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INTRODUCTION
When you get tenure at Columbia you are invited to a reception for all newly
tenured faculty. You meet the others from all over the university who received
tenure in the same year at a somewhat formal gathering and you congratulate each
other and say you will stay in touch, even though the chances are you will never see
them again -- Columbias a big place, departments dont mix so well. I imagine this
is done at other universities too. I wasnt expecting it, but it seemed like a nice idea.
So in 1992 I was invited to the event for the newly tenured because I had received
tenure in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (actually, it was
called the Department of Geological Sciences at the time, a distinction that only
scientists would care much about, but we care a lot). It was a nice little gathering at
Faculty House that, at the time was a fairly run-down place with a dining area for
faculty and some shabby event spaces. You wouldnt even call it shabby chic, just
shabby. Its much better now having had extensive renovations. There were some
university officials, the usual chardonnay and finger food in the typical university
tradition almost good, but not quite. The Presidents house is right next-door, you
can see it through the windows of Faculty House, but he didn't attend the event.
After a while and some mingling someone, I dont remember who but probably the
Provost or a Vice President, made some remarks about how clever we all were to
achieve tenure and what a wonderful university we were privileged to be working
at which was, of course, more important than how clever we were. Then to my
horror, he asked the first of us newly tenured to come forward and make their
remarks in response. I suppose I had not looked at the invitation carefully enough
and had no notion that I was supposed to make remarks. I had prepared nothing.
Everyone else obviously had prepared remarks and they were ready with notes in
their hands or in their jacket pockets. Having just been recognized as clever and
privileged I knew I had better say something suitably clever and humble, but at that
instant I hadnt any idea what to say maybe it was the mushroom-polenta on tiny
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pieces of toast, or more likely the couple of glasses of free chardonnay, but my mind
was blank.
One by one the newly tenured came to the front and talked about what they did,
modestly admitting how clever they were, rarely saying anything about the privilege
of being at Columbia though, I expect because most of them knew they would soon
move on. And the newly tenured scientists all did what scientists always do in this
type of situation. They talked about how, from their very earliest memories they
had had, they always knew they were destined to be scientists. I have noticed that
other academics dont do this. Economists don't seem to begin contemplating
discount rates while still in the birth canal.
There was even a geologist who gave the good old time worn geologists story of
how he had a huge collection of rocks, minerals and fossils by the time he was 14
years old that he had amassed since he was old enough to totter around carrying
samples home and up to his bedroom. The guy said he used to carry them home in a
little red wagon like the one Calvin and Hobbs hurtle themselves down hills in and
over cliffs while pondering the meaning of life.
My heart sank. That narrative doesnt work for me at all. I didnt have a rock
collection at 14. I had a record collection. I wasnt thinking about rocks and the
origin of the universe, I was thinking about girls; I thought that was normal. In
Australia where I grew up we dont have little red wagons; they are one of the great
American innovations. The marvelous technology of little red wagons never came to
Australia and gave me one of my first lessons in the limits of technology diffusion
and no doubt explains why Australia is so backward.
Many of the newly tenured talked about the inspirations provided by their parents
who were often scientists or intellectuals of some sort themselves, and because
most of the newly tenured were males of course they most often spoke about their
fathers. No one mentioned their mothers, not even the very few newly tenured
women. My father was a Scotsman who immigrated to Australia with his father and
two sisters (the sisters turned around and went right back) and he became a radio
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operator in Her Majestys Navy during WWII. When I was seven months old he left
my mother, sister and I, never to be seen or heard of again. I have no shred of a
memory of him. I have seen just two photographs and those only fairly recently.
They may be all the photographs there are. My mother worked as a temporary
telephone operator until she retired. She was an inspiration, but in a very different
way. Ill explain a little later. So I had no paternal inspiration story either,
especially from my father.
So, when it was my turn I went to the small podium with its microphone that I had
to bend over to use and with a piece of paper in my hand that I hoped people might
think contained my prepared remarks, even though it was actually the program
handed out for the evening. And I told them the truth. I told them that I didnt quite
fit the mold that most scientists seem to be cast from. I even got a couple of laughs
and some sense of relief from the audience. I didnt tell them about my father
because I actually didnt know very much about him at the time. It is only in the last
few years, after turning 90 in the years before she dies at 96 that my mother has
been a bit more forthcoming about those early days.
