The Post-Normal Times

In a measure designed to make government agencies more open and accountable to those they regulate, yesterday Bush signed an executive order that requires federal agencies to identify the “specific market failure” or problem that justifies government intervention, and to get approval from a politically appointed regulatory policy officer before even planning any kind of regulatory intervention or even just preparing regulatory guidance documents. But for anyone who professes Social Darwinism, the market has been wildly successful. And by creating ever more uncertainty regarding the impacts of all of the novelty it generates, and failing to fund scientific research and monitoring that detects any such impacts, as Bush demands scientific certainty, this invisible hand assures that there will never be enough scientific information to justify government intervention to protect public health, safety and general well-being.
A few examples of reduced capacity for scientific research under this administration – according to a recent NAS report, the capacity of all of our earth observing systems is expected to decrease by 40% by the end of the decade and many critical measurements are expected to cease altogether, jeopardizing the ability to forecast weather, hurricanes and El Ninos at a time when changes in climate are affecting global precipitation patterns, and land use patterns changing rapidly as well. Among the earth observing missions threatened with discontinuity is Landsat, which has provided continuous images of the earth for over 30 years – although some steps are now being taken to reduce this risk. Among the reasons is that, “Early plans called for NASA to purchase data meeting LDCM specifications from a privately owned and commercially operated satellite system. However, after an evaluation of proposals received from private industry, NASA cancelled the Request-for-Proposals (RFP) in Sept. 2003.” (link) According to one of my former professors, John Townshend, who chairs the geography department at the University of Maryland – where I watched the launch of Landsat 7 in 1999 – only one bid came in and was rejected because it was deemed too expensive, and because there was not enough cost sharing by the private sector. But he said part of the failure can be attributed to the scientific community, which assumed continuity and did not speak loudly enough when the program was delayed. He referred to it as “going blind.” And then there are the closures of EPA science libraries .
Although I regard this discourse of market failure to be a distraction from the more important problem, of finding agreement on policy goals and how they can best be achieved, whether through public or private means, perhaps it should be welcomed as an opportunity to put aside the games with cost-benefit analysis and get this administration and its supporters to be explicit about what they believe the purpose of government to be. Although placement of politically appointed regulatory policy officers in each agency practically guarantees political interference in science, he could no longer blame the bureaucracy and would have to take responsibility for his policy decisions. In other words, if Bush doesn’t believe that health and safety or disaster response is a government responsibility, he should just say so!

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.

Editors note: The following book review, which analyses a new book by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery from the perspective of Post-Normal Science, was provided by Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre, who we are honored to welcome as a contributor to the PNT.

Unstoppable Global Warming – every 1,500 years
S Fred Singer and Dennis T Avery
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., Lanham, MA, 260pp.
Hardback 0-7425-5116-4, £49.00
Paperback 0-7425-5117-2, £15.99

Is this a book about science? It is certainly written by scientists, one a climate physicist (Professor Fred Singer, an ex-US Government science advisor and outspoken critic of the idea that humans are warming the planet), the other a biologist. Its central thesis – the warming currently observed around the world is a function of a 1,500 year ‘unstoppable’ cycle in solar energy – is linked to evidence that most people would recognise as being generated by science. And the book is written as a scientific text, with citations to peer-reviewed articles, deference to numbers and adoption of technical terms. But whether this book is about science or about something else depends on what you believe science to be. One of the central reasons we disagree about climate change is because we have different conceptions of what science is and with what authority it speaks – in other words, how scientific ‘knowledge’ interacts with those other realms of understanding brought to us by politics, ethics and spirituality.

Before I explain, let me precis Singer and Avery’s argument. Their contention is that a well-established 1,500-year cycle in the Earth’s climate can explain most of the global warming observed in the last hundred years (0.7degC), that this cycle is in some way linked to fluctuations in solar energy, and because there is nothing humans can do to affect the sun we should simply figure out how to live with this cycle. We are currently on the upswing, warming out of the Little Ice Age, but in a few hundred years will be back on the downswing. Efforts to slow down the current warming by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases are at best irrelevant, or at worst damaging for our future development and welfare.

This of course is not what the Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will say next week. Its report from its climate science working group will conclude that it is likely that most of the warming of the last 50 years has been caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations and that, depending on our actions now to slow the growth of emissions, warming by 2100 will likely be between about 1.5º and 6ºC. The upper end of this range is almost an order of magnitude larger than the warming Singer and Avery suggest is caused by the 1,500-year cycle. So is this a fight between scientific truth and error? This seems how Singer and Avery would like to present it – ‘science is the process of developing theories and testing them against observations until they are proven true or false.’

Last week on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dennis Avery discussed the ideas in the book with climate campaigner Mark Lynas. The interesting this about this ten minute discussion was that the battleground was over the scientific truth claims of the 1,500 year cycle – which reduced to how many scientific papers were cited in the book, were they ‘proper’ scientific papers, how many scientists wrote the IPCC report, and so on. It was odd to hear a biologist and a historian trading blows in front of half a million listeners over the scientific veracity of a geophysical phenomenon.

