is accepted as “official” calls the shots.
Since data regarding public safety is withheld as confidential business information, acceptance of these risks depends more on trust and confidence in judgments made by those calling the shots than it does on actual science. Certainly it does not inspire confidence that the Department of Agriculture, which has approved over 100 applications has been dismissive of safety concerns.
Often overlooked is that, what makes knowledge "scientific" at all is that it can be validated. If quality control is central, should information be regarded as scientific at all if it cannot be subject to scrutiny and if assumptions cannot be questioned by those with conflicting interests? In the case of pharma crops, among the assumptions made are "an ability to control living and propagating organisms" with containment practices used while cultivating them. In other words, the ability to control nature... Ultimately, even science rests on a foundation of judgments, and on the public' s trust and confidence in scientists. Caruso concludes:
Scientists often dismiss the idea that people without technical knowledge can help them make risk assessments. As a result, biotech scientists and regulators have long made safety determinations from within an opaque system of their own design, using only the evidence they accept as valid.
But scientific evidence is not a constant, like the speed of light or pi. Especially in biology, where we still know so little, “evidence” is often just a small circle of light surrounded by the darkness of the unknown. Decisions about risk cannot safely be made in a private club that accepts only its members’ notions of scientific evidence.
The best research on risk declares the opposite to be true: that risk evidence is particularly subject to distortion by conflicting interests, and that the best foil for such distortions is to ensure that the people whose fate is at stake participate in the analysis.
We need a new policy framework for scientific evidence that is built on this foundation. If developers want to sell their products, they must subject their inventions to the helpful scrutiny of people outside the club — before radical technologies like biopharma are brought to market.
The article also serves as an important reminder that science is not a monolithic institution. In the rush to defend science against the pseudo-skeptics/denialists/contrarians or whatever we want to call them, and to proclaim the end of the science wars that once took place within the academic community, we have to keep in mind the difference between science used to justify risks that science itself has created, from science done to detect those risks - a subject discussed at length in Jerry's book, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science.
~~~~~~~~~~
Addendum: I wrote this post in haste, neglecting to put up a link to the above-cited paper by Jerry Ravetz, Paradoxes and the Future of Safety in the Global Knowledge Economy, which is freely available on his website. Here is a longer quote from the most relevant bit of the paper:
We might call it the 'Triple Catch-23', since it involves three elements, the economy, government and the public, all in a dance around different sorts of safety and danger.
In the global knowledge economy,
constantly accelerating innovation
buys temporary safety for firms against their competition
but cannot guarantee the safety of their innovations in the environment.
In the face of these possible dangers from innovations,
governments
lose public trust by reassurances of their safety
and regain public trust by admission of their danger.
But by admitting danger and thereby inhibiting innovation,
governments
lose safety in the politics of the global knowledge economy.
Denise Caruso also provides further comments on her excellent blog, www.hybridvigor.net, which was brought to my attention in the comments, and which I have now added to the PNT blogroll.
Did you know that, in the late 1870s, there was "scientific evidence" that "rain follows the plow"? At least from observations based on a few wet years. Except at that time, those in denial of the findings of a more comprehensive survey and more credible scientific findings, presented by John Wesley Powell in the 1878 Report on Arid Lands, did claim a human role in climate change - in case
you thought the war on science reality and reason, or flip-flopping, was anything new, here is an excerpt from a biography of Powell by Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell:
Powell's land reforms failed to get a hearing mainly because many politicians were in the grip of a dream of their own. It promised that the West would become another Eden of easy, abundant wealth and happy, innocent, people. They ignored the warnings of journalists such as Colburn and the sobering hardships of real, on-the-ground settlers. No matter how arid the climate or how limited the water, they insisted, the West was sure to become another promised land. God would make it so. His chosen people would never
suffer denial.
The world of science included a few believers in that Edenic dream. Ferdinand Hayden, for example succumbed-eager, as he admitted he was, "to report that which will be most pleasing to the people of the West, providing there is any foundation for it in nature." More than a decade before Powell's reform proposals, Hayden thought he had evidence that the planting of trees on Nebraska homesteads was ameliorating the climate. Rainfall had increased with agricultural settlement and was becoming more equally distributed
through the year. Plant enough trees across the Great Plains and aridity would give way to well-watered fertility. A member of Hayden 's survey team who became a professor at the University of Nebraska, Samuel Aughey, also bought the dream of unlimited bounty and paired up with a town promoter, Charles Dana Wilber, to sell the idea that “rain follows the plow.”