The fact is I had never even considered being a scientist when I was young. I told
them that too. My plan, if I could dignify it by that word, was to be an artist. I could
draw well. I still go to figure drawing classes at the Arts Students League of New
York. I took drawing classes while in Paris as a visiting professor in 2013. My
mother bought books about the great artists, especially the impressionists and post-
impressionists that she loved. If I had had any choice I would have gone to art
school, become and artist, lived a debauched artists life and died young of gout,
alcoholism or an STD or all those together, leaving perhaps a tiny legacy of a few
paintings.
Two things happened to set me on a different path. Australian High Schools begin
after six years of Primary School when students are 12 years old (no middle school).
In Primary School you have Art classes every year, but Essendon High School where
I went, didnt have Art classes beyond second year, so I simply couldnt continue.
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And there was nowhere else to go that in knew of and my mother was in no position
to send me to a private school in Melbourne. So I stopped drawing, at least at
school.
About the same time it was also discovered that I was good at Maths. In the
Australian system (an exaggerated colonial transplant of the British system, more
British than the British) at that time if you were found to be good at something
anything -- the thinking was that you should do that, and just that, and almost
nothing else. So if you are good at Maths you can do physics and chemistry but
forget history, language, politics or literature. If you are good at Maths they didnt
even want you to do biology; that was science for the people who were not so good
at Maths. If you asked, as I did, that along with Maths and Physics you would like to
take History or English Literature, the teachers looked at you completely
nonplussed no-one does that. Its one field or the other. They don't mix. By the
time I finished high school my subjects were Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Physics,
Chemistry and the required subject of English Expression (not literature). I may not
have come out of the womb as a scientist like my co-newly tenured geologist
colleagues, but I certainly came out of high school as one.
So I told the audience about all that too. Some of them seemed amused. Most
seemed puzzled. I think that more than a few may even have had similar stories to
tell though none did. There is a standard narrative to follow and thats what you
are supposed to follow.

But it would be wrong to suggest that I am a reluctant scientist. Im not. It was not
as though I was good at Maths but hated it I loved mathematics and physics and
still do. I am sort of a snob about it, actually. I had a wonderful math teacher named
Mr. Bruce Tozer in 4
th
, 5
th
and 6
th
form (the last three years of High School); the
most no nonsense and clearest teacher I have ever had. Homework every night and
if you didn't do it or got some of it wrong he would simply look at you as if you had
become an overnight moron, say nothing at all and move on to discuss the
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homework with the students who had done their work and so were not morons and
therefore deserved his attention. It took days of correctly completed homework to
redeem yourself, and don't imagine a note from home explaining why you had not
done the work would make the slightest difference to Tozer. You could be stricken
with malaria and he still expected homework to be done.
And using science to reveal the workings of Nature is exhilarating, there is just no
question about it. Its seductive. Its almost addictive. It feels like something that is
a proper use of the mind. Richard Feynman the great nuclear physicist talked of
doing science as an act of doing good. Hes right; it feels as if gaining the
understanding that can come from sciences inquiry into the world is a righteous act.
Almost all scientists think they are doing something pure and something good.
Others, politicians most likely, may make bad use of the knowledge that comes from
science but creating that knowledge remains a good action. Feynman pushed that
idea very hard.
When I first studied physics, scientists like Feynman, Niels Bohr, and of course
Albert Einstein were popular heroes, and because they were heroes they could say
just about anything they wanted to on almost any subject and people mostly
believed them, even if it had nothing at all to do with science. Then as now many
people trust scientists. Sadly, fewer people than ever trust scientists.
But I think I always doubted how genuine Feynman was in making that separation
between the work of science and how it is used. He along with many other
physicists had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb.
Many of them felt huge guilt and remorse for it. He wanted to separate the act of
building the bomb from the act of dropping the bomb. He wanted to draw a bright
line between the work of an atomic physicist and the work of an atomic bomb. And
he really wanted to say (and he was not alone) that scientists should be left to do
anything they pleased in splendid isolation and that whatever negative
consequences unfolded it wasnt their fault. If the consequences were good for
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society, scientists reveled in the praise that came, but if the consequences were bad
that was someone elses doing.
