"No matter what they say, “science” is not an empirical ruler, it is a soup made of anecdotal information, literature reviews, assumptions, imperfect calibrations of imperfect modeling tools, inadequate sampling often by volunteers who vary in method, and fudged or biasly arrayed statistics. There is very little use of the scientific method - the on the ground testing of hypothesis."
That...wow. Thank goodness I live far enough away from California to avoid the worst of the aftermath of your "policy making." Let me guess, you probably don't enjoy math either. :p
I once partcipated on a federal technical (science) advisory committee to a federal task force on salmon. (I later also participated on the task force.) I saw how the soup is made. ALWAYS question assumptions. ALWAYS ask for raw statistics and don’t settle for graphs. ALWAYS question who collected the data and under what protocols.
We had a study that looked at presence and absence of coho in streams that ran two non-consecutive years. (Coho have a strict 3 lifecycle so there are three consecutive cohorts.) Then they used the study as foundational to establish the decline of the species. Sure, that is using science, but it is not sufficient study to establish what they claimed the study established.
We see environmentalists do so-called scientific economic reports that have no basis. We had a Stanford professor try to use current appraised value of property to determine value loss from taking out dams. CA Prop. 13 froze the value at a certain point of time and established a set formula by which to appreciate value. The appraised value certainly did not reflect current actual market conditions. The study was bogus.
Did you know that the 300 foot riparian setbacks for salmon streanms are based on the height of an average tree on steep slopes on the Olympic Penninsula in Washington. Yet it was applied by NOAA fisheries to a low gradient agricultural bottom land as scientifically appropriate?
Heck, we have two economic studies done on the impact of a proposed water bottling plant in our county. One was done by a state university and another done by an environmental group. They have opposite conclusions.
I saw a scientific group from a federal agency try and calibrate a water flow model for one of our major rivers. The twisted assumptions they had to make to have the model run with past data was seriously questionable. (They finally assumed that some large unknown underground stream must empty into a reach.)
You can’t just accept something as true because a policy advocate points to some study they call science. As I understand it, global warming models are based on only a tiny handfull of the variables at play.
Also, the legal system has a separate non-scientific construct of how the world functions - such as water use rights. It differentiates between groundwater and surface water. Hydrologically they are related, but under the law they must be treated as separate entities. A policymaker must acknowledge that.
Above all, a policymaker must be accountable to the will of the people.