Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 The Lack of a Satisfactory Conceptualization of the Notion of Error in the Historiography of Science: Two Main Approaches and Shortcomings
- 2 Experimental Knowledge in the Face of Theoretical Error
- 3 Learning from Error: How Experiment Gets a Life (of its Own)
- 4 Modelling Measurement: Error and Uncertainty
- 5 Handling Uncertainty in Environmental Models at the Science–Policy–Society Interfaces
- 6 Variations on Reliability: Connecting Climate Predictions to Climate Policy
- 7 Order and Indeterminism: An Info-Gap Perspective
- 8 Learning from Data: The Role of Error in Statistical Modelling and Inference
- Notes
- Index
5 - Handling Uncertainty in Environmental Models at the Science–Policy–Society Interfaces
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 The Lack of a Satisfactory Conceptualization of the Notion of Error in the Historiography of Science: Two Main Approaches and Shortcomings
- 2 Experimental Knowledge in the Face of Theoretical Error
- 3 Learning from Error: How Experiment Gets a Life (of its Own)
- 4 Modelling Measurement: Error and Uncertainty
- 5 Handling Uncertainty in Environmental Models at the Science–Policy–Society Interfaces
- 6 Variations on Reliability: Connecting Climate Predictions to Climate Policy
- 7 Order and Indeterminism: An Info-Gap Perspective
- 8 Learning from Data: The Role of Error in Statistical Modelling and Inference
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In support of a 1990 UK House of Lords private members' Bill – to enable construction of a barrage across an estuary in a politically high-profile part of northern England – a complex hydrodynamic model had been used to assess the distribution of pollution, should the barrage be built. In the run-up to the General Election of 1987, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had stridden across the industrial wasteland alongside the River Tees, cast her arms open, inviting her television audience to take in the barren scene, and proclaimed ‘We shall regenerate this’. The barrage, oddly enough, was to be the spark of that regeneration. The model had consistently forecast that pollution in the future would be shifted out to sea, far away from the inland barrage. While the opponents of the proposed barrage did not succeed in preventing passage of the Bill, they were granted the right to request a sensitivity analysis of the model. In the course of that analysis a substantial error was discovered. When corrected, pollution was forecast to accumulate against the barrage. The group responsible for the model and its forecasts was obliged to issue a formal public apology.
To be precise, the error was a programming error, rather than one of either the science underpinning the model or the values assigned to the parameters (coefficients) in its mathematical expressions.
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- Information
- Error and Uncertainty in Scientific Practice , pp. 97 - 136Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014