But this is symptomatic of what has happened to climate change. Too often the reasons we disagree about what to do about climate change are framed in this way, as disputes about the truth claims of some aspect of biogeophysical science – is the world warming; are greenhouse gases responsible; will this ice-sheet collapse? This reflects one view of science, the conventional Enlightenment view of science as an objective, disinterested endeavour incrementally leading us closer and closer to a universal and immutable view of reality … past, present and future. This is ‘normal’ science.

But for many years now, around 25 at least, philosophers and practitioners of science have identified a different mode of scientific activity, a mode where stakes are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent, and where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken. This is what Silvio Funtowicz labelled in 1993 ‘post-normal’ science. Disputes in post-normal science focus as often on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy – as on the facts of science. The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity. The IPCC is a large procedural assessment activity involving first of all scientists, but then later entraining a broad range of other experts from government, business, civil society to evaluate the quality of the assessment, before the modified text is presented to government representatives for their amendment and approval.

But there is also a third way of interpreting contemporary science, which is yet one further step removed from the binary truth-falsehood view of Singer and Avery. This third way of seeing science pays more attention to the social and cultural context in which science works and speaks than to the phenomena being studied. Who are the scientists, what are their values, motives and preferences, why are they being asked to study this particular problem rather than some other problem, and who funds them? This understanding of science is what sociologists have termed its social construction.

Understanding the nature of post-normal science, and drawing upon some of the insights of social construction, helps us to re-interpret the Radio 4 discussion between Avery and Lynas. It will also help us towards understanding why we disagree about climate change. On the surface, Avery and Lynas were arguing about science – is there a 1,500 year cycle in world temperatures; do greenhouse gases warm the planet? This was normal science mode and many people, perhaps a majority, will have interpreted the debate in this way: truth or error, fact or fiction, or just more uncertainty and confusion between experts.

But what was really going on was a dispute about the much deeper (yet unexpressed) values and beliefs held by Avery (and Singer) and Lynas. Do they have confidence in technology? Do they believe in collective action over private enterprise? Can all things they value be quantified in monetary terms? Do they believe we carry obligations to people invisible to us in geography and time? We need this perspective on science if we are going to make sense of books such as Unstoppable Global Warming. Or indeed, if we are to make sense of polar opposites such as James Lovelock’s recent contribution The Revenge of Gaia, in which he extends climate science to reach the conclusion that the collapse of civilisation is no more than a couple of generations away.

The unfortunate thing is that many people still hold onto a ‘normal’ faith in science such that it can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow. Fred Singer has this view of science; so does Mark Lynas. That is why they reduce their exchange to one about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences. If the battle of science is won, then the war of values will be won.

If only climate change were such a phenomenon and if only science held such an ascendancy over our personal, social and political life and decisions. To the contrary, in order to make progress about how we manage climate change we have to take science off centre-stage. This is not a comfortable thing to say – neither to those scientists who still hold an uncritical view of their privileged enterprise and who relish the status society affords them; nor to politicians whose instinct is so often to hide behind the experts when confronted by difficult and genuine policy alternatives. Two years ago, Tony Blair announced the large, government-backed international climate change conference in Exeter in his G8 year by asking for the conference scientists to ‘identify what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is self-evidently too much’. This is the wrong question to ask of science. What is ‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking; we might gain some insights into the question if we recognise the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists – and politicians – must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth-seeking and reveal honestly and fully the values and beliefs they bring into their scientific activity.

Lack of such reflective transparency is the problem with Unstoppable Global Warming, and with Dennis Avery and Mark Lynas on Today. Such a perspective also opens a chink of weakness in the authority of the IPCC as it reports its latest science findings next week. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy. What matters is whether we have just sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered. All of us alive today have a stake in the future and so we should all play a role in generating sufficient, inclusive and imposing knowledge about the future. Climate change is too important to be left to scientists, least of all the normal ones.

Professor Mike Hulme
School of Environmental Sciences, and Director Tyndall Centre
University of East Anglia
Professor Hulme is currently writing a book “Why we disagree about climate change”

I promise – no more test posts. The technical issues seem to have been resolved and some changes were made that should make this site work better. Apologies to anyone who might have reached this site when it was in a state of suspension, or who, like James Annan, might tried to tried to comment. Instead, he wrote his own post regarding Paul Baer’s post on The worth of an icesheet which has generated some discussion on his blog. That post was also linked to by John Quiggin who has a number of thoughtful posts on the subject.
After spending much of the week learning more than I ever wanted to know about Movable Type I have to do some real work but, over the weekend, will see if I can get the index page to list recent comments and will add a link to the comments feed, which is: http://www.postnormaltimes.net/blog/comments.xml
I also look forward to continuing the books discussion started in the last post on science and policy interfaces. Another blog I would like to acknowledge, that regularly links to climate related posts here, is A few things ill-considered, by Coby Beck, who has written the best cheat sheet you can find for answering those tiresome, redundant and unsubstantiated arguments by the global warming “sceptics.”