..
For most of what I have done as a scientist I have worked well on the safe side of
Feynmans bright line. And most of what I have done sits there just fine; it was
almost all of my own choosing and done in splendid isolation from the world outside
of science and all essentially of no value to society one way or another. It helped me
get tenure at Columbia, but it didnt help anyone else. Most science is that way.
Today I think I spend almost as much time feeling my way around the landscape on
the other side of the Feynman line than I do on the side I come from. When did I
start looking across the line? Why did I start looking? This is a question I am asked
all the time and a question I also ask myself a lot as well. I really don't have a good
answer. To the extent that I can offer an answer at all it is something like this:
I have come very gradually to understand that the largest, most difficult and most
important problems we have in the world today cannot be solved by science alone,
no matter what scientists might think. Science solves science problems. It cant
solve social problems. The most important questions we have today come broadly
under the subject of sustainable development. Problems like climate change, like
providing electric power to everyone without making climate change worse still,
like how we will feed 9 billion or more people, problems like the use of Genetically
Modified Organisms (GMO), like how we can improve the conditions of the poorest,
how we can preserve the environment for our own good and the good of future
generations and how we can counter the trend toward massive inequality in our
world today. These problems sound more like problems of society and so need the
approaches of the social sciences. Feynman thought so and he readily admitted that
they were much harder than regular science problems because there were no
physical principals to call on, no formulae to derive and solve that would settle the
problems.
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But I think these problems actually lie at the nexus of the physical and social worlds.
They are on neither one nor the other side of the Feynman line; they are right on it.
Just think about the problem of continued poverty in todays world where so many
are so very rich, the problem of massive inequality. What prevents the poor from
breaking out of their terrible situation and enjoying the benefits of prosperity? If
some can do it, why cant everyone? There is no simple answer and many factors
are sited that are social in nature. Governance, institutions and corruption are
leading causes. But poverty must be a physical phenomenon as well as social one;
why else would poverty today be concentrated in the dry tropics? Thats no
accident of history. Why would the actions of Nature be harsher on the poor than
the rich? Why is it that only the poorest among us are brutalized by famine when
there is more than enough food in the world to feed us all?
Climate change may be a change in the conditions of the atmosphere, but the way
human societies feel it and will respond to it cannot be understood from climate
physics alone. When thousands of children die in schoolrooms in an earthquake in
China scientists say it is because building codes are lax and they scold the politicians
for not making or enforcing those codes. The old adage holds true earthquakes
don't kill people, buildings kill people. Those who live in countries prone to
earthquakes are the very least people who need to be told that. The real question is
why building codes or their enforcement are lax in places prone to earthquakes.
These issues cannot be solved by scientists working in their own splendid isolation,
ignoring everyone else, and then throwing their result into an imagined crowd of
eager social scientists, like a bride throwing a wedding bouquet into a crowd of
hopeful bridesmaids. But thats what most scientists think they should do.
Because most scientists stay with their colleagues where they are most comfortable,
the result is that a lot of what passes for science on the other side of the bright line
isnt science at all. Its what I would like to call Scienciness. Its a form of Stephen
Colberts Truthiness. These are things that are felt to be true, and might even be true,
but are often factually incorrect and not logically true. They do not come from the
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works of science but might have because they sound like it. I suppose I might call it
Science Thruthiness but I think that running the two words together makes the point.
Scienciness applies to statements that might have come from science, feel a bit like
they might be science, but actually have very little to do with science. They just
sound a lot like they are.
When Michelle Bachman was campaigning for the US presidential nomination she
made a speech on climate change. Of course she was trying to say how ridiculous
the idea was, it was required that all the Republican candidates made such a speech.
So she said first that there was only 3% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And she
asked the audience how could such a tiny amount of a gas have any real effect.
Surely you would need more of the stuff to do any harm. There was just way to little,
she claimed, to make any difference. And then she said that scientists say carbon
dioxide concentrations were only going to rise by another 3% -- how could such a
small change make such a big difference?
The concentration is actually 0.035% and is expected to double. She got the figures
badly wrong by intent or from bad advice. And never mind that the absorption and
radiation properties of carbon dioxide to long wavelength electromagnetic radiation
were worked out a century and a half ago. Her pitch had a ring of truth to it. If you
don't know the truth such an argument can sound plausible. The climate change
discussion has produced more Scienciness than almost any other subject I can recall.
