Wikipedia shows that the curious term used by Mike Hulme, who argues Global Warming can only be met by something called “post-normal” science has a history of use in the environmental movement since the late 1980s and early 90s. I have interspersed the Wikipedia entry describing the term with my own commentary.
Post-Normal Science is a concept developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, attempting to characterise a methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for contemporary conditions. The typical case is when “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.” In such circumstances, we have an inversion of the traditional distinction between hard, objective scientific facts, and soft subjective values. Now we have value-driven policy decisions that are ‘hard’ in various ways, for which the scientific inputs are irremediably ‘soft’.
How are the values that drive these policy decisions derived? From whence do they come? And if their provenance does not derive from scientific fact, who chooses the appropriate values which should drive policy?
We can understand ‘Post-Normal Science’ by means of a diagram, where the axes are ‘systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. When both are low, we have ‘applied science’, the routine puzzle-solving like the ‘normal science’ described by Thomas Samuel Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When either is medium, we have ‘professional consultancy’ for which the examples are the surgeon or the senior engineer. Although their work is based on science, they must always cope with uncertainties, and their mistakes can be costly or lethal. It had once been believed that environmental and general policy problems could be managed at this level, but the great issues of global warming and diverse forms of pollution show that framing and implementing policies must frequently be done before all the facts are in. Thus many problems occur in the high-stakes, high-uncertainty region of the diagram, a condition referred to as ‘post-normal.’
But wait. Weren’t we told that Global Warming was established scientific fact? That the world’s experts agreed on its existence? If so how can Global Warming be in the “high-stakes, high-uncertainty region” where post-normal and not normal science rules? In this special Twilight Zone where all the rules are suspended? The only way it can inhabit this region is if there is a high degree of uncertainty associated with it; in other words if “Global Warming” were only a theory and very iffy one at that. Wikipedia continues.
This is why there must be an ‘extended peer community’ consisting of all those affected by an issue who are prepared to enter into dialogue on it. They bring their ‘extended facts’, that will include local knowledge and materials not originally intended for publication such as leaked official information. There is a political case for this extension of the franchise of science; but Funtowicz and Ravetz also argue that this extension is necessary for assuring the quality of the process and of the product. In recent years the principles and practices of Post-Normal Science have been widely adopted under the title ‘participation’.
What is is this “extended peer community” and what is an “extended fact”? Is it extended like saltwater taffy or extended as in hamburger helper? Like the “values” which drive policy, who chooses these extended peers? What are their qualifications? Can anybody be a peer? All in all, the notion of “post-normal science” seems like a complete contradiction in terms or a perversion of the standard definition of science as commonly understood. It appears to be an elaborate and dishonest attempt to pass off the preferences of a single group as some kind of pseudo-science.
There’s a much simpler term for this dishonest phrase: politics. Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth “Global Warming” may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge. Until “post-normal science” is repudiated as a method of proving “global warming” then both must share the same reputation.
To which commenter Betsybounds noted:
This sounds like something my nephew said while we were together at Christmas. He’s a PhD laureate from a major university, his degree awarded in what I have always thought of as a bogus discipline: Ecology (I’m a geologist, with advanced degrees). He says that science is evolving, and the old concepts of theory, hypothesis, testing and falsification are no longer useful. I told him that, to the extent that it’s evolving into something else, it isn’t science. Well. Instead of actual science (he says), we have to rely on experts and the world must learn to submit to unitary rule under a single master who will know what is best for all. I was amazed that an allegedly well-educated young man with a degree in an alleged science (he even claims that it’s rigorous!) should believe such a thing. I said (calmly, I think), “You’re talking about tyranny.” “Yes! YES!!” he shouted triumphantly, I dare say.
This is what we’re in for if we don’t manage to stop it. I fear for the future, truly I do.
By Jay Lehr
In 1968, when I was serving as the head of a groundwater professional society, it became obvious to some of my colleagues and me that the United States did not have any serious focus on potential problems with its air quality, drinking water quality, surface water quality, waste disposal problems, and contamination that could occur from mining and agriculture. I held the nation’s first Ph.D. in groundwater hydrology, which gave me unparalleled insight into many of these potential problems.
