Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy

by Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action. Through their close look at environmental assessments involving acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise, the authors explore how experts deliberate and decide on the scientific facts about problems like climate change. They also seek to understand how the scientists involved make the judgments they do, how the organization and management of assessment activities affects those judgments, and how expertise is identified and constructed.
 
Discerning Experts uncovers factors that can generate systematic bias and error,  and  recommends how the process can be improved. As the first study of the internal workings of large environmental assessments, this book reveals their  strengths and weaknesses,  and explains what assessments can—and cannot—be expected to contribute to public policy and the common good.
 

Genres: Science, Environment, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2019

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

The team of authors has done an amazing job in thinking through the issues of an academic genre of writing that serves the public today as the most sustained direct influence of scientific policy-advice there is, if the IPCC General Assessments are any indication. There's a lot here that is careful, well-measured, and frankly useful for understanding the binds that scientists put themselves in and the history of use and abuse to which assessments are put. Very recommended.

[Nicolas Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brief overview of recent scientific assessments is an interesting exploration of the various roles scientists play in influencing environmental policy. Far from dispassionate purveyors of "objective" information, Oppenheimer et al. convincingly argue that scientists have always blended questions of science, policy, and values in conducting assessments. Whether it is explicitly built into the assessment - as in the case of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, which asked for policy recommendations to stem damages from acid rain - or implicitly in scientists' decisions of research questions to prioritize - value judgments are inextricably linked with summarizing and refining science to inform policy.

This book provides a useful overview of how the interplay between science, policy, and societal values played out in three major sets of environmental assessments over the last 40 years: acid rain, ozone, and the potential melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Each of the assessments is summarized in one of the three major chapters in the book - the authors detail the state of the science at the time of the assessment, and perhaps more importantly, the state of scientific uncertainty, and how assessment participants decided to characterize and/or reduce these uncertainties. Some of the strongest points of the book use in-depth interviews and documents to relate how the political contexts (both big-scale national politics, and smaller-scale politics within the scientific community) impacted how each assessment framed the state of the science, and the extent to which the assessments were actually useful for informing policy.

Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case for consciously embracing the value and political judgments that are inherently part of the scientific assessment process, at least as long as these are adjacent to scientists' bodies of expertise. In making this recommendation, the authors draw inspiration from the "scientist as a sentinel" role that was effectively played by several physicists who warned society of the dangers of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. It would have been interesting to have explored this era in more depth in this book, perhaps as a counterpoint to the more institutionalized environmental assessments in more recent times that have strived for "objectivity" - perhaps at the expense of their ability to influence policy.

[Floris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice assessment of assessments. The authors, consisting of several historians (of science), an anthropologist, philosopher of science, and climate scientist, tackle the phenomenon of scientific assessments: how they work, how assessors research their conclusions, and what their wider implications are for science and policy. They narrowed down their focus on three primary case studies in the environmental sciences/policy, which form the core of the book: acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise. These are mainly but not exclusively discussed from a US perspective. Padding out the book are a chapter on the need for expert judgement, how experts navigate relationships between science and policy, what implications assessments have, and to sum it all up a short chapter with the primary conclusions of the project.

The analysis is still somewhat limited. Discussions about science-policy relationships, for instance, focus predominantly on the US context, and it isn’t clear to me to what extent the takeaways apply to other kinds of political systems. The sweeping conclusions don’t make it easy to know how widely they apply across the world, even if we only look at the late-20th/early-21st century period. Limitations aside, this book is a great model for how to write these kinds of final project summaries. It’s very clearly written and easy to follow, perhaps because of the multidisciplinary nature of the group. The organisation makes sense and allows readers to read selectively if they want to. The conclusions are plainly stated and to the point.

[Mills College Library]

363.70561 O622 2019