Challenging Models in the Face of Uncertainty
Tuesday, 28 September 2010 to Thursday, 30 September 2010Location: Gillespie Conference Centre, Clare College, Queens Road, Cambridge and Mill Lane Lecture Rooms
Keynote Lecture 1
How do Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority?
Climate models have become central to the unfolding story of climate change. Climate models underpin the knowledge claims and risk assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, activity which powerfully shapes political narratives of climate change. Climate models are essential for the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change; and they offer access to the future by simulating the climatic consequences of the development pathways we have chosen and are choosing. Climate models have therefore acquired significant authority in the contemporary world: they exercise power and influence over the academy, over policy debates, over the human imagination. The question I wish to answer in this lecture is ‘How do climate models gain and exercise this authority?’ There are two inter-related dimensions to this question which need examination: the source of climate models’ epistemic authority and the source of their social authority. Epistemic authority comes from models using mathematical expressions of physical theory to represent reality. And yet climate models remain significant abstractions and simplifications of reality. Climate models’ social authority resides in the interactions between scientific practices and political interests which endow models with the status of trustworthy ‘witnesses’. To assist in this investigation, a four-fold typology of climate model reliability will be developed: coding precision; statistical accuracy; methodological quality; and social acceptability.
Keynote Lecture 2
Lord Krebs Kt FRS (Principal, Jesus College, Oxford; Chairman, House
of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee)
Risk, Uncertainty and Regulation
Professor Dan Kahan (Yale Law School)
Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication
The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the impact of group values on individuals' beliefs about the consequences of putatively dangerous activities. Research has identified cultural cognition as an important source of public disagreement over myriad issues, from climate change to vaccination of schoolgirls for HPV, from nanotechnology to gun ownership. My talk will describe this research. I will focus on identifying the discrete psychological mechanisms that cultural cognition comprises, and on the design of science communication strategies aimed at neutralizing their tendency to polarize individuals of diverse outlooks.
Professor Melissa Leach (University of Sussex)
Imagining and Negotiating Pathways in an Age of Anxiety and Incomplete Knowledge
Complex global dynamics around climate change, food and
pandemic disease produce a host of situations that make policymakers and
publics alike anxious. Dominant approaches, supported by powerful cognitive,
institutional and political pressures, often imagine and seek to act on such
situations as if they involved a particular, narrow notion of risk, assuming
that threats can be calculated, controlled and managed. Yet complex challenges
implicate a far wider variety of kinds of incomplete knowledge where
understandings of possible future outcomes are more intractable. Some of these
involve uncertainty, where the possible outcomes are known but there is no
basis for assigning probabilities. Other situations involve ambiguity, where
there is disagreement over the nature of the outcomes, or different groups
prioritize concerns that are incommensurable. And some social, technological
and ecological dynamics involve ignorance, where we don't know what we don't
know, and the possibility of surprise is ever-present. Drawing on health and
agricultural illustrations from the global South, this presentation explores
how and why powerful imaginings and pathways of intervention so often downplay
these broader dimensions of incomplete knowledge. An appreciation of these
wider dimensions is essential if we are to avoid the dangers of creating
illusory, control-based approaches to complex and dynamic realities, and of
imposing definitions of threat and legitimate anxiety that ride roughshod over
diverse social sensibilities and concerns. Addressing the full implications of
incomplete knowledge requires, it is argued, methods and practices that involve
flexibility, diversity, learning and reflexivity; deliberation that embraces
diverse anxieties and judgements about the future, and a politics that enables
alternative pathways to be recognised and pursued.