We spoke before dozens of congressional committees, calling attention to mounting environmental pollution problems. We called for the establishment of a federal Environmental Protection Agency, and in 1971 we succeeded. I was appointed to a variety of the new agency’s advisory councils, and over the next 10 years we helped write a variety of legislative bills to make up a true safety net for our environment. These included, among others, the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act); the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act; the Clean Air Act; the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act; and the Comprehensive Environmental Reclamation, Compensation, and Liability Act.
All of these laws worked extremely well in protecting the environment and our citizens’ health, with the exception of the Superfund Law, which proved to be far too overreaching.
Agenda-Driven Turning Point
A turning point occurred roughly a decade after the creation of EPA. Activist groups realized the agency could be used to alter our government by coming down heavily on all human activities regardless of their impact on the environment. From approximately 1981 onward, EPA rules and regulations became less about science-based environmental protection and more about advancing extraneous ideological agendas.
States Ready
It is my very strong belief that most EPA jurisdiction and functions can and should be replaced by a committee of the whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. Each of the individual states have its own environmental protection department, and these are much better at assessing and crafting solutions to local and regional environmental issues than the federal EPA. At the national level, a committee of the whole would do a much better job directing environmental stewardship than the money-hungry and power-hungry federal EPA.
Back in 1971, a federal EPA was necessary because the states did not have environmental protection departments. Now, however, with state environmental departments already providing on-the-ground environmental protection throughout the 50 states, EPA has morphed into an overpowering entity that arrogantly dictates to the 50 states while doing everything possible to protect its power and regulatory turf.
The 50 state agencies are ready to assume full management of our environmental issues. The state agencies already do so, with many states enacting and enforcing environmental rules more stringent than those crafted by EPA. Only the EPA research laboratories should be left in place to answer scientific questions, no longer under the heavy hand of Washington politics.
Workable Phase-Out Plan
We could eliminate 80 percent of EPA’s bloated $8 billion budget and return the money to the people. The remaining 20 percent could be used to fund EPA’s research labs and pull together a committee of the 50 state environmental protection departments to take over EPA’s other responsibilities.
A relatively small administrative structure is all that is necessary to enable the states to work together. The states would have the incentive and the means to act as environmental stewards without the power to impose scientifically unjustified, economically punitive restrictions on a national basis.
We could phase out EPA in five years. It would take one year to prepare the new structure and then four years to phase out the various EPA bureaucracy and programs. As each EPA program is phased out, the committee of the whole would assume the phased-out oversight and responsibilities.
Committee of the Whole Responsibilities
The committee of the whole would quickly determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were crafted under EPA discretion. The committee would then reassess discretionary regulations to ensure wise ones are retained and unwise strictures are revised or repealed. A good procedure for reviewing EPA regulations would require a two-thirds vote of the committee of the whole to revise or repeal an existing EPA regulation.
Environmental stewardship would continue unabated, but without the severe negative consequences resulting from EPA arrogance and overreach.
Until and unless the committee of the whole acts upon an existing regulation, each regulation will remain in force. Therefore, all existing environmental rules and regulations are presumed wise and valid unless the states determine otherwise.
When one considers the initial motivation for creating a federal EPA, a committee of the whole 50 states makes perfect sense as a forward-looking means of ensuring wise and appropriate environmental stewardship. The states are in the best position to assess and address environmental concerns within their respective borders, and a committee of the whole can effectively address environmental issues that are regional or national in nature.
The easy path is the path of least resistance. The easy path is to continue funding and granting increasing power to an out-of-control federal EPA. A wiser path is to recognize that the individual states are ready and willing to provide more commonsense environmental protection.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (lehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
UPDATE: See this story What Global Warming? 2012 Data Confirms Earth In Cooling Trend
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P Gosselin on 7. August 2013
The political beauty about climate data is that it can be easily manipulated in order to fool the public.
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Enlarged
This is the difference in the latest USHCN data from the version prior to the ‘adjustment’ in 2007.
Is there any surprise that every month and season and year ranks among the warmest given they have eliminated the 1930s-1950s warming. See this detailed PDF on the data manipulation and where we really stand with regard to even the last century.
The National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently released its State of the Climate in 2012: Highlights. To no one’s surprise, the report gives the reader the impression that warming is galloping ahead out of control. But their data show just the opposite.
