Discerning Experts

Discerning Experts Discerning Experts The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER, NAOMI ORESKES, DALE JAMIESON, KEYNYN BRYSSE, JESSICA O’REILLY, MATTHEW SHINDELL, AND MILENA WAZECK University of Chicago Press chicago and london The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60196- 0 (cloth) isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60201- 1 (paper) isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60215- 8 (e- book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226602158.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Oppenheimer, Michael, author. | Oreskes, Naomi, author. | Jamieson, Dale, author. | Brysse, Keynyn, author. | O’Reilly, Jessica, 1978– author. | Shindell, Matthew, author. | Wazeck, Milena, author. Title: Discerning experts : the practices of scientific assessment for environmental policy / Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynyn Brysse, Jessica O’Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck. Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018021455 | isbn 9780226601960 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226602011 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226602158 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Environmental sciences—Research—Evaluation. | Environmental sciences—Research—Evaluation—Case studies. | Acid rain—Research— United States—Evaluation. | National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (U.S.) | Ozone layer depletion—Research—Evaluation. | Sea level—Research—Antarctica— Evaluation. | Environmental policy—Research—United States. | Research— Evaluation. | Expertise. Classification: lcc ge70 .o 66 2019 | ddc 363.7/0561—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021455 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper). We dedicate this book to Stephen H. Schneider (1945– 2010) friend, colleague, inspiration and Bert Bolin (1925– 2007) for his foresight and steady leadership Contents Preface • ix List of Abbreviations • xiii 1 The Need for Expert Judgment 1 2 Assessing Acid Rain in the United States: The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program 19 3 Assessing Ozone Depletion 81 4 Assessing the Ice: Sea Level Rise Predictions from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, 1981– 2007 127 5 Patrolling the Science/Policy Border 171 6 What Assessments Do 195 Conclusion 211 List of Interviews • 223 Notes • 227 Bibliography • 257 Index • 273 Preface This book, and the project it embodies, originated with a chance encounter between Naomi Oreskes and Michael Oppenheimer at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union at the end of 2006. Oreskes has a long involvement in questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, from the perspective of both a geologist and a science studies scholar. Oppenheimer is a climate scientist with a long record of participation in ozone and climate assessments, including the then- ongoing Fourth Assessment Report of the In- tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he had become intrigued by the processes by which experts decide on matters of fact and uncertainty and how expert judgment has sometimes gone awry. Both were curious about the inner workings of assessments and how scientists arrived at their con- clusions. Oreskes and Oppenheimer engaged the interest of Dale Jamieson, a philosopher of science who had studied the National Acid Precipitation As- sessment Program. Together the three designed a project to investigate how assessments operate in practice— how assessors come to their views and make the requisite judgments about the state of scientific knowledge. International expert assessments have become an approach favored by governments for obtaining advice on the science, economics, and policy options available to confront large- scale environmental problems. Assess- ments that emerged in the 1970s altered both the policy landscape and the practice of environmental science. Understanding how assessments operate requires reconstructing the deliberations of expert participants, who reach judgments about what is known and what is uncertain in the scientific and political context of their times. x preface Previous work, such as studies carried out by the Global Environmen- tal Assessment Project,1 focused on aspects of environmental assessments that render them effective in the policy domain. In contrast, our study is about scientific experts and the processes by which questions are framed and judgments are rendered within assessments. The focus of our project is largely internal to the institutions performing assessments and to the deliberations among authors. Our initial work centered on a series of assessments of the behavior of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), initiated by the project’s first postdoctoral fellow, Jessica O’Reilly, an ethnographer experienced in studying Antarctic scientists. Soon the project, dubbed Assessing Assessments, received support from the National Science Foundation. Over time, we were joined by three additional highly talented postdoctoral fellows: Keynyn Brysse, a historian of paleontology who has examined major controversies, including the mass extinction debates and the reclassifications of the Burgess Shale organisms; Milena Wazeck, a historian of science and expert on Albert Einstein and controversies over the theory of relativity; and Matthew Shindell, a historian of science with a focus on earth and planetary sciences, and the biog- rapher of American chemist Harold Urey. Their participation in the project allowed us to expand our focus to two additional sets of assessments: the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) and the multiple national and international assessments of ozone depletion. Our methods consisted of interviews of participants and analyses of archival records. We focused on these particular assessments for several reasons. First, these were all assessments of earth and environmental science (our primary expertise and interest) that played a significant role in crucial public policy debates of the past 40 years. The various assessments of ozone (chapter 3), for instance, contributed directly to the development of international law, including the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which has helped to protect the very existence of life on earth. Con- versely, some argue that NAPAP (chapter 2) contributed to delay in US policy on acid rain. While action on climate change to date has not been com- mensurate with the scale of the problem, there is no question that the WAIS assessments we studied (chapter 4) addressed a momentous question: Will climate change cause a large part of one of earth’s two remaining ice sheets to disintegrate, precipitating a sea level rise sufficient to destroy much of worldwide coastal civilization? Second, many of these assessments were very large, engaging hundreds of scientists and costing many millions of dollars. Indeed, they comprise a preface xi significant fraction of all work in earth and environmental science over the past several decades. The first phase alone of NAPAP, for example, lasted 10 years, cost nearly $600 million, and made major contributions to the scientific understanding of the relationship between industrial pollution, the hydrologic cycle, and lakes, forests, and soils. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), discussed here in the context of assessment of WAIS, can be seen as the culmination of much of the earlier work in environmental assessment. The human and financial resources devoted to the IPCC over the past 31 years run into hundreds of thousands of person- hours and tens of millions of dollars of direct expenses. While one can argue about the efficacy of the IPCC in helping the world to prevent dangerous anthro- pogenic interference in the climate system, there is no doubt that the IPCC represents an important mechanism by which the world has tried to come to grips with this difficult, thorny, and potentially existential question and is thus worthy of study in its own right. It has also deeply affected the development of atmospheric science and related fields. We argue in this book that assessments do not just summarize existing knowledge but also create new knowledge and frame research agendas beyond the assessment. Scientific assessments have become a significant locus of scientific knowledge pro- duction and therefore are important to study along with fieldwork, labora- tory practices, and other more familiar topics in science studies. Third, we focused on these assessments because the three sets of epi- stemic communities involved overlapped to a significant degree, with many individuals being part of two and in some cases all three of these communities in one capacity or another. Taken together, these factors helped us to avoid the problem of making inferences across widely differing professional norms, although the range of expertise within any one of these assessments is very broad. We make no claim that these assessments are representative of all assessments made everywhere in the

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