Pekka Pirilä on Energy

In his book “The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics” Roger A. Pielke, Jr. considers four possible roles for scientists: The Pure Scientist, The Science Arbiter, The Issue Advocate and The Honest Broker.

The two first roles apply to issues, where scientists can agree on a range of answers that does not leave space for significant value based disagreement and controversies. Large and even extreme uncertainties may be present in pure science, but they do not affect policies or politics in foreseeable future when these roles are applicable. The Science Arbiter gives advice on policy relevant issues and his advice is taken into account without major disagreement.

When large uncertainties are present and allow for opposing value based choices for important policy decisions, the role of The Science Arbiter becomes impossible. The Pure Scientist may then also face difficulties in pursuing his or her research e.g. in securing funding for research that appears to lead to directions deviating from prevailing preferences. Under these conditions many scientists may turn into issue advocates trying to influence the policies to reach better agreement with their own views on the scientific knowledge and with their own value judgments based on these scientific views. Many scientists do this based on purely personal reasons, some are drawn by their scientific colleges, but scientists are also used in issue advocacy by outside political actors who seek support for their goals by picking from a wide spectrum of scientific statements only those favorable for their cause. In this process the statements become often overly simplistic and may leave the scientist in an awkward position.

The book of Pielke accepts that issue advocacy is a natural position and that politics is about issue advocacy, but it emphasizes the need for the fourth role for scientists: The Honest Broker, whose goal is not to support certain policies and help in narrowing the choices to that advocated, but to widen the view on possible paths by describing the pros and cons of the alternatives – and possibly adding new paths, which might provide basis for commonly acceptable compromises.

The idea of honest brokers is compelling but it is far from straightforward in practice. All individuals have their subjective preferences and all scientists have their own differing views on issues where uncertainties are large. Thus Pielke appears to favor the idea that more often The Honest Broker would be a group of people, a panel, than an individual scientist. But the problem remains. How can we know that The Honest Broker is not a stealth issue advocate? How can even the panel itself know that it is not significantly biased? The climate change issue is a strong example of this problem because the reliability estimates of many central results are largely based on scientists’ subjective assessments rather than faultless formal tests.

Many advocates of strong climate policies try to give the impression that the whole issue is settled, the science is strong and supported by The Science Arbiter. Those who do not agree are simply wrong and funded by questionable sources or otherwise misled. The opposite side is equally vehement. They accuse the scientific community of outright wrongdoings or at least of incapability in maintaining scientific objectivity and in accepting the full uncertainty of even the most basic results.

What is the role of the IPCC and what it should be? Its task is defined in its governing principles to be close to The Pure Scientist and many of its procedures are built on this basis. The critics of IPCC typically claim that it has turned to an issue advocate. Others may insist that it should be more strongly an issue advocate or that it should act as a science arbiter or an honest broker. All these views either conclude that IPCC is not really acting as pure scientist or that it should drop the role of a pure scientist. On the other side are those that insist that IPCC should remain as a pure scientist or return to that role if it has lost it.

The role of a pure scientist has the advantage of being objectively better defined than other possible roles of IPCC. It would require an even stricter adherence to objectively justifiable procedures than e.g. the report of The InterAcademy Council has recommended. It might make impossible to write such summaries for policymakers and synthesis reports that IPCC has so far produced. It means that the reports of IPCC would not anymore be as accessible to policymakers as they have been so far. But are there any alternatives for separating issue advocacy from the work of the IPCC. It is certainly not possible to write concise and at the same time policy relevant reports without losing the role of The Pure Scientist. Presenting science to non-science society requires one of the other roles. Some may claim that these summary reports present an objective science arbiter, but this is definitely questionable, and even that goes outside of the role of The Pure Scientist.

What could be done? Perhaps one should indeed make the IPCC to present The Pure Scientist as well as it can be done and to create separate bodies outside of the IPCC to act as Honest Brokers. My idea is to have several competing and mutually complementary Honest Brokers, as full objectivity is not possible to achieve and as its excessive search might make the bodies too passive. Still all these bodies should aim to be honest brokers instead of issue advocates, which will flourish anyway. The role of these additional bodies would be to interpret the scientific knowledge and connect it to other goals and values of the global and national societies. Each of the bodies might emphasize different points of view and different concerns of the society. All of them should have good science background to make them capable in interpreting scientific knowledge. Separation of these interpretative tasks from the tasks of IPCC, would allow IPCC perform better in those tasks that its governing principles define.