How to Fix the World
Life on a fault line should concentrate the mind, and make it serious. If you want to build an office tower in California, for example, laws require that you make sure it will stand up to a major earthquake. Over the years the specifics change, as both building technology and seismic research advance, but the general principle endures: politics, technology, and science should work together to protect people’s lives. Imagine, though, what earthquake preparedness would be like if it were handled the way American society deals with climate change. There would be little debate on the real choices ahead, but plenty of "debate" over the "alleged scientific proof" that earthquakes are actually real or that humans can do anything about them. Deniers would trot out one or two dissident seismologists to claim (falsely) that there is no scientific consensus. The reality-based community would take the bait and claim (falsely) that all scientists agree about everything. In An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore states that there are 930 papers that agree on human-made climate change and zero that dispute it. But as the climatologist James Hansen recently noted, "That’s just not normal for science." Instead of pondering probabilities and degrees of confidence, we have allowed our deliberative processes to turn the world’s environmental crises into culture wars. Last December, for example, the biggest climate news concerned not scientists’ data but their stolen personal e-mails. As the sideshows go on, the risk of global catastrophe keeps rising. The entire human population now lives on an environmental fault line. So why, when we debate what to do about global warming or long-term sustainability, can’t we sound like grown-ups? In The Essential Engineer , Henry Petroski offers an answer. Americans, he suggests, are deluded about what science is and how it works. We want high-tech ways to cope with the risks of (to use a list of potential worldwide disasters that Petroski himself quotes) "a modern day global famine; an astronomical event leading to complete or partial extinction of life on Earth; a hundred- or thousand-year severe storm, earthquake or volcanic eruption; a terrorist attack that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or a climate change that could lead to total extinction of life on Earth." Instead, Petroski argues, American politics and culture prepare citizens for a fantasy world in which science eliminates all uncertainty, predicts the future perfectly, and provides technical solutions untainted by politics and money. "Conventional wisdom is that science is sure," he writes. "In fact that is often the way its findings are reported." Of course, the actual language of science is nothing like this. Only crazy cult leaders tell their followers that the next big earthquake will strike at 8:14 a.m. on April 12, 2016. The best scientists can do is to say there is a 46 percent probability that an earthquake with a 7.5 magnitude will strike Southern California in the next 30 years, and a "greater than 90 percent certainty" that human activities drive global warming. Those are impressive intellectual achievements, and we should be glad to fold them into policy debates. Instead, we want scientists to act like cult leaders. How did that happen? The role of theoretical physics in the development of the atomic bomb, Petroski believes, led us astray. For a few decades during and after World War II, with physicists "almost running amok in political influence," it really did seem that abstract, all-knowing science was the root of progress, both for our understanding of nature and our ability to make airplanes, cell phones, and other useful stuff. In reality, knowledge more often flows from material progress. "The rocket came before the mathematical solution to the problem of rocket flight," Petroski notes. "Inventors seldom have the patience of scientists." From steamships to pasteurization to refrigeration to the earthquake-resistant Golden Gate Bridge, the typical history of invention belongs to practical people trying to make things that we can use, building on what has come before. Revolutionary leaps are rare, unintended consequences ever-present, and a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Indeed, Petroski writes, it is failure that teaches inventors how to improve. The people plodding along this path don’t refine beautiful theories or wait for perfect insights. They just get things done. Approvingly, Petroski quotes a "frequently cited” definition of structural engineering: "the art of assembling materials whose properties we do not fully understand into arrangements we cannot fully analyze to support loads we cannot fully predict — and to do so in a convincing enough fashion so that the public has complete confidence in the resultant structures." The driver of progress, then, isn’t pure science (which often brings up the rear, advancing thanks to the new instruments and data created by the practical inventors). It’s engineering, broadly defined as the business of making things people can use out of what is available, with whatever knowledge is at hand, and accepting the constraints of politics, money, and human nature. "Engineers do not need to imagine the unimaginable," Petroski writes. "They have to imagine the manageable." As a claim about the history of progress, this is an extreme position in a long-standing debate. (Do new machines foster new thought, or does new thinking lead to new machines? Surely it’s a little of both.) And Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University who has written 15 books (counting this one) that explain the engineer’s mind-set, lays it on thick. In The Essential Engineer , scientists merely know, but engineers do . Petroski’s scientists are passive and innately pessimistic, content to study nature and think their impractical "out of this world" thoughts. But engineers are active, upbeat, and always useful. After all, Petroski writes, while scientists "tend to be more flamboyant than engineers" and "sometimes appear to think of themselves as special," it’s the engineers who, though they have "few if any literary allusions or plays on words in their work," are "in a position to change the world, not just study it." If this makes Petroski sound as if he has a chip on his shoulder, let me hasten to clarify: it’s a boulder, and it makes him, and his argument, look small. The peevish tone is unfortunate, because the book makes a valuable point. Engineering as Petroski describes it is the human side of our science-based civilization. It involves all the mess and strife from which we dream that pure science is immune: incomplete knowledge, insufficient budgets, political trade-offs, fads, fears, and foibles. When we forget all this, we end up expecting inhuman perfection from scientists. We want to know exactly how climate change is happening and precisely what we can do about it. Hence the sorry state of climate politics: if you believe science can know everything , then the slightest uncertainty or disagreement can make science look like it doesn’t know anything. People who think too much of science, in other words, will end up thinking too little of it. So Petroski is right to encourage an engineer’s grown-up perspective. But he goes too far, and it’s not just in his self-indulgent grousing about the "separate and unequal" professional relationships of scientists and engineers. The Essential Engineer isn’t an argument for correcting the imbalance; it’s a call for reversing it. On climate change, for example, Petroski believes we’ve had too much study and not enough action. It’s not enough for scientists to do science, he says; they should also do engineering, or let the engineers do it themselves: "Scientists should either hand the problem over to engineers or engage not only in science relevant to climate change but also in engineering means to control it." But global warming is exactly the kind of problem for which his get-it-done, use-what-we-know solutions could be disastrous. Like any good engineer, Petroski wants to plan our actions on global warming by adding up the dollars and cents and using what knowledge we have. After all, "engineering is all about designing devices and systems that satisfy the constraints imposed by managers and regulators." That leads him to accept without question the supposedly hardheaded, by-the-numbers reasoning of Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who claims society should spend its scarce resources on problems other than climate change. Petroski quotes Lomborg as saying that "spending an extra dollar cutting CO2 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits." These numbers have been disputed by economists, but there’s a larger problem with this kind of analysis: it works only if we can be certain we know exactly how much good will result in 2030 from a choice made in 2010. In other words, it assumes that past experience is a good guide to the future. Petroski, eager to accept the constraints imposed by managers and regulators, buys that premise without question. But climate scientists, whose discipline gave us the term "butterfly effect," know that the planet’s natural history is nonlinear. Sudden shifts in global climate have occurred out of all proportion to their causes, and in those times the past was no guide to the future at all. Before we try to engineer the climate, then, it’s probably a good idea to learn more about what could go wrong. Hence, we’re lucky we still have some people pursuing impractical knowledge instead of just making better refrigerators at a better price. Petroski prefers doing to knowing; he wants to roll up his sleeves and start geo-engineering. But a society that takes his advice to heart could end up not knowing what it’s doing.
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How to Fix the World