**Post by Andrew Dessler

It has been argued on this web site that it is impossible to receive advice on science independent of political considerations. I disagree and suggest in this post a process for how it might be achieved. The process relies on scientific assessments: summaries of the scientific literature that are produced by expert scientists. Assessments connect the domains of science and democratic politics, but are distinct from both. They differ from science because rather than advancing the active, contested margin of knowledge on questions that are important for their intrinsic intellectual interest, they seek to make consensus statements of present knowledge and uncertainty on questions that are important because of their implications for decisions. They differ from democratic policy debate because they reflect deliberation over questions among scientific experts based on their specialized knowledge, not among all citizens or their representatives over what is to be done.

Here’s how the process would optimally work. Policymakers would determine the positive (scientific) questions of importance to them on some issue. This would likely be an iterative process, where scientists and policymakers together identify which scientific issues are most important for a particular issue. For the climate debate, the important questions might be: 1) is the Earth warming? 2) are human activities to blame? 3) what kind of warming do we expect over the next century? These questions would then be passed to the assessment body, which would use the existing peer-reviewed literature to determine the scientific consensus on those issues, and produce from that a report that is itself peer reviewed by outside experts. A good example of this process in action is the National Academy review of the IPCC Working Group I report initiated by the Bush Administration in 2001. The White House provided a list of questions, and the NAS panel responded to them.

Under this model, the questions investigated by the scientific assessment might have an obvious political agenda. This would not invalidate the non-political “honest broker” status of the assessment, however, since the political agenda is that of the policymakers who determined the questions, not the assessment scientists.

In one of Pielke’s “honest broker” posts, he posed a question about giving advice on where to eat. According to the assessment model described here, if a policymaker asks “where should I eat?”, an expert advisor should balk. Answering this question clearly requires the expert make some value judgments about what kind of dinner the policymaker wants. Rather, the expert should insist that the policymaker reconfigure the request into a series of specific positive questions that can be addressed by facts alone, without any value judgments by the expert: “Where is the nearest vegetarian restaurant?” “Which restaurants have entrees under $20?” “Where can I get a dinner that follows the Atkin’s diet?” etc. Such questions can be answered without the expert assuming any normative values because all necessary value choices were made by the policymaker in formulating the questions (e.g., decisions such as whether the dinner should be vegetarian or not).

One key assumption underlying this model is that policymakers are able to decide on a set of specific, well-phrased, positive questions for the assessment body to evaluate. For the climate change problem, this would require a values debate between and within national governments, which I believe would be extremely beneficial for the overall debate. It might be particularly beneficial to entrain skeptics like Joe Barton into the process of defining questions. This would allow them to pose their favorite questions to the assessment panel — e.g., Does the disagreement between the surface and satellite record invalidate the surface record? Is there any merit to Lindzen’s “iris” hypothesis? etc., etc., etc. (FYI, the answers are no and no).

For climate change policy, in the end I believe that it is possible to identify a set of pertinent scientific questions that most (but not all) policymakers would agree are the important questions for determining a policy — although this is supposition on my part. I should also note that defining a question is no guarantee that the scientific community can provide a good answer. Policymakers need to realize that policy still needs to be made, even if science cannot tell them everything they want to know. Uncertainty is a fact of life — deal with it!

Once one decides on a set of scientific questions, the IPCC Working Group I provides a good example of how the scientific community answers specific scientific questions without regard to the scientists’ normative values. [note: I’m not arguing that the IPCC TAR does or does not follow this model, just that the questions addressed in the Working Group I report are all answerable entirely from scientific facts.]

To summarize, if one could get all policymakers to agree to use assessments derived according to this model, then I believe that many of the problems of the politicization of science would disappear. I would be incredibly surprised, however, if it ever happened. There are simply too many incentives for policymakers to argue about science for them to willingly give up the opportunity.