The Post-Normal Times

For all of the European visitors to this site, Randy Newman sings a few words in defense of America, well, sort of…

Hat Tip goes to Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex blog, who also has a good post about The Certainty Bias typically found in political decision-making. I’ll come back to the subject of the title of this post…

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

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

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

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.

Why would anyone pay $10,000 for an essay about the weaknesses of climate models for policy purposes when all they need to do is get a couple of modelers in the same room, each trying to demonstrate that their model is bigger, better and more policy relevant than the other one or anything else out there? One does not need to be skeptical or in denial of the science that supports the findings of the IPCC to have concerns about whether or which Global Climate Models are relevant and useful for policy purposes. However, “normal” skepticism and disagreements within the scientific community, which are inherent in the process of science, tend to be downplayed in the policy arena where consensus based on information available at the time of decision-making is necessary to inform policy – the reason for having bodies such as the IPCC, to conduct a more extended process of peer review. A second reason for downplaying normal skepticism and uncertainty is fear that it will be exploited and distorted by denialists of human induced climate change, whose main purpose is to foment doubt and confusion, by challenging scientific findings in the media, thereby circumventing the IPCC review process – (a topic addressed also in this previous post).

I was going to write a longer piece about the Guardian story “Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study – that received almost as much if not more commentary than the release of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, but David Roberts and Andrew Dessler have
just done that in an excellent post at Gristmill that explains why “bashing climate denialists still makes good copy but is increasingly beside the point.” Since they have nicely summarized all of the background information and I wholeheartedly agree with their argument, I’ll just add a few points. But read their article – and also comments on it by Ken Green from AEI, who, with Steve Hayward, made the offer on behalf of AEI.

What is upsetting is not so much the amount offered – ok, $10,000 is more than I usually get to write a review paper but is not exorbitant by standards of pay for journalists, and it is no surprise that the generation of empty soundbites and predictable narratives are more highly valued than substance…Or even the critique of models. The real problem is the way AEI is expected to use the critiques they solicited. But intended or expected use isn’t news. Even less fitting into news narratives is a problematic assumption inherent in the wording of the original request, that scientific models are some sort of a crystal ball:

we are looking for . . . a well-supported but accessible discussion of which elements of climate modeling have demonstrated predictive value that might make them policy-relevant and which elements of climate modeling have less levels of predictive utility, and hence, less utility in developing climate policy.

Although AEI does appear from its list of climate-related publications to engage at least some credible scholars, some of whom even support a carbon tax, Green’s and Hayward’s intent can be inferred from the title of another website where they posted a personal rebuttal, The
Great Global Warming Myth, subtitled Consensus does not = science. The site also prominently features a picture that ridicules Al Gore. So their claimed motive, made in a second letter, about wanting to “break out of the straightjacket” in which debate about climate policy is framed as being “between so-called ’skeptics’ and so-called ‘alarmists’ doesn’t pass the laugh test:

First, in the public mind at least (which is to say, the news media) climate change has tended to be caught in a straightjacket between so-called “skeptics” and so-called “alarmists,” with seemingly little room left in the middle for people who may have reasonable doubts or heterodox views about the range of policy prescriptions that should be considered for climate change of uncertain dimension. This perception is mistaken, of course, as Andrew Revkin’s recent New York Times article on “an emerging middle ground” on climate change made evident. Nonetheless, we would like to attempt to break out of this straightjacket and see if it is possible to create a space for an identifiable “third way” of thinking about the problem that is similar to the various “third way” approaches to other social policy problems that were popular in the 1990s.

The original letters, and the response of AEI president Chris De Muth can be found here.

Regarding the use of models in policy – I would gladly accept even just $5,000 from AEI to write an essay on the utility or not of mega-models for purposes of informing policy and on what kind of information is most useful for decision-making. But with a caveat: they would have to convince me that they intend to engage in “good faith” negotiations of climate policy, and make arguments on their scientific merits. They could start by actually disavowing the “so-called” skeptics, cease and desist from labeling Al Gore, or anyone presenting well established scientific evidence as “alarmists.” Ken Green and Steve Hayward could also start by withdrawing their post from The Great Global Warming Myth website.

Bashing denialists is not simply beside the point but is not an effective way to respond to Global Dumbing – which does nonetheless need to be responded to. To learn more about sources of Global Dumbing, see this Special Report by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler. For more on the consequences, stay tuned.