In a new book Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science Aynsley KeIlow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, uses ... case studies from conservation biology and climate science as examples of 'noble cause corruption'. The phenomenon is recognised in law enforcement circles where police officers manufacture evidence to ensure a conviction.
The thesis of Kellow's book is that noble cause corruption gives as much cause for concern about the reliability of science as the potential influence of money.
Kellow shows that noble cause corruption is rife in the environmental sciences, and he shows how the corruption is facilitated by the virtual nature of much of the science.
After opening with the somewhat comical example of the bogus listing of the mythical Cambodian mountain goat, Kellow gets into the history of conservation biology. He explains how in the early 1980s ecology lacked a scientifically respectable method for studying life. The ecosystem approach potentially provided scientific respectability by supplying ecologists with mathematical tools developed by physicists beginning with the species-area equation and the theory of island biogeography.
While the theory could explain the number of insect and arthropod species colonising mangrove islands off the coast of Florida as a function of their distance from the mainland, the theory's extrapolation to non-island situations and terrestrial ecology more generally was not justified.
And predicting species loss by extrapolating backwards to suggest, for example, that a reduction in the area of forest will produce the same rate of species reduction as does its growth, has no basis in observational data but is common practice in conservation biology.
It is this approach, in particular the dominance of mathematical models, which makes it possible for groups like Greenpeace to use figures of 50,000-100,000 species becoming extinct every year, with support from the scientific literature, when they would be hard pressed to provide evidence of any actual extinctions.
Furthermore, an ecosystem as Kellow explains is nothing more than a construction: 'Ecologists tried to study ponds as examples of ecosystems, but soon found even they were not closed systems but connected to the watertable, and affected by groundwater flows, spring run-off and migrating waterfowl.'
In Science and Public Policy, Kellow shows how the misguided approach to the complexity of 'ecosystems' facilitated the subsequent development of climate science as 'post-normal' science. Kellow begins by explaining that climate change is an area of science where models inevitably play an important role-there is little scope for laboratory experimentation.
