Wretchard, congratulations on yet another deeply insightful essay, beautifully put together. Your pursuit of this theme over the past several days is the best available anywhere.
In my view we can summarize the lessons learned as follows:
(1) In our open system, (a) there will always be games being played and (b) the pressures to maintain momentum for ongoing efforts will always appear to be overwhelming.
(2) Such checks and balances as exist come from individual decision makers at every level in the system.
(3) So what really matters is the desire and ability of these decision makers to get beyond the myths generated by the games and (bureaucratic, budget, political) momentum and then to have the integrity to make decisions consistent with reality in face of great pressures to do otherwise.
(4) Where science is involved, decision makers have a tool they can either use or abuse, depending on their own abilities and integrity.
Some years ago, a decision maker went outside his formal system to ask me to look into the safety of the space shuttle because he was faced with a decision to approve its use in a particular mission. Everyone (without exception as I recall) in his formal chain was strongly in favor of approval, but he wanted an independent perspective.
After noting, as Feynman did, that the chief engineer at NASA had signed off on the estimate of one accident per 100,000 launches, I found by my own independent analysis that the realistic expectation for the shuttle was/is a failure in somewhat less than a hundred launches. I found no technical way to bridge the gap between NASA’s estimate of one expected accident in 10^5 launches and my own of one in slightly less than 10^2.
When this decision maker announced that he would be using my analysis as the basis for his approval, I enjoyed a flood of advocates armed with a broad range of arguments both technical and non-technical, so that I got a full feeling for the pressures that are brought to bear. None of the arguments, however, changed the numbers.
For an example of how people involved in an enterprise buy into the mythology of the enterprise, I recall the reaction of the chief scientist for one of the major aerospace companies to my numbers. I remember the exact words because they startled me at the time. He agreed with my analysis and then he said: “I used to think the astronauts were very brave, but after Challenger, I discovered that they were merely uninformed.”
There were consequences to the decision not to approve that mission, of course. Some immediate, some long term. Among the long term, the shuttle lost one of its main reasons for being.
The numbers which portray reality need not be complicated. To my mind, the numbers which prove the lie in the AGW hockey stick model are the population figures for the Viking farming/herding settlements on Greenland, which were large enough to justify their own bishop and which prospered for 400 years prior to the onset of the little ice age (1350 AD).