Whether tree planting or plowing could work such magic across the entire arid region was never addressed by Hayden or his disciples, but the Powell survey did give it serious consideration. Gilbert, in his chapter on the Great Salt Lake, allowed that the lake might be rising due to human agency. He went on, however, to criticize the Hayden circle for leaping to conclusions about plow agriculture, nor did he take seriously another popular argument, that telegraph wires were affecting precipitation. What he concluded,
and Powell followed him, was that stream flow was being enhanced by deforestation in the highlands. They did not expect that the desert would vanish any time soon.
The West, according to Wallace Stegner, "has not been so much settled as raided-first for its furs, then for its minerals, then for its grass, then in some places for its scenery," and with every raid the raiders have ignored consequences. Powell warned about those consequences, ecological and political, that persistence in old land policies must bring, and the raiders and boosters fought him as they fought reality. But it must be added that the failure of the arid lands report was more complicated than a losing
confrontation between popular myth and scientific reality. Powell was himself responsible for some of the resistance he met, for he made a strategic mistake in trying to sell his reforms. He tied them to a scientific establishment in the East that was beginning to demand that the West be brought under their intelligent control. They called for more centralized authority that could bring greater efficiency in the use and development of the region's resources. Powell wanted their support and approval. Where they
led him, however, was not exactly where he wanted to go.
After a few subsequent dry years, development was made possible by feats of engineering. But even under the plan that was proposed by Powell, little if any water from the Colorado River would have flowed across the border into the Green Lagoons of the Colorado River Delta, which only exists now because of a failure to control every last drop. The Delta, with 5% of its original 2 million acres of wetlands remaining, was brought back to life in the 1980s, when El Niño brought some exceptionally high rainfall.
It owes its continued existence to "waste water" from the Mexicali Valley, which has been the beneficiary of leaks from the unlined All American Canal that diverts water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley in California. Now facing prolonged drought, current efforts to eliminate this waste and inefficiency would come at the expense of environmental flows. As pointed out by Matt Jenkins in a High Country News article, The
Paradox of Efficiency, (available here in pdf):
...instead of vanquishing the demons of aridity, efficiency has only chased them into the dark. And it has now run up against the quintessential problem of the West.... Untangling the competing demands on the river will be an incremental and possibly perpetual endeavor. It is tempting to argue that the enterprise of developing the Colorado was made feasible in the first place only by writing off he cost of its environmental effects on the Delta. But that simply is not true. Those costs are mere fractions of the
total amount of water in the river and the money spent to develop that water. They are so small that including them in the dealmakers' calculations from the very beginning would have never come even remotely close to breaking the entire river-development proposition. And so we are now left with a choice: endlessly pursuing yet one more house-of-mirrors fix - or, finally, trying to set the equation right.
John Fleck also has a post about Powell, commenting that: "He’s revered because he understood, more than those of his days, that there were limitations to the exploitation of the West’s resources. But it’s important not to miss his central purpose, which was to squeeze every bit of human use possible out of West."
The same arguments can be made about energy efficiency.... I'm starting to trail off onto another subject but, there is a name for this phenomenon - here is an excerpt from some jargon-laden stuff I wrote in graduate school: ... the “Jevons Paradox”, after William Stanford Jevons who, in 1865, argued that greater efficiency through technological progress would not reduce coal consumption, but would instead increase it because of human addiction to exosomatic sources of comfort (Mayumi et al, 1998). Greater efficiencies
also reduce the ability to adapt to changing conditions because of increased dependencies on particular inputs. A similar observation is found in the work of Georgescu-Roegen (1971) who stated: 'a technical evolution leads to an increase in the rate at which a society "wastes resources" . . . the economic process actually is more efficient than automatic shuffling in producing higher entropy, i.e. waste. In other words, the more developed is a society the higher it is its rate of generation of garbage
per capita (in Giampietro 1997).
Then there was Gregory Bateson who argued that the characterization of natural processes in terms of energy flows, in a single level analysis that regards ecosystems as simply extensions of matter, that respond mechanically to inputs and outputs of energy, is inadequate for living systems because organization or relationships among the system elements are greater limiting factors than energy. He also thought it would only increase the likelihood of “runaway ecological degradation,” because the increased ability
to predict and control the factors of interest would only make a pathological system more efficiently pathological, leading to more rapid self-destruction, as it does not address the false premises upon which the model is based. Clearly, it is time for a new vision.
References:
Georgescu-Roegen,N., The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971
Giampietro, M., Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in Human Societies: What can we learn from energy efficiency studies in human societies in respect to regional and global sustinability?, 1997, Istituto Nazionale della Nutrizione, Rome, Italy
Harries Jones, P. A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1995.
