…One word: economics. While the core logic of PNS seems solid – the hard science only goes so far – in the details, its practitioners seem to neglect any solutions or approaches other disciplines have found around these same sorts of problems. Social sciences can get you systems theories, ways to reduce complexity, risk tolerances, and even chaos theory these days. According to Sardar, “Indeed, it is ethics, and only ethics, that can guide us out of the postnormal impasse.” If that’s true, than the entire global warming debate is going to devolve into people saying, “trust me”, which will only muddy the waters even further.

I know readers don’t come here for reasons I haven’t been blogging – mostly complexities in my personal life, but I would also like to get beyond arguing with contrarians and in the future, would like to bring the focus of this blog to creating a proper place for science (the notion of restoring it to a proper place rests on the assumption that it had one to begin with), and how it might help navigate the backloop to some new normal.

Sorry for long absence. Just to say that while some people see PNS as ‘tailor-made for the denialist crowd’, others see it as a substitution of political correctness for scientific integrity, and hence a cheats’ charter for the warmistas. I’ve also seen PNS quoted casually and completely erroneously. I suppose that all that is the inevitable price to pay for a concept becoming popular.

Our Lisbon workshop on Reconciliation was a great success. Everyone was rather pleased to see that those on the other side were really quite human after all. And the spirit of civility really did work. There were some sharp exchanges, and also some useful technical discussions and agreement to work on particular disagreements.

All the best -

Jerry

I also want to notice that it is difficult to take the precautionary principle, or (not always equivalent) taking the worst scenario, as the principle, though it is a good as a hint. Our outlook about continuous variables does not usually have a well-defined “high end”. There is some possibility of a very high value to happen, but we cannot assign it a quantitative value of probability, except saying that the probability is very low. Then whether we should include such a scenerio depends on individual value judgements rather than scientific assessments. Perhaps we had better taking the high end of such outcomes that quantitative probability can be assigned, taking notice that we technically exclude rare possibilities.

(key points in my next post that I need to finish. Pressure is on…)

But, scientists can be still “normal” in the Kuhnian sense when they work with hydrology in a non-stationary (or post-normal, in a sense) world. They continue publishing academic papers in Water Resources Research of AGU, for example.

It seems really post-normal (in Kuhnian sense) to me that scientists are sometimes asked for what they cannot answer with confidence. Then, the society, including the scientists, must develop adequate combination of questions and answers. Perhaps we need a new type of semi-experts (interactional experts, in terms of Harry Collins and Robert Evans) to adjust questions considering both what society requests and what scientists can answer.

BTW this is what TB was babbling about

If we increase the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere, the level at which energy can be radiated to space rises also because of increased absorption, but since this higher level is colder and the pressure and density are lower, the doorway becomes narrower, and the surface has to warm more in order to shove the same amount of energy out and restore the balance with the incoming energy carried by the sunlight.