John Tierney on The Honest Broker
February 24th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
John Tierney of the New York Times has a column and a blog posting up on The Honest Broker. I’ve agreed to answer reader questions over at his blog. If you are a first time visitor to our site, welcome. You can learn more about The Honest Broker here.
Also, anyone interested in a copy of my air capture paper can find it here in PDF and a FAQ page here.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Hi Roger,
This is a question related to a discussion I’m having in a private venue.
Could you give a couple examples of these?
“But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as ‘unqualified’ or ‘unscientific.’”
Thanks,
Mark
February 27th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Mark-
I can’t speak for John Tierney, but the major examples I used in my book are
1. The decision to go to war in Iraq where scientific and other intelligence information was used to say that the world was at risk from Iraq unless an invasion took place.
2. The battle over The Skeptical Environmentalist which started as a stealth political battle through science and devolved into a series of personal attacks on Lomborg.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Hi Roger,
Hmmm…neither of those two examples seems to match very well with:
“…they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise…”
Thanks,
Mark
February 27th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
-3-Mark
Probably best to read the book;-)
February 28th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Mark–
Why do you think those examples don’t line up with the sentence you quote? Both seem to line up fairly well.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Hi Roger,
“Probably best to read the book;-)”
Perhaps, but I’m still trying to deal with my buyer’s remorse about purchasing “Prediction.”
(Seriously, Steve Raymer’s chapter on climate change was particularly disappointing.)
February 28th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Mark- Well, if if you overcome your remorse and want to write a review, good or bad, we’ll run it here . . .
February 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Hi Lucia,
Those two examples don’t seem to be good examples what John Tierney described, because:
1) I don’t think of Iraq as experts pretending to be impartial; I think of it more as politicians ignoring experts or misrepresenting experts.
2) On The Skeptical Environmentalist, certainly Lomborg was denigrated as “unqualified” and “unscientific.” I thought both sides behaved pretty badly in that episode. Neither side admitted when the other had valid points.
March 1st, 2009 at 6:59 am
Mark-
1) Oh? But there were some who provided the politicians with information they preferred to believe. Do you think those advising in the Iraq affair weren’t considered experts? Or that those who provided the information that was accepted by the politicians weren’t pretending to be impartial?
2) So how is The Skeptical Environmentalists not an example? Roger hasn’t said the examples only come from one side. The fact that you see the behavior on both sides of “The Sekptical Environmentalist” debate might appear to be a double-whammy example. It’s not a non-example.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:13 am
In the Iraq situation analysts took bits and pieces of intelligence along with assumptions and extrapolated. Since the CIA, NSA, etc are intelligence experts politicians listened. Everyone was willing to believe the worst about Saddam.
In climate change we have experts looking at the bits and pieces of past climate and trying interpolate to the present (hockey stick comes to mind). They then used this flawed and murky data and attempted to extrapolate. I think that unless you can perfectly model the climate from the end of the last ice age your extrapolation will be flawed. Just as the CIA failed to come up with photos of canisters of poison gas and anthrax. What is needed is science to admit flawed nature of the models and it’s the best they can do-uncertainty.
The Lomborg case was appalling attempt to throttle free speech. Many times peer review papers are later found faulty. Nobody drags them in front of government bodies as was the case in Denmark.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Hi Lucia,
“Oh? But there were some who provided the politicians with information they preferred to believe. Do you think those advising in the Iraq affair weren’t considered experts?”
First off, let me admit that I didn’t follow the whole Iraq lead-in very carefully.
I thought G.W. Bush should have just said, “I’m going into Iraq because Saddam Hussein tried to kill my dad. That’s my main motivation. Anything else is just icing on the cake.” (Seriously. I think the main reason the U.S. invaded Iraq was that G.W. Bush was the president, and Saddam Hussein tried to kill G.H.W. Bush.)
Let’s take the yellowcake from Niger example. Again, I don’t know the details, so I could easily be wrong, but my impression was that the experts realized that there wasn’t any merit to that, but that they were ignored by political players (possibly even G.W. Bush himself).
“Or that those who provided the information that was accepted by the politicians weren’t pretending to be impartial?”
Again, we’d need to discuss specific examples, and I’m not very up on details, but my impression of Iraq is that experts were generally ignored if they said things or presented evidence that didn’t fit what the adminstration (specifically, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney) wanted to do, which was to invade Iraq.
“2) So how is The Skeptical Environmentalists not an example? Roger hasn’t said the examples only come from one side. The fact that you see the behavior on both sides of “The Sekptical Environmentalist” debate might appear to be a double-whammy example.”
Yes, when you put it that way, and I think about it more carefully, I’d say that is indeed a good example of scientists (on both sides) posing as impartial, but not really being impartial. If either side had been truly impartial, they would have freely admitted if the other side had a good point.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Hi Roger,
“Mark- Well, if if you overcome your remorse and want to write a review, good or bad, we’ll run it here . . .”
Thank you, that’s very kind. Right now, I’m juggling a few things (including trying to figure out what California’s water situation will be like in 2100, and how houses can be prevented from burning in wildfires in the U.S. and Australia). But if I get some free time, that would be very interesting. (I’d probably want to focus on Steve Rayner’s chapter…that was the main reason I bought the book.)
Best wishes, and thanks again for the offer,
Mark