Mayumi, K., M. Giampietro, and J.M. Gowdy, Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Revisited.Ecological Economics, 1998.
this is a test. I have a glitch that is preventing me from uploading images from my blog interface software. But this is a real image (uploaded directly) that I took last August during festivities at the Chicago AFSCME convention, that I attended as a guest of one of the delegates. There were several of these live statues at various points in the room, creating
atmosphere.
Addendum: I didn't post this picture out of any nostalgia for the sixties, or any other idyllic once upon a time that never was when all was well, and science was used to prove it - instead of to identify new and unforeseen problems. But how else to respond to the revelation that the current National Strategy for Victory in Iraq comes right out of the playbook of Henry Kissinger, who, according to Bob Woodward, gave Gerson (Bush's speechwriter) a memo he wrote to Nixon in 1969? Unfortunately, it isn't news that
policy is getting made by speechwriters. What is news is that, in a 60 Minutes interview about his book, State of Denial, Woodward essentially makes the case that Kissinger, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld who both worked in the White House during the Ford administration, are "fighting the Vietnam war all over again." Cheney even told Rumsfeld to "get it right this time." Not that some of us
haven't suspected this based on inuendos from Bush et al that seem to lay the blame for all social dysfunction on the '60s. Upon seeing it confirmed by Woodward with actual quotes, I suspected Digby would be all over it it and sure enough, found a post on it. As he so eloquently put it:
The extent of Rumsfeld's screw-ups is well known by now, but this book seems to be asserting something about the war that is quite startling at this late date --- the real reason they were so anxious to go into Iraq come hell or high water. Yes, we know it was about oil and it was about Israel and it was about PNAC wet dreams and seven thousand other things. But I'm talking about the Big Reason, the one that united all these people: Iraq is their long awaited chance to do Vietnam right.
Stewart Ackerman, writing in TNR, elaborates on the myths developed in the 60's and 70's - that attributed the failures in Vietnam to anti-war sentiment, and shows how this framing is being used now by the War-niks to blame "overzealous opposition to misguided wars" rather than misguided wars or any kind of failure in U.S. foreign policy:
When Nixon prosecuted an even more savage war with no appreciable change in its fortunes, an emboldened Congress, led by Democrats, voted to cut off funding in 1974. This had an unintended and profound consequence. Suddenly, the right, which had spent the previous five years and the entire Johnson administration recognizing that the war was bleak, if not totally futile, had a new scapegoat: the forces that had ended the war before giving their preferred strategy time to work. Those forces were twofold: first,
the representatives and senators who had betrayed the troops in the field; second, the antiwar movement that had pressured them to do so. ...
Democrats are, of course, not blameless. He also writes:
...it is a profound and painful thing to accept that one's country has involved itself in a futile or immoral cause; it is worse still to ask what intellectual or political mistakes led to such a nightmare. Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not "Were we wrong?" but "Why were we wrong?" and "How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?" These are questions that often will implicate the country's leading politicians and intellectuals, and its cherished myths. The anguish
of confronting them has been on display in the Democratic Party's foreign policy debate for 35 years.
Back to Digby;
Republicans did worse than that. They nursed their grudges against the counter culture and turned them into an opportunistic partisan culture war. And the real pieces of work, the neocons and the partisan veterans like Cheney and Rumsfeld waited patiently until they got their chance to "do it right." Never having honestly assessed what went wrong the first time but merely laying facile blame on liberals and the anti-war movement, they have willfully made the same mistakes all over again and seem to
have no more sense of their own responsibility than they did three decades ago....
...all their dirty linen is now being exposed. The macho GOP they've been selling for 30 years turns out to be a bunch of whiny cranks who are so obsessive about their youthful "failures" that they have spent their entire lives getting into a position that they could prove they were right after all. But it's clear that the modern Republican party is incapable of governing a superpower. They have no capacity for self-analysis or learning from their mistakes so they cannot be trusted to learn from this two term
debacle of terrorist attacks, unnecessary wars, economic insecurity, corruption and now even covering up for known sexual predators rather than risk their hold on power....
...It is long past time that Democrats killed the 60's albatross the Republicans hung around their necks more than three decades ago and throw the dead carcass right back at them. This country's problems are not caused by unreconstructed hippies ruining the political system. The problem today is the eternally resentful, unreconstructed anti-hippies who somehow got psychologically paralyzed by the events of that time.
To wrap up what was just suppose to be a test post, those now occupying the White House are obviously incapable of learning anything, particularly from their own mistakes, and will undoubtedly continue to find scapegoats make excuses for them by leaning on uncertainty, and muttering about untidiness and threats from unknown unknowns - which make learning imperative. Rapid changes in climate alone have put us in uncharted territory.
