Patrick Brown of The Breakthrough Institute had
an interesting Tweet today. It reminded me of an apocryphal story of the Forest Service’s Dr. Tom Mills, an economist. When working as Station Director at the Pacific Northwest Station during the development of the
ICBEMP. For those of you who weren’t around then, that was the “
Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project.” It was finalized in 2000. I heard it referred to as “ickybump” but have also heard other pronunciations. This was one of those massively expensive and lengthy effort by scientists to do some kind of regional assessment/analysis/planning.
I think it would be interesting, just as with the NWFP, to take an interdisciplinary group not affiliated with the effort to review the original intent and whether it was successful or not. It’s intriguing to me which efforts seem to get a formal “lessons learned” and which do not.
As I recall, I was on a WO review of PNW and Tom Quigley seemed to believe that people who didn’t want tree cutting or grazing would change their minds based on monitoring. I remember thinking “do you really understand these people? What are your alternative hypotheses to “more info, folks will agree?” I also wondered whether the fact that scientists and monitorers would be getting more work (or the Station getting more bucks) make this a bit of a conflict of interest for them?
What disagreements of that time have been resolved since, and which not? Maybe more long-term research on conflict resolution efficacy would have been a useful investment?
Anyway, back to the Tom Mills story.
Supposedly he said something like “I don’t want to see any “shoulds” in this (ICBEMP) report” which led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the authors (according to the story).
Maybe other scientists aren’t as rooted in philosophy as economists. Maybe they are not required to take courses in the philosophy of science. Maybe, since economists get feedback from the real world sooner, and results can be observable to all without sophisticated equipment, many have more humility.
One more ICBEMP economist story.. I remember Richard Haynes remarking that he was surprised to find that the biologists he was working with didn’t use sensitivity analysis in their models. And yet, some lump all this stuff together and claim the authority of “science.” Others among us remain skeptical.
Anyway, back to Patrick’s tweet. Patrick’s background is in atmospheric science although he has recently done some work in wildfire, as we shall see.
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Is high-impact climate science really just “science”?
Greg Mankiw’s, Principles of Macroeconomics textbook makes an interesting distinction between the different roles that economists play: “When economists are trying to explain the world, they are scientists. When they are trying to help improve it, they are policy advisers.” He alludes to Hume’s is-ought distinction, saying scientists make descriptive claims about how the world is, not prescriptive claims about how the world ought to be.
Critically, he says, “Deciding what is good or bad policy is not just a matter of science. It also involves our views on ethics, religion, and political philosophy.” This is a very interesting distinction in the context of high-impact “scientific” publishing on climate change because in order for “science” to be “high-impact” (of sufficient interest to a general readership), it is often incredibly helpful for it to be framed as having important prescriptive implications for contemporary policy debates. The journal Nature, for example, recommends that the end of the abstract/intro paragraph give a “broader perspective” on the findings, which in practice often means “state why these findings are of sufficient interest and palatability to our readership.”
In the climate science landscape, this recommendation often manifests as studies focused on the physical and biological world but concluding with a prescriptive claim about how the world ought to be (a claim that does not actually follow from the study itself because the study is way too narrow to make said claim).
These types of abstracts very much blur the lines between Mankiw’s definition of a “scientist” and a “policy advisor.” What’s particularly insidious is that having a strong prescriptive implication on e.g., reducing greenhouse gas emissions acts as a selection mechanism for what studies get published and amplified as the most important “science”. This muddying of the waters between researchers acting as scientists or policy advisors wouldn’t be such a problem except that the public perceives that a journal like Nature is a scientific journal, and thus, it produces more-or-less authoritative truths, not claims that rely on ethical, philosophical, and moral assumptions. This can be partially remedied if the public understands that the prescriptive statements emanating from these journals are subjective and do not deserve the perceived authority typically bestowed upon the idealized concept of “Science.”
