Spurious Certainty: How Ignoring Measurement Error and Environmental Heterogeneity May Contribute to Environmental Controversies

摘要

Many environmental disputes ostensibly centernon conflicting findings reported by different scientificnstudies. The current controversy over marine fisheries man-nagement, for example, involves a heated debate about thenextent to which marine fish stocks are overfished (Hilbornn2007). When conflicting results emerge from different stud-nies, it is often alleged that they are due to flawed or fraudu-nlent science on the part of one of more parties (Herrick andnJamieson 2001, Bocking 2004, Sarewitz 2004). Such allegationsntend to fuel and polarize the controversy. They often also leadnus to attempt to resolve the conflict by trying to establish whonis right and who is wrong. What is seldom recognized is thatnallegations of poor science implicitly assume that an observ-nable and largely invariable set of processes underlies the ndisputed issue. But what if the processes being studied varynover time or space or are not readily observable? In the ncomplex systems that form the setting for most environmen-ntal disputes, this is often the case.