I am quite sure there is a version of scienciness in almost all areas of public and
intellectual discussion. I am quite certain it comes up in discussions that sound like
they have good economic thinking behind them but actually dont. That might be
Econiness. The current debate about the size of the deficit and its consequences for
economic growth feels that way to me. It sounds like the deficit is a bad thing and
we should try to get it down to some much smaller figure, but if Paul Krugmans
numerous Op-Eds in the New York Times are anything to go by, there is no real
argument in economic theory that deficit reduction will lead to a return to growth
after the 2008 recession. He is a Nobel Prize winner after all so he should know
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what he is talking about. He claims that the deficit hawks are not just working of
lousy economic thinking but they have malicious intent and actually know that such
an approach will be devastating to some people, but that they are people the hawks
just dont care about. The economics around the cost of regulations to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions is the same.
Every scientist knows about Scienciness. I expect economists know about Econiness
too. Scientists mock people like Michelle Bachman who engage in Scienciness. It is
one of the things that keep us on our side of the line we dont want to be associated
with that stuff. It is part of a certain arrogance or aloofness that scientists
sometimes show. We like to say that what we do in the natural science is hard
science while what is done in social science is soft science. The irony is that
Scienciness exists in good part because of our aloofness and the way we insist on
keeping to our side of the line.
It reminds me of Xi, the Kalahari bushman in The Gods must be Crazy who comes
across a Coca-Cola bottle tossed from an airplane into the desert, an object he has
never seen before. He has no idea what to make of it. He first thinks it is a
wonderful gift from the Gods and takes it to share with his tribe. Then finds he
needs to rid his tribe of the bottle for all the trouble it causes because they dont
know what to make of it. They find it especially difficult to share this gift from God.
How can anyone who is not trained in science be expected to understand what
science can bring if what we as scientists do is little more than throw our work over
the line and expect people on the other side to admire it and share it? What results
is that proponents on both sides of every debate from climate change to
hydrofracking to GMOs scramble to grab scraps of science and stitch them into
arguments that have their central motivation in judgments and values far from
those that science can contribute to. Both sides are guilty. I know I will be pilloried
for saying this but if you imagine that those who are on the side of the argument that
says global warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions the scientifically
correct conclusion -- are actually more conversant with the scientific evidence than
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those who deny it, you would be quite wrong. Both sides typically have about the
same real understanding and each supports their case with various snippets of
Scienciness with some Econiness thrown in. As someone who teaches science to
undergraduates at Columbia who are almost all completely convinced that climate
change is real and a serious problem (and it is a very serious), I can assure you that
lack of scientific understanding on the part of those who hold that view is another
inconvenient truth. It is simply not correct to say that those who hold the right
perspective are better versed in the science than those who are deniers.
I am not the first person to grumble about this sort of thing. Fred Pierce who is a
self-declared environmentalists and even looks like one from his online pictures
thoughtful, wise but concerned expression on his bearded face wrote a piece for
Environment 360 titled Why are Environmentalists Taking Anti-science Positions? in
which he essentially accuses many of those on the right side of the environmental
debates (his own side) of tactics that are dishonest and self-defeating. I think he
is completely right. I might add disingenuous.
It seems to me that there has been a persistent rise in Scienciness over the time that I
have been a scientist, and it might be that that is what has compelled me to cross the
Feynman line. There have always been people who got the science wrong and said
things that didnt make sense, and people who deliberately contrived to sell all
manner of cures and devices that claimed to be based in science, but were not and
they knew it. Rainmakers come to mind. For the most part none of it really
mattered very much unless, I suppose, you lost your farm to a fake rainmaker. But
there seems to me to be more and more Sciencines and more of it seems dangerous.
Michelle Bachman might have become US president!
I cant fix all the problems of Scienciness but I believe I can fix some of them in some
places. To do that does mean crossing the Feynman line. Its not a comfortable
place to be for a scientist I can assure you. It is full of mine fields. We need to think
about problems we have never thought about before, or think of old problems in
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different ways, and we need to listen to and respect those whose work has them on
that other side. But I am afraid there is nothing for.