The NOAA says 2012 was the 8th or 9th warmest on record, but fails to mention it was one of the coolest of the decade, and thus confirms the cooling trend. (Above sequence estimated using the chart. Trend line is only approximate). Also see: woodfortrees.org from:1998.
Source: NOAA
When one carefully reads the report, we find that the NOAA findings actually do confirm precisely what the skeptics have been claiming all along:
1. The Earth has stopped warming.
2. The climate models exaggerated future warming. CO2 climate sensitivity is much lower than we first thought.
That’s the real issue at hand.
On global temperatures, the NOAA report itself states (my emphasis): “Four major independent datasets show 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, ranking either 8th or 9th, depending upon the dataset used.”
2012 one of the coldest this decade
But if 2012 is only the 8th or 9th warmest and we are told again and again that almost all the warmest years occurred since 2000, then it can only mean that 2012 was one of the coolest so far this century.
And indeed the above NOAA chart confirms just that. Moreover, the stagnation of the last 15 years defies all computer model projections, thus confirming that the models all exaggerated CO2 climate sensitivity. In order for the models to be correct, the global temperature over the last 6 years would have to be 0.2 to 0.3F warmer.
We suppose that the NOAA and NASA will soon be going to work readjusting the 1998 to 2005 data downwards to get the curve shape they need. Such dubious (and perhaps criminal) manipulation of data has long since become NASA’s “scientific” approach over the recent years. It kind of reminds us of the days when Stalin tried to change history by cutting and pasting photos.
NOAA admits using random weather anecdotes as “data” to show warming.
Now that we see that the global temperature data show there’s been NO WARMING and that the models all exaggerate, how does NOAA arrive at the conclusion that the globe is warming? Answer: They use scattered weather anecdotes as evidence. Something that even 6th grade students learn not to do. Their science is that bad.
The NOAA even admits this: “The report used dozens of climate indicators to track and identify changes and overall trends to the global climate system.” These “climate indicators,” as you are about to see, are merely cherry-picked weather events.
For example the NOAA writes that the Arctic sea ice extent last year reached a record low “during the satellite era”. However, the satellite era only goes back 33 years, and the NOAA couldn’t be bothered to tell readers that low Arctic sea ice also persisted in the 1950s and is all part of natural cycles, and is thus not “unprecedented”. Also read here.
The NOAA in its report also uses a single 4-week-long period of weather over Greenland last summer as conclusive data that our planet is warming. But this is just a weather event.
Another remarkable single event that the NOAA uses is: “A weak La Nina dissipated during spring 2012 and, for the first time in several years, neither El Nino nor La Nina ... prevailed for the majority of the year.” A La Nina naturally disappearing is evidence of global warming? You gotta be kidding.
NOAA’s scientific incompetence reaches a new high
The NOAA just released it’s State of the Climate: Extreme Events chart.
Again the NOAA confuses weather events as “climate events”. The scientists at the NOAA are no longer able to distinguish between a single tropical storm like Sandy and climate. Scientific incompetence has reached a new high.
If you think scientists just couldn’t get anymore incompetent, then think again. NOAA scientists even appear to believe that cold events are now signs of warming. It includes expanding Antarctic sea ice as evidence the globe is warming:
Antarctica sea ice extent reaches record high… reached a record high of 7.51 million square miles on September 26. This is 0.5 percent higher than the previous record high extent of 7.47 million square miles that occurred in 2006 and seven percent higher than the record low maximum sea ice extent of 6.96 million square miles that occurred in 1986.
When the traditional fundamental data stop supporting your claims and you’re scientifically desperate, then I guess you have to resort to fringe weather anecdotes. Who would have thought that the NOAA would devolve to such a low level?
And as the warming stagnation continues, expect a lot more comedy to come from the NOAA in the years ahead.
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By PATRICK J. MICHAELS and PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER
Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
Yesterday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a press release announcing the publication of its “State of the Climate 2012” report. The global media, predictably, are all over it, loving the gloomsaying.
None of it is new. The NOAA report is simply a collection of rehashed stories that have already had their 15 minutes of fame, stories that we (and others) have already commented on, put into perspective, or debunked.
Usually, “Year in Review” type of stories are saved up until the end of the year, but when it comes to climate change, an issue for which the president has declared “we need to act” once a year is apparently not enough. So, NOAA’s “Year in Review” comes out at the end of December and then is rerun like old Seinfeld episodes the next summer.