So now what? George Soros in his new book the Age of Fallibility, that he discussed in an interview on C-Span, suggests that, for the US to be again be a world leader, it has to contribute to solving common problems of humanity, of the kind that cannot be addressed without collective action, like global warming, the energy crisis,
and nuclear proliferation. And, of course, building the capacity to govern that matches up to the capacity we have developed to destroy the entire planet. He also points to the leadership role taken by the United States after World War II, when it sponsored the United Nations and initiated the Marshall Plan. Since then, we have had a Cold War that was also devastating. What is sorely missing now, besides leadership and accountability, is a plan for Post-Cold War Reconstruction.
More later on implications for science. Stephen Colbert has The Word on Kissinger.
A few links, via Coturnix that address topics often commented on here at PNT. First, he brought my attention to another science and policy blog that I have just added to the blogroll (Bee Policy, by Jessica Henig). A few posts ago, I made a comment about the Green GOP, and then also wondered if it was just the caffeine - and about the wisdom of using this particular blog to overtly discuss party politics. But these are post-normal times - and, as far as I'm concerned, you either have a grip on reality or you are soaring - and rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg - as Steven Colbert so eloquently put it. Anyway, Jessica makes a similar observation about non-fundamentalist conservatives, in Caffeine or righteous indignance:
I am glad -- thrilled -- that there are non-fundamentalist conservatives, because hopefully they'll eventually notice and get disgusted with the fact that "their" government is run by a cadre of zealots engaging in a holy war on all fronts. (The numbers would suggest that this realization has already happened, but see the link.) But for non-fundamentalist conservatives to support this administration and to vote for Republicans now really does negate any rationality or love of science they profess. It's becoming increasingly clear that you must make a choice: Bush or science. If you accept one, you throw the other away.
Then, see this article in BBC news about The battle over certainty, in which historian, Lisa Jardine discusses "how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth." To illustrate this, she presents a historical example she came across in which, Holmes, the captain of a ship who had agreed to test a clock that was developed to enable mariners to find their longitude at sea, "thought that by tampering with his evidence he would please the scientists at the Royal Society. Instead, the too-precise nature of the match between his data and the results they wanted alerted them to the fact that his testimony was unreliable."
She goes on to conclude: "We cannot afford ourselves the luxury of waiting for evidence which clinches the theory. We are going to have to learn how to participate in debates which are not about certainties." Which is why, as I stated in the one of the first posts on this blog, if the climate and reality denialists want to talk about uncertainty, bring it on.... They haven't taken me up on it yet. What I still want them to tell me is, whether all obtainable scientific information would actually make any difference in policy decisions and actual practices of this administration. This is a major area of uncertainty, and, as we move beyond known ranges of climate variability, business-as-usual is certain to create more of it.
Lastly, another update to the blogroll is the InSCights lab, the site of the Science and Society Virtual Network now converted to a blog format, frequently updated with annotated links to important papers on Interfaces between Science and Society. Like this blog, it also came about after discussions that took place at a symposium on Interfaces between Science and Society that took place in Milan in December 2003, which gathered together all of the usual suspects.
Welcome to visitor number 10,000*, who followed a link here from Effect Measure, where you can find out everything that is and isn't known about Avian Flu. So, with kudos to Revere, I'll take the opportunity to post a few comments on environment and public health. For some reason, there seems to be more general acceptance of uncertainty on health matters than on, say, climate. At least I have never heard Bush say it was necessary to have certainty that the Avian flu has mutated before making decisions, even if his decisions have left much to be desired. And those who have serious ailments have no problem with the idea of getting second and even third professional and other opinions about what to do, and aren't surprised to get different answers.
There is another observation I have been wanting to make. Public Health docs seem to have no problem taking on the political battles needed to promote public health. In fact, the Code of Ethics of the American Public Health Association requires this:
We promote the scientific and professional foundation of public health practice and policy, advocate the conditions for a healthy global society, emphasize prevention and enhance the ability of members to promote and protect environmental and community health.
III."A physician shall respect the law and also recognize a responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient."
And its a good thing too. Otherwise, our rivers might still be valued more as sewers, and our lives more miserable and short. In many places in this world, they still are.
So why is it that, in the environmental arena, scientists still dance around taking positions on policy issues? Hopefully, this is changing. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is somewhat of a breakthrough in that it explicitly connects ecosystems - which happen to also be the source of avian flu - to human well-being. The connection to human well-being is also implicit in the concept of ecosystem services, which refers to economically significant benefits that ecosystems provide for humans. More on that later.
~~~~~~~~~~~
*At least according to site meter. I have no idea how many visitors this site has actually had. Statistics provided by my webhost show over 40,000 visits and over 12,000 unique visitors. Of course, that includes RSS feeds, admin, and peddlers of poker and piills (I delete about 75 spam comments and trackbacks a day. My apologies if I have accidentally deleted anything legit.) This blog was launched last February.
