Re: [asa] Cooney Testimony: A Study on What is Wrong with Science Policy

*Government can and does choose to live in never-never land and how the
current climate policy is being derived here reflects this. The stakes are
too high and we need the most nimble and the most fact-based science
policies ever. Top-down-only policy making simply will not work in this
environment.*

Rich -- I think you're right on here. This is one of the reasons I can't
accept most of the proposals that have been floated so far -- they all are
"top down," bureacratic, overly centralized, and subject to ossification and
capture by special interests.

On 3/26/07, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've watched the first third of the congressional hearing and I have some
> thoughts on how best to reform science policy. The first thought was the
> wasted time spent on this whole "follow the money meme" which in my opinion
> is intellectually lazy. It is not relevant who Cooney's previous client was.
> This should have been clear when he was deposed by staff that he was merely
> attempting to do a good faith effort to be loyal to his then current client
> and not his previous one. What was also clear was that there was severe
> structural problems with how science policy is done that transcends any mere
> example of corruption.
>
> Cooney claimed that he was making sure that any budget request matched the
> science in the NAS 2001 report. His lack of science training was evident of
> applying uncertainty in one area (predicting local effects of climate
> change) to all areas of climate science. This was passed off by the
> committee as "thinking like a lawyer" rather than "thinking like a
> scientist". If I was David O. I would be supremely insulted that Cooney's
> extremely sloppy and non-evidence-based thinking was considered indicative
> of his profession. Cooney not having the intellectual chops to do this,
> however, masks an even more fundamental problem which is indicated by the
> next example.
>
> Cooney deleted a reference to the accuracy of the models improving from
> the record because the 2001 report said their was inaccuracy. Unless the
> report was prescient it would not know how much better the models would get.
> In fact, the report called for more funding of climate research to decrease
> the innaccuracies. The research that followed bore fruit and we are in much
> better shape now than when the report was generated. Cooney used this report
> -- and it appeared that this was a matter of policy rather than personal
> preference -- as the sole basis to judge the science of anything that came
> out later. The fact that Cooney did that poorly doesn't take away from that
> this whole approach is ill-advised. The science was made to force fit to a
> policy derived from a 2001 report. The problem is that plan is thus static.
>
> Contrast this with how planning is done in industry. A plan is crafted by
> management. As the plan is executed by technical staff there are what are
> known as exceptions. If the exceptions are significant enough the plan is
> modified. In the case of climate science we had an upside exception. The
> risk management paid off and allows for more aggressive decision making as
> the uncertainties are now much lower. When Cooney or other policy makers see
> exceptions between the original plan and the documents that cross their
> desks it's time to poll the authors and modify the policy accordingly. They
> should not just delete or change the text. The same should have been the
> case when the media was asking for interviews concerning 2005 temperatures.
>
> For those of us in industry, this is a duh. This reflects what people at
> my work humorously refer to as Blinne's Reality Principle. If you break
> reality, reality breaks you. We cannot choose to ignore physics because our
> customers will not accept non-working chips. Government can and does choose
> to live in never-never land and how the current climate policy is being
> derived here reflects this. The stakes are too high and we need the most
> nimble and the most fact-based science policies ever. Top-down-only policy
> making simply will not work in this environment.
>
> This also shows that the approach of not picking "winners" for green
> technology but let the market do it is a wise one. The reason why the EV-1
> failed but the Prius succeeeded was because the former was done via a
> government program and the latter by Toyota. Industry will probably be
> forever more nimble than government. But, industry cannot do policy and the
> policy makers need to learn from our processes to do a better job.
>

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Received on Mon Mar 26 14:34:31 2007