Science or Scienciness?
Posted October 29, 2010 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
In the endless debates and warring proposals about how best to manage the imperiled Bay-Delta ecosystem, it seems that all sides agree on at least one principle: management decisions must be rooted in science. NRDC certainly considers that tenet a core building block for just about any natural resource management decision, including ones involving the Bay-Delta. But underneath this veneer of consensus, different players in the Bay-Delta debates actually mean wildly different things when they refer to “sound science,” some of which bear no relation at all to objective scientific principles or practices. Dr. Jeff Mount from UC Davis recently described these alternatives to real science as crisis science, combat science, science by powerpoint, blog science, and even “science that sounds good” (quite a spin on “sound science”). As “truthiness” is to truth, these brands of “scienciness” are to real science.
On October 26th, the federal district court in Fresno rejected one version of scienciness in the Delta debate. The decision in Family Farm Alliance v. Salazar is an offshoot of the many cases challenging protections for endangered salmon and other fish species in the Delta. The Family Farm Alliance challenged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion under the Information Quality Act, a relatively recently enacted federal statute that is designed to ensure that federal agencies base decisions on high quality information. In response to the Family Farm Alliance’s complaint, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service subjected the 2008 biological opinion to yet another independent peer review (it had already undergone two peer reviews that supported the analysis) by a group of outside experts. This third independent peer review, conducted by PBS&J, largely confirmed the findings of the first two peer reviews, concluding that the analysis in the biological opinion was sound and its protective measures supported. Among other things, the independent peer review concluded that the peer reviewed studies underlying the biological opinion “constitute the best scientific and commercial data available” and support the conclusion in the biological opinion that “pumping may have an important ‘sporadic’ effect on delta smelt abundance, particularly during the past decade.” The independent peer reviewers also pointed out that “[a]nything that contributes to lengthening the recovery period increases the risk of setting recovery back even further because, in a sporadic impact scenario, it increases the probability that another major impact will introduce a setback to recovery.” Finally, the independent peer review report states that “[t]he episodic frequency of catastrophic impacts on survival can make the difference between survival and extirpation when the population is small.”
This, of course, was not the kind of science that sounded good to the Family Farm Alliance, so, even though they had pressed to have this independent scientific review of the 2008 biological opinion conducted, they fought like crazy to keep the PBS&J report from being considered in the very courtroom where they were challenging the scientific basis of the biological opinion.
The court rejected Family Farm Alliance’s claims this time around, but we are far from winning the war of science against scienciness. As Dr. Mount points out:
The Delta has been embroiled in combat science for decades. Combat science usually involves the selective use of facts or analyses to advance the political or legal position of one group and/or to disadvantage the position of another. … But combat science is not science, because the goal is principally to win, not to advance understanding through the objective collection of facts and the testing of hypotheses. …In the past year, the funding, sophistication and effectiveness of combat science has steadily increased. Indeed, the state and federal water contractors have decided to form their own science program to compete within the scientific adhocracy. Their first efforts indicate intent to wage combat science with great enthusiasm.
Here’s hoping that real science will win the day before too much more damage is done to the Delta.
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Comments
Mike Wade — Nov 1 2010 01:02 PM
This court decision did not reject the Family Water Alliance's petition on grounds that the science used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is valid. In fact, the judge has already ruled that FWS's science in formulating its biological opinion that governs Delta flows is lacking. The judge's ruling explained that the Information Quality Act, upon which the Alliance brought its lawsuit, is insufficiently specific with respect to deadlines and so the Alliance's complaint was moot on procedural grounds. The court did not rule on the science or the substance of the Alliance's complaint. This blogger's attempt to paint over the judge's decision with a "scientific paint brush" is false and misleading.
Mike Wade
California Farm Water Coalition
Kate Poole — Nov 1 2010 01:39 PM
Byron,
I'm glad to hear that SFCWA's new science program will "be subject to the same scrutiny and standards of all other published research." Previously, one of the contractors' star witnesses in the cases challenging the biological opinions for threatened and endangered fish species in the Delta, Dr. Richard Deriso, expressed some disdain for those standards, including peer review and in-depth knowledge of the ecosystem and species on which he was opining, as reflected in this excerpt from a transcribed court hearing on April 6, 2010:
Q. And have you conducted any field studies of Delta smelt?
A. No.
Q. And were you part of the Pelagic Organism Decline studies
that many scientists have participated in over the years?
A. No.
Q. Would you call yourself a Delta smelt biologist?
A. No.
Q. And why is peer review considered important when validating scientific analyses?
A. It's not.
Q. You wouldn't give any more weight to a peer reviewed study than you would to a non-peer reviewed study?
A. No.
Kate
Dan Keppen — Nov 1 2010 04:27 PM
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2008 issued a biological opinion for California’s delta smelt that contained numerous deficiencies, which Judge Wanger has detailed in several of his other rulings on these issues. As one of the attorneys who has been arguing against the correction of these defects, Ms. Poole knows better.
The Information Quality Act (IQA) provides a mechanism for the public to request corrections in documents of this kind, but when the Family Farm Alliance formally asked FWS to correct 25 specific defects in the biological opinion, the agency first delayed making any response, then rejected our request, and when we appealed, they rewrote all of the issues we raised and instead addressed only the questions they deigned to answer.
In his ruling, Judge Wanger did not question the substance of any of our
complaints, but nevertheless ruled that our filing was moot on procedural grounds. He concluded that IQA itself is insufficiently specific with respect to deadlines or the adequacy of an agency’s response to such a request. As for FWS’ failure to conduct an independent review of the shortcomings in its own scientific analysis, Judge Wanger determined that the federal government has not established “enforceable standards” to ensure the objectivity and independence of the peer review process.
Although we are disappointed with the outcome, Judge Wanger’s ruling provides a valuable roadmap to the points where improvements are needed at the federal level to ensure that the government’s scientific analysis is competently performed, based on the best available science, independently reviewed, and subject to appropriate public comment and correction.
While the Delta smelt may be the catalyst in this particular case, the Alliance’s involvement was driven by an effort to determine whether the IQA might help ensure that the ESA and other environmental laws aren't wielded as clubs, but rather, serve their intended purposes. The all-important question of whether the government used the best available scientific data in the delta smelt case remains to be decided, and we are optimistic that we will prevail on that issue.
Dan Keppen
Executive Director of the Family Farm Alliance
Byron Buck, Executive Director, SFCWA — Nov 1 2010 04:38 PM
Kate, thanks. SFCWA is not a party to the litigation and our Science Program has no role in it. But I think Dr. Deriso's point has some validity to it. The normal "peer review and publish" process of producing scientific research is no panacea and we recognize its limitations. Hopefully the Delta Science Program and Independent Science Board can take us to the next level, designing ways to compare and contrast different published work and put forth testable hypothesis that can lead us to management actions that improve the ecosystem. If the next thirty years play out like the last thirty, there will only be losers all around.