In a discussion of media ethics and mistakes made by Fox news in reporting that the Sago miners had been found alive, Sixty Percent O'Reilly notes that "Standards today are just not what they were ten years ago." Of course, as Murray Waas notes, O'Reilly wasn't on the air ten years ago!
And if Sixty Percent O'Reilly himself had any standards, he might have instead been discussing the lowering of safety standards in the mines instead of perpetuating ignorance by covering it up with self-serving blather. According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, Serious and Substantial safety violations in the Sago mine were four times higher in 2005 than in 2004
Some people say (as Fox news likes to say) that "Sixty Percent" is an underestimate of the amount of crap in what O'Reilly says, and that it is really more like 95%. I'm not one for beancounting, and to give O'Reilly some credit, he actually accepts that global warming is real, unlike Amy Ridenour, and other denialists who call themselves skeptics, but then again, he also thinks that it caused the tsunami, but is no big deal.... Video at Crooks and Liars.
Transcript and video of Ol Reilly on the Letterman show available here.
In this article that Paul Baer dug up from the Independent, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute expresses surprise that his plan, to form a "European Sound Climate Policy Coalition" to destroy European support for the Kyoto treaty has been unsuccessful, and that the European companies he met with "rejected his ideas." Given a bias most organizations have towards claiming progress if not success in all things that they undertake, the only surprise to me is that he admitted to it. Among those companies were Ford Europe and the German utility RWE, whose spokespersons were careful to point out that they only met with him in Brussels and don't necessarily share his opinion. "Exactly the opposite" according to Adrian Schmitt from Ford Europe, "Our position is that climate change is a serious issue and appropriate steps need to be taken now."
Chris Mooney is back from his book tour and is in the process of reading and reviewing "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" by Tom Bethell, from which he has extracted this quote:
All science based on dire warnings about the future should be suspect, and all such science is almost by definition politicized--if only because democracy as presently constituted responds with undue haste to any and all claims of crisis. (p. ix)
Now I'm trying to remember any policy response at all to anything that is not a crisis. Maybe Chris can ask him that when he debates him tomorrow on the Fox radio show, 11 ET. I can hardly wait. A listing of local radio stations can be found here.As for the politicization of science, there has been a lot of comment in the blogosphere by those more prolific than me, that I have barely had time to keep up with. But a download on that is coming in my next post
When Reagan came into office, some of the more insidious things his administration did to incapacitate the government now seem quaint. Among those, was cutting maintenance contracts for photocopy machines - or so I was told by OSHA and EPA employees at the time. It may be difficult for some to remember the importance of a photocopier in the pre-online and pre- computer printer era - i..e, the 1980s. What was really quaint was the barter system - since the Department of Interior and perhaps other agencies were not set up to handle cash, outside researchers had to bring reams of paper in exchange for copying privileges - but I digress. At least those libraries were there, and often carried journals and old reports that could be found nowhere else. These are often essential for understanding how particular policies have come to be in the first place, and the scientific or other evidence that justified them. Currently, at least some conscientious government employees use online access to journals to evaluate the effectiveness of existing programs and find the evidence needed to support new policies when these are needed. Without them, they would simply not be able to do their job of protecting public health and safety.
Now those libraries may soon disappear as well. One of my reliable sources just informed me that, at the Department of Health and Human Services, online access to journals is being terminated this week, and the physical collection of books is being spread around to the various departments. Is this an isolated case? Or is it happening in other agencies? I would be interested in hearing from people who work in other agencies who know anything about this.
IMHO, if the current administration does not believe that protecting public health and safety is a proper role for government, they should have a debate about that rather than silently undermining scientific capacity needed to do so.
The banter about whether or not there is uncertainty about climate change once again exploded in the blogosphere last week, after the New York Times published an article about edits of scientific reports made by now former White House official Phil Cooney, that emphasize areas of uncertainty in climate science, or imply it is greater than it is but, of course, ignoring other kinds of uncertainty, that will only increase under a business as usual scenario. Since this is, like, so redundant, I will lapse into just a bit of redundancy myself...