.
I was thinking about scienciness, where and why it originates and why it is so
pervasive and the harm that can come of it when I read Daniel Kahnemans excellent
and absorbing book, Thinking Fast and Slow. This is a wonderful book by a
psychologist, but won the Nobel Prize in economics. His seminal contribution for
which he earned the Nobel Prize is so-called Prospect Theory that describes how
people make decisions in a probabilistic way about risks. In the discussion of
natural disasters the words risk and probability and/or uncertainty are center
stage. There is a major endeavor in one branch of natural disaster studies called
Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR to those in the know). Kahnemans ideas are crucial
to understanding how we all think about risk, probability and uncertainty.
His central idea is that all of us have two quite different ways of thinking. In System
1 our thinking is fast, instinctive and emotional. In System 2 we are slower, more
deliberative, and logical. System 1 thinking is used for many tasks like -
_______________but System 2 thinking is needed for others such as _______________________.
Scienceiness comes out of System 1 thinking. It is System 2 thinking that is needed
to understand natural disasters but I think System 1 thinking has dominated most
discussions.
In that discussion of natural disasters the word prediction is a major actor too, at
least it is to those in the scientists troop. Prediction is very closely associated with
concepts of risk, probability and uncertainty and sometimes it is the only actor on
the stage. I will say a lot about prediction and its problems in a later chapter. For
now it is important to understand that one of the most important roles that
scientists, who I am sure would universally regard themselves as System 2 thinkers
have assigned themselves the role of predictors not predictors of disasters exactly
but predictors of the associated natural disturbances of hurricane, earthquake,
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drought etc. If scientists try to predict the physical event using the laws of physics
that they know well then they stay on their side of the Feynman Line where it is safe
and they have lots of colleagues to talk to. Its lonely for a scientist on the other side.
..
The subject of this book concerns the way we should think about natural disasters.
This is hardly the first book to be written on the subject, but I hope it is the first
book by a scientist that approaches the subject from both sides of the Feynman line.
It is hard for me to think of a better example of a subject that cannot be understood
from science alone. Having studied seismology for many years I know how
seismologists think about earthquake disasters. They think, in a completely
appropriate and defendable way, that their task is to understand the mechanics of
earthquake generation and the way seismic energy propagates away from an
earthquake. We do need to know this. But seismologists were also looking for
hoping for -- ways to predict earthquakes and essentially threw in the towel on that
quest quite a few years ago. It was not because the problem was too hard to solve.
Seismologists learned that it cant be solved if the objective is to say exactly when,
where and how large the next earthquake will be. Prediction isn't hopeless but that
sort of prediction event prediction is hopeless. Now what?
What it means is that the problem of earthquake disasters and all other disasters
becomes even more social in character. Natural disasters are truly schizophrenic;
they actually exist on both sides of the Feynman line at once. On the one hand you
do need some sort of natural extreme an earthquake, hurricane, volcano to have
a natural disaster. Science can tell us a lot about these natural extremes. On the
other hand, the result of Natures tantrums how many people are killed, how badly
an economy is impacted and for how long is entirely a social construct. Natural
and social systems are so co-joined that it is not useful to try to separate cause from
consequence do earthquakes cause earthquake disasters or do people cause
earthquake disasters? The answer is both. Natural disasters occur when Nature
meets human nature under conditions of great duress.
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I readily admit that coming from the natural sciences, much of the way I had thought
about natural disasters was from the perspective of a physical scientist and just that.
For a long time I didnt even know that social scientists studied disasters. I knew
that some economists did cost-benefit analyses, and concluded its better to spend
on preventing disasters than reconstructing afterwards, but I never looked into the
way they did the calculations. I just assumed it was true. The UN and the World
Bank have vast efforts underway in Disaster Risk Reduction so I just assumed that
the economics was there. I didn't know that it is actually very difficult to show that
disasters actually do significant economic harm. I probably would not have taken
any notice even if I had known. Social scientists are on the wrong side of the
Feynman line.
I cant tell you when I first came to realize that the Feynman line might be a chasm
that needed to be bridged. I know that Hurricane Katrina had a large effect on me.
Why did so many people die? Why were they mostly so poor? Why were so many
victims so old? Why were all the sad distressed faces in the Superdome black faces?