Professor Steve Rayner (University of Oxford)
Handbags and Goat Entrails
This paper will explore the role of models as boundary objects in science for policy assessments, their function as oracles in guiding and justifying the actions of The Modern Prince, and their susceptibility to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Professor Johan Rockström (Stockholm University)
Building Resilience in an Era of Rapid Global Change
Earth system science over the past decades has advanced our understanding of the functioning of the planet, and the impacts of human pressures on the systems on Earth. The exponential rise in environmental impacts are causing concern at the planetary scale, which combined with scientific advancements of the risks of non-linear change (crossing tipping elements or thresholds) in sub-systems on Earth, raise – for the first time – the question whether humanity may be undermining the stability and ability of the Planet to sustain human development as we know it. This paper explores the challenges of understanding and building resilience in the current era of rapid global change. The new Planetary Boundaries framework is presented, which is aimed at guiding governance and management of uncertainty and risks of non-linear change in key components of the Earth system. Resilience, as defined in this presentation, includes capacities of social-ecological systems to deal with change and continue to develop, and includes three key attributes – the ability to persist in a desired state, the ability to adapt to unavoidable change, and the ability to transform to a new desired state in the face of crisis. At the global scale, the argument is made that our sustainability focus in terms of building resilience, must focus on active stewardship, across scales, for persistence in our current desired Holocene state, which in turn poses a grand challenge for inter- and trandisciplinary science on global sustainability.
Professor Andrew Stirling (University of Sussex)
From Risk Regulation to Innovation Governance: Reconciling Rationaility, Progress, Precaution and Democracy
Worldwide,
current debates over the ‘regulation of technological risk’ are pervaded by
apparent tensions. In particular, emotive ‘public perceptions’ are repeatedly
portrayed in beleaguered government and business circles, to be in conflict
with ‘sound scientific’ realities. In this view, moves towards more ‘precautionary’
and ‘participatory’ approaches are feared to open the door to ‘irrational
anxieties’ and so help foster an apparently indiscriminate 'anti-technology’
climate. The fear is, that such trends threaten somehow generally to ‘suppress
innovation’ and detract from competitiveness in an apparently one-track global ‘race
to advance technology’. The widely advocated alternative is ‘science based’
decision making, protecting incumbent patterns and directions for innovation
from ‘spurious interference’ by politics. In this talk, I will argue that each
of these understandings are not only mistaken, nor just intrinsically
unscientific in their associated rationales. They are also fundamentally
undermining of the real progressive, enlightening and empowering potentials of
science and technology themselves.
The
argument will begin by documenting and examining the ways in which the tensions
summarised above are highlighted in contemporary high-level policy making on
technology risk. It will then compare these representations with well-established
cross-disciplinary understandings of the real nature of scientific progress and
technology change. These show that science and technology can (at every
juncture) evolve in a variety of different directions. And innovation in every
case is typically far wider than science and technology alone, being both
driven by – and embodied in – far more distributed cultural structures and
social practises. Inherent uncertainties and ambiguities are thus compounded in
obscuring what constitutes the ‘best’ or ‘most viable’ directions for progress.
Yet the realities of constrained resources, market dynamics and institutional
power in a finite world, mean that not all feasible or desirable innovation trajectories
can – or will or should – be pursued to their full potential. Likewise, conventional
high-level policy representations of public understandings of science and
technology are also well documented to be persistently deficient in a number of
ways. Contrary to expedient caricatures, public perceptions of science and
technology are actually highly discerning as between contrasting trajectories
and contexts for research and innovation. Mischaracterised ‘zero tolerance’ of
risk is actually better understood as an aversion to disingenuous denial of
uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance. There is widespread public appreciation
for independence and scepticism in science and an empathy for humility over the
role that science can legitimately play in policy making.
It
is on this basis, that I will conclude that there are in fact no necessary
tensions between imperatives for rationality, progress, precaution and
democracy in the regulation of technological risk. Any reasoned understanding
of scientific and technological progress must acknowledge the intrinsic
plurality of possible pathways. When we escape from ‘science based’,
‘one-track’, ‘race to the future’ rhetorics, it follows rationally that
questions of scientific and technological progress are pervaded by social
values, economic interests and political aspirations. This expands attention in
risk regulation, away from polarised questions over: “how safe?”, “yes or no?”;
“how much?”; “how fast?” and “who leads?” Instead are raised more searching and
explicitly political queries over “which way?”; “who says?” and “why?” As
restricted notions of risk regulation thus progress towards more enlightened
understandings of innovation governance, we face the prospect of reconciling
apparently contending pressures for scientific rigour, technological robustness
and democratic legitimacy. There exists a variety of concrete appraisal
methods, institutional practices and political procedures that can help
practically in realising this potential. But it is only by understanding the open
and plural social dimensions of science, technology and innovation, that we can
hope truly to realise the full diversity and promise of human ingenuity.