There may be uncertainty about the magnitude of climate change, and the exact percentage of it that is caused by human activities. But we know, with a high degree of confidence, that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations are coupled to changes in climate and are beginning to go beyond the range of variability known to have occurred in the period for which we have ice core data, now over 400,000 years, which is longer than the span of human existence. The most relevant area of uncertainty is not about the aggregate change in temperature, but about regional impacts, in specific places, which depends not only on climate but also on vulnerability, response capabilities, and future human behavior. Since behavior has much to do with what people actually believe, I am not optimistic (but will save that one for another time). Another relevant area of uncertainty, that some enterprising reporter might want to ask is, how much evidence would it take to satisfy the Bush administration and, whether all obtainable scientific evidence would even make a dent in policy decisions. A memorandum written by Rick Pilz - another former government official who was a Senior Associate in the US Climate Change Science Program, reduces this uncertainty somewhat, by providing a glimpse into the science & policy black box (elephants don't hide very well). Another is whether votes are counted and whether they have anything to do with who is entrusted to make these decisions. For more on this, see the earlier post on Known Unknowns and Known Unknowables. As I said then, if anyone on the White House Cherry Picking Brigade wants to debate the policy implications of the various kinds of climate uncertainty, Bring It On! But I have another observation to add. (more)
To go back to the subject of White House edits of scientific reports, Cooney is a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute who has no scientific training, and, until a few days ago, was a White House official at the Council on Environmental Quality - but he has now been hired by Exxon. To anyone who follows the issue, it is just one more smoking gun that comes as no surprise. For context and other recent occurrences of such behavior, see the Pilz memo, and also comments by Roger Pielke and by Chris Mooney, who undoubtedly provides the whole story and all of the relevant references in his forthcoming book, The Republican War on Science. Thank goodness for the National Academy of Sciences - which has the privilege of presenting reports to sponsoring agencies only in their final form. In at least one instance that I know of, it has even come as a great surprise that there would be no opportunity to edit or even see a draft. (I know, I once worked there...)
But the NAS seems to continue to adhere to an outdated set of (so far) unwritten rules, which is, in the interest of maintaining civility, to find at least one thing nice to say about a study or a research program before saying why it is otherwise completely flawed or even worse, irrelevant. That approach may still work in the academic community, where professors try to at least be polite when reviewing the work of colleagues who will someday be in the opposite position, or reviewing their work. If they get too polite, it comes out eventually because science is inherently a self-correcting process. But in the lopsided arena of science and policy, saying something nice about scientific research that is entirely flawed just provides one more opportunity for cherry picking by those whose job description is to defend it at all costs. For example, Scott Mclellan claimed the administration's 10 year plan for science was "widely praised by the scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences." But as Mooney points out, the praise in the NAS report is for responsiveness to previous committee comments. The report goes on to point to the failure to acknowledge and consider the results of the U.S. National Assessment, and to the dangers of oversight and management of the program by high level political appointees, and also questions the capacity to implement the plan.
The only reason this kind of spin works is because of a popular misconception that science provides certainty at all and that it can always be reduced through more research. And because of the way uncertainty is generally abused in decision-making, scientists have often been reluctant to clarify this point. This, in turn, leads to the notion that there is some kind of a linear or deterministic relationship between science and policy. In other words, if we just get the science right, the right policies will follow, which would put scientists in the position of being benevolent dictators. Decision-makers and advocates then need only point to scientific conclusions to justify a policy decision, no matter how controversial, and even if the decision itself has more to do with policy than with science. But we can't know everything. That is why, as the nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon put it, rationality is bounded. No matter how good or bad the science, decisions must ultimately be based on judgment, informed or not. Historically, science has more or less played along but lately, like Simon, has been going in a different direction, towards a more dynamic view of ecosytems, as explained in this post and may be also going through a process of self-correction needed to better serve the public interest. Unlike science, politics is not a self-correcting process, or at least, not when there is an elephant in the room who has already decided what he is going to do... To play by the rules of science in the policy process first of all presumes there is some semblance of civility and rule of law.
Disclaimer: If I had time right now, I would go over the entire NAS report myself, of which I have only read bits and pieces, so the material referred to above may have also been cherry-picked, but as I recall, the report accepts the consensus that the human contribution to climate change is significant even if there is uncertainty about exactly how much. Since even small changes that take us beyond normal ranges of variability can have large consequences, and since USA Today proclaimed that that debate is over, lets just say it's "42." Scientific capacity is better spent on monitoring changes and helping to identify feasible response options than arguing with denialists. Kudos to my Congressman, Chris Van Hollen, for being on the list of co-sponsors of Apollo Energy Act introduced by Congressman Jay Inslee, also discussed here... Is yours there yet?
An article in the current issue of Scientific American by David Michaels (not free but can be purchased online roughly at the newstand price), and commented on also by Revere at Effect Measure, makes a good case that the manufacture of doubt in scientific studies, which supports the "vilification of threatening research as "junk science," and the corresponding sanctification of industry-commissioned research as "sound science" has become nothing less than standard operating procedure in parts of corporate America." It also illustrates the kinds of statistical games that get played to make rates of a disease - such as lung cancer associated with Beryllium exposure, appear insignificant compared to background levels of lung cancer. In other words, creating noise to obfuscate a signal.