What was inescapable about Katrina was how unjust it seemed. As if Nature had
selected poor black people for her victims. Then the gulp of realization that this
injustice had nothing at all to do with Nature, that it was our own doing. We
ourselves victimized the victims, not Nature.
Not since the Galveston flood of 1900 or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 had
so many died in a natural disaster in the US. Back then there was no FEMA, no cars
and busses to evacuate people, no helicopters for rescue, no fire hydrants to provide
water for fire fighting, no bulldozers to clear rubble and no television to exploit the
opportunity. Why did Katrina make us look 100 years old in so many ways? Why
are we so unable to defend against Nature and so willing to treat some of our
citizens so callously?
But I would not claim Katrina as the cause in the cause and effect of my change in
thinking. It was more gradual and had antecedents. I was a young adult in the 70s
and 80s and one of the pivotal news events of those times was famines in Africa and
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the appalling death tolls they brought -- hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.
But the press coverage was relentlessly focused on political conditions, not physical
conditions. It was as if drought was incidental to the outcome; that famine had a
human cause with little if anything to do with nature. The Indian Ocean tsunami in
2004 troubled me a lot too. That too looked unjust. From the early reports you
might have thought that it selected Scandinavian tourists for victims. In fact, they
were just the ones who had cameras and who escaped. Most of the victims were
actually poor coastal communities living in the shadow of tourist hotels.
And each time another disaster happened the same questions seemed to arise;
questions that simply have no answer coming from the natural sciences. Why do
they seem so unjust? Are they that because the world they stab at it an unjust place
or is it that the poor shield the rich from the harshest effects of disaster? Science
has no answer to this.
..
Now I am almost as schizophrenic as disasters themselves. I am appointed in both
the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, a natural science department
and in the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbias policy school and as
well I am a member of the faculty of the Earth Institute that is directed by Jeffrey
Sachs. I believe I am the only Columbia faculty member with a joint appointment in
a natural science department and in a school based on the social sciences. To make
things more bizarre still in the spring of 2013 I was the Alliance Visiting Professor at
Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school just outside of Paris where Napoleon
was educated and I was hosted there, of all things, by their economics department.
This all seems a long way from where I was in 1992 desperately searching my mind
for something to say to university officials and to the other newly tenured faculty.
But the truth is I have never been entirely comfortable wearing scientists clothes.
They dont fit so well and the style isnt completely mine. I never felt quite in the
right place completely on the scientists side of the Feynman line. I never could tell
the standard scientists narrative. I know that some of the thoughts about the
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nature of our deepest problems were stirring in me even then in 1992 and for a
while before, perhaps from as far back as High School days when I enquired about
taking History as well as Maths.
A couple of years ago I was asked by a student group to participate in a discussion
about the ethics of climate change with a scholar from Sri Lanka who I did not know,
and had not heard of. When the flyer came out about the event it was billed as a
debate between a Christian environmentalist and a secular humanist. For a moment
I wondered which one they thought I was. Then, after a process of elimination I
decided I must be the secular humanist. I dont think that is quite accurate either
but its pretty close.
This book is about the tragedy of natural disasters. It discusses many hard and
difficult things. It was not easy to write. I missed the publishers first deadline. It
talks about death. It talks about how little we understand even though we think we
know a lot. It argues that we have been mislead in the ways we have been
encouraged to think about disasters. It talks about human nature as much as about
Nature. It talks about injustice.
I have thought about natural disasters for a very long time, as a scientist and as a
secular humanist, if thats what I really am. I spent a lot of time trying to keep those
two ways of thinking apart from one another and now I cant disentangle them at all.
The two dont always co-exist happily together. Sometimes they are deeply at odds.
Sometimes it is exhausting. Sometimes they fight each other savagely. Sometimes
there is a peaceful truce.
But ultimately I do believe that everyone has both of these ways of thinking
embedded in their brains, even people who would never described themselves as
either a scientist or a humanist. We also have Kahnemans System 1 and System 2
thinking embedded in us. We have them both, like it or not. I have learned a lot by
giving up the struggle to keep the two apart. I wish I had called a truce a long time
ago and not fought on as long as I did. The insights in this book are the result of the
truce that I have come to.