Scientific Uncerftainty

It is a classic characteristic of the Whitehall Loop that government (especially the Civil Service) can never admit that it has got things wrong. To do so would “let the side down”. They set out to defend the indefensible, and this requires increasing layers of dissembling, being economical with the truth, and bureaucratic obfuscation to maintain the charade of infallibility.

The biggest dissimulation in the environmental field has been to claim that everything is scientific, and therefore impervious to challenge. But as Richard Feynman, one of greatest physicists of the last century put it

"The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty. We take it for granted that It is perfectly consistent to be unsure - that it is possible to live and not know.

But I don't know whether everyone realises that this is true"

Richard Gleick states in his biography of Feynman that “he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science has fought for centuries.

Scientists have theories that are provisional, not arbitrary. Their approach to knowledge differs from all others in that the goal is never a potpourri of equally attractive realities. Their goal, though it always recedes before them, is consensus.”

In short, science does not deal in certainties. To claim that it does, a mistake often made selectively and with full knowledge by English Nature and the Environment Agency, and unwittingly by the politicians they advise, is a classic case of being ‘economical with the truth’ as Sir Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary so famously said. The Whitehall Loop again! Nowhere is this problem more acute than around the coasts and estuaries and at sea, where scientific data is in short supply and expensive to obtain.