Ultimately, it comes down to how much and what kind of information is enough to support a decision, whether the information is of sufficient quality for the purpose, and who gets to decide. Under the Data Quality Act, passed without any hearings or debate as a "midnight rider" to the 2001 appropriations bill, the ultimate arbiter would be the White House Office of Management and Budget. According to Michaels, this act, together with proposed guidelines for "Peer Review and Information Quality" simply institutionalizes this new operating procedure, as it allows industry groups and anyone else to challenge the underliyng data that supports decisions and thereby delay regulatory action by requiring further study... (more)
Several years ago, someone by the name of Samuel T. Fife, who was a Health and Safety Representative for workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explained that he had little regard for epidemiological studies because there would not be any results until they were all dead. Epidemiological and other studies of actual impacts are, of course, essential for learning lessons from past mistakes. But if the purpose of applied science is to prevent future harm, waiting for body counts of the currently living won't help - except to shift the cost onto those being harmed.
The occasion of Fife's remarks was a Karen Silkwood Award ceremony at which he was honored in 1985, organized by yours truly. The event was held in conjunction with an annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, "in recognition of nuclear workers who have endured personal hardship in the defense of public health and safety." The event also featured the last production of the play "Silkwood" by the late Jehane Dyllan, and the awards were presented by Kristi Meadows - the daughter of Karen Silkwood, who said she adored Meryl Streep as an actress but that Jehane's performance reminded her more of her mother. A year or so later, I drifted over to natural resource related issues, but came away from that experience with the utmost regard not only for those who were honored at the ceremony, who were only asking for the right to participate in decisions about their own health and safety, but for a group of occupational health doctors who were the most enthusiastic supporters of the event, and who did not shy away from a role as advocates for their patients. I do not remember if that group included David Michaels as I did not know them all personally. But environmental scientists could learn a few things from those in the field of public health, who generally seem to have a much better understanding of the uses and abuses science in policy and in politics. Issues such as climate and water quality are also issues of public health, and if we have to wait for enough information to satisfy the Denialists, certainty won't matter - by that time, we will probably all be impoverished or dead. For the sake of balanced reporting - Keynes once justified a short-term focus in economics with the infamous statement that "In the long-run we are all dead" but I digress.
Gregory Bateson once said that "all science is an attempt cover with explanatory devices - and thereby obscure - the vast darkness of the subject." The sun also obscures a vast darkness, and not even a scientist can say for sure that it will come up tommorow. But we still need to rely on both, even if it is an act of faith. The key question then, how best to achieve acceptable quality of data for purposes of making high stakes and often urgent policy decisions, and what kind of data do we actually need before we act. This is indeed a policy decision, but is not one that should be addressed in midnight riders. Reaching a broad public consensus on data quality issues is essential, but is not a substitute for peer review by scientists on questions of technical merit. As is achnowledged by other commenters on Revere's post, even what level is considered statistically significant is a value judgment (Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz might be able to shed more light on the origins of .05 as a standard for statistical significance - I would have to do some digging). The subject is often addressed in individual pieces of legislation such as the Clean Water Act, which specify, even if vaguely, what kinds of standards of evidence must be met as a condition for various kinds of regulatory action. This allows for broader debate than occurred for the Data Quality Act, and indicate that there is at least enough agreement for the legislation to receive a majority of votes.
Note: I also once worked at the late OTA, where I received a "you think those charts are bad you should see my tables of the living dead award" for tables I compiled that reviewed the evidence upon which carcinogenic chemicals were regulated, or not. Mostly not. And yes, we should definitely bring back OTA, as was suggested in another of articles in the same issue of the Scientific American - more on that in a future post.
In the earlier post on Unknown knowns and known unknowables, I illustrated some dimensions of ignorance and uncertainty that are seldom acknowledged in the prevailing science and policy banter but that are almost certain to increase under a business as usual scenario. None of the so-called climate skeptics took up the challenge to discuss the policy implications of these broader and more pervasive kinds of uncertainty. Instead, somewhat predictably, a comment was left alleging bias - on another website, realclimate.org, to which I had offered kudos for clarifying what climate scientists do and don't know, often in response to the very same commenter. Also since then, my favorite blog, Sifossifoco (posted 3-1-05), brought my attention back to some additional more fundamental dimensions of ignorance. One of these is to fill up the void of ignorance with meaningless and aggressive chitter chatter, which demonstrates an ignorance not so much of knowledge, which should make us all humble, but of manners. Those blissfully ignorant of what Dante once referred to as "vulgar eloquence" of the fiery Tuscan tongue in which that blog is written will just have to settle for my commentary (or, at your own risk, try the automatic translation at SFF InInglish).
Sifossifoco was referring to a newsitem regarding the death of a Florentine poet, Mario Luzi, which covered up the reporter's ignorance of Luzi's work, citing a statement by the mayor that "he is gone but left us with his words" - without actually recalling any of them. This seems odd for a report on someone who had been a candidate for the the nobel prize and given the title Senator for Life of the Italian Republic in honor of his very words. This kind of cover-up is often attributed to the laziness of otherwise well-meaning reporters on tight deadlines and dismissed as iinnocuous. But that is to accept something much more insidious as just normal background noise, particularly when this kind of chittter chatter is presented as real news. When reporters on tight deadlines fail to ask questions, and in many cases, go so far as to pass along the content of press releases and government produced videos as news, they are unworthy of their job title or of the trust placed in them by the public. Lazy reporters are hardly the only source of such ignorance.
Science can just as easily be used to cover up ignorance by providing an illusion of understanding and objectivity, with facts that have been carefully selected to support an agenda. This happens on all sides, whenever scientific generalizations are used to to provide simple, generic and seemingly objective answers as the solution to complex problems, with little if any consideration of the place or context in which they are to be applied. This context, which includes future human behavior, is usually the source of even greater ignorance. Mario Giampietro refers to such generalizations as the kind of knowledge that one would expect from replicants - these were the pseudo-human creatures portrayed in the film Blade Runner, who had no histories, and therefore, no memories, no roots, no future and no point of view. In other words, unbiased. Except that, in order to function, they were implanted with the memories of those who created them. This made them ideal for their role as colonizers of other planets.
There may well be those who have unrealistic expectations that science can predict the future, and who pontificate in a state of blissful ignorance. Then there are those who take advantage of such expectations in others by claiming scientific uncertainty as a way to justify arbitrary and capricious behavior, or simply to avoid controversial decisions such as reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses, and taking steps needed to reduce vulnerability to their consequences. That this has been a conscious and deliberate public relations strategy on the part of the Bush administration was demonstrated by the now infamous briefing book prepared by Republican strategist Frank Luntz for the 2000 presidential campaign. In it, he recommended that Republicans focus on the lack of scientific certainty in the global warming debate, and recruit sympathetic experts who would challenge the science, so as to avoid a broad public consensus on the matter, as this might require an actual commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The problem of global warming itself was defined as a "communications battle" rather than one of responding to the expected and unexpected impacts of climate change. The great majority of scientists who actually study climate and anyone else who dares to disagree can then be conveniently labeled as biased - as if bias could actually be avoided. Unless of course, one is a replicant. They can also be ridiculed with labels that obscure what is actually at stake and reduce the public discourse to a some sort of a caricature. It is much easier to dismiss global warming concerns as environmental alarmism based on doomsday science, call the problem a market failure, blame Clinton, and say everything will be fine as long as we drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - rather than debate differences of values and objectives. Responding to such charges may be even more difficult and tiring than discussing inevitable trade-offs. As Sifossifocco also says, "Mai discutere co' un grullo! T'abbassa í livello dialettico e poi ti vince coll'esperienza" (post of 4-24-2004) - [translation: Never argue with a fool! He will lower the dialectical level and beat you with experience.]
A more recent Luntz report (zip file) instead recommends the exploitation of tragedy, by framing isues in the context of 9/11. The only mention of climate is in reference to political, legal, business and economic climates. He specifically recommends against the use of the term "global" with respect to anything (apparently polls show that Americans are more afraid of globalization than of privatization), and doesn't mention warming at all. Energy issues associated with changes in climate are instead presented as threats - of sticker shock, rolling blackouts, rising gas prices, and to national security. It reminds me of a remark once made to me about 15 years ago by a government official who was in charge of producing environmental impact statements for offshore oil exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico - that if only there were an energy crisis, there would be no need for environmental impact statements. Why was I not surprised today to hear discussion in the news of a potential doubling of oil prices? Interestingly, Luntz also suggests it is effective to advocate trust in experts rather than politicians, but he doesn't say which ones. Another item in the news today is that over 1300 pre-eminent scientists from 95 countries who participated in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment came to a general conclusion that business as usual is no longer an option, but that there are still some options. OK, I'm biased - I was among the less pre-eminent
one of which highlights a fallacy that explains not only what I think is a key problem in framing scientific messages, but also the stated purpose of this blog - to provide news that doesn't fit:
this is a test. I have a glitch that is preventing me from uploading images from my blog interface software. But this is a real image (uploaded directly) that I took last August during festivities at the Chicago AFSCME convention, that I attended as a guest of one of the delegates. There were several of these live statues at various points in the room, creating
atmosphere.