Guest essay by Eric Worrall
President Obama thinks he doesn’t need to understand anything about climate science, to know what needs to be done. However, in my opinion, this is a demonstrably poor management strategy.
How many times have you heard President Obama say something like the following:
“They’ll say, ‘You know, I’m not a scientist,’ Well, I’m not either. But the best scientists in the world know that climate change is happening.”
(Read more at The Guardian)
Obviously its difficult to directly measure whether this disengaged approach is a bad strategy for managing climate research. It takes decades to discover whether a given climate research effort has yielded an improved ability to model and predict changes in the climate. We do know that climate models to date have a dismal track record of prediction.
However, we can look at other areas where non-expert managers have to manage specialists with arcane knowledge, which the non-expert manager does not share.
For example, consider how businesses (and governments) manage their IT departments.
Like climate science, an IT project requires input from specialists with diverse and arcane skills. Arguably a climate science research effort is an IT project, given the level of computer involvement in climate modelling. However, unlike climate science, most business IT projects have a lifecycle measured in years, not decades, so there is a lot more data available on why business IT projects fail.
According to ISM journal, one of the key causes of IT project failure is lack of stakeholder support.
No stakeholder involvement and/or participation.
Any project of significance has a number of stakeholders. These stakeholders have to contribute resources if the project is going to succeed and often have to take away resources from lower priority activities to do so.There are always more demands for resourc- es than there are resources available. If all relevant stakeholders are not engaged and committed to project success, it is just about guaranteed the project will not get the resources and attention required to deliver the promised project scope on time and on budget. If key project stakeholders do not participate in major review meetings, it signals they are not engaged in the project and therefore the project is not a high priority for them. Other stakeholders soon begin to disengage too.The project manager then finds it harder to get the participation and resources necessary for project success, especially from those who are not full-time members of the project team. Often such project team members get reassigned to other projects that are perceived to be more important. However, the project scope and due date remain fixed. The project falls into a death spiral. Important projects have and keep the attention of major stakeholders.
Read more: http://ism-journal.com/ITToday/projectfailure.pdf
But surely President Obama is very involved and supportive – he talks about climate science all the time!
Actually no. I would argue that the President is not engaged – because he doesn’t try to understand the details of the project. As he has repeatedly said, he doesn’t feel any need to try to understand the science himself, because he has scientific advisors to tell him what it means.
An article by Project Skills does a good job of describing this distinction:
Case Study: The worst project I have been in as a project manager saw a rather insidious case where senior management support was lacking. This “Senior Management Person” (call him “SMP”) in question was the CEO of Retailing Banking for Singapore and Malaysia at the time for a large regional bank.
I was project manager in charge of delivering a banking system to the bank. During Project Steering Committee meetings, the SMP would appear, ask some clever questions but never worry about the real issues in the project. When I surfaced serious scope creep issues to him and that users were being unrealistic, he would say (in front of his senior vice presidents, etc) – that my team and I were hired to manage all of these things.
Wrong! Projects are a team effort. A team effort between the client (in this case the bank) and us (the vendor). The SMP continued to ignore my pleas for executive support to tone down user requirements.
So guess what happened to the project? Yep – it was an epic failure.
Read more: http://www.project-skills.com/top-7-reasons-for-project-management-failure.html
Is there any other instance in which the President’s hands off approach to management of IT projects has caused problems? In my opinion the answer is most likely yes. A substantial part of the delivery of Obamacare depended on the success of a major IT system. The rollout of Obamacare has arguably not been a glowing success.
Obviously some level of delegation and disengagement is necessary – you can’t be an expert in everything, you can’t be everywhere at once. A manager with poor delegation skills is a bad manager.
However, there is a huge difference between a lack of engagement, and engaged management of experts, even if you don’t share their expertise.
Steve Jobs, the legendary former CEO of Apple Computer, was not a code developer. But Jobs was intensely involved in the process of producing Apple products. He would never have said something like “I don’t have to understand product design, I have advisors to tell me whether the next iProduct will sell”.
A low level of engagement – even enthusiastic support, without an effort to comprehend – in my opinion is fatal to the success of a project, for the reasons I have given.
How can the President possibly devote enough time to climate research, to understand the issues well enough to provide engaged management oversight? Quite possibly he can’t. The US Federal government is composed of almost 500 agencies which between them employ millions of civil servants – all of which must place significant competing demands on the President’s time.
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I can’t fault Obama or any other politician for delegating comprehension of climate science. Rocket science is easy by comparison. So many of the comments here are shaped by political and confirmation bias. Ironic, isn’t it, since so much of what these biased commentators critique is political and confirmation bias of the other side. When Monckton writes (previous post) about the “foreign born” president, he is political hack and not the observant analyst.
As several observe above, politicians say and do what creates popularity and voter support and enthusiasm of their constituency.. There are very few Washingtons, Adams, Hamiltons, Jeffersons, and Madisons among the history of the world, learned individuals whose individual ambition is subservient to the commonweal.
To move beyond political rant, its the advisers who deserve condemnation- Holdren especially, but Kevin Trenberth and the other establishment climate scientists who have convinced the political left that model projections are “the science.” There’s so much to condemn on the basis of science without slogging through the quagmire of discerning motivation. I think Judith Curry is the most successful climate scientist in actually promoting climate science understanding.
Presidents deserve praise or blame for their appointments. Obama deserves much blame. His science advisers and the establishment climate scientists deserve a lot more.
To start, this is a comment that agrees / expands on the comment of JLURTZ, above
Over the past 30 years there has been a substantial trend toward bringing in people with no expertise in a subject matter and appointing them to manage activity where the substantive knowledge is critical to making decisions. This isn’t just in government, it happens a great deal in business, where people with marketing or financial backgrounds are put in charge of engineering or analytic functions. It happens in government when political wonks are put in charge of everything. The problem is that you start to view every problem through your narrow lens. To a person trained in finance every product development issue comes down to cost. To a person trained in politics an environmental issue becomes one of constituency. This is more and more true as you move to the top in HHS, EPA, DOE, and it’s even creeping into defense at an alarming rate.
The view from the left argues that we just need more “experts” and more money to address the problems, but since they’re political and not substantive issues no amount of money or faux experts can solve them.
The alternative view is to make the Federal government smaller, and do a better job of circumscribing the nature and scope of Federal power. This has to come from the states. In the past many states did a poor job of standing up against Federal overreach, simply because they wanted the cash that came with the buy-in. But push-back from the states is happening, more and more. The problem is that there will still be reprobates, like California, which will soon be bankrupt and devoid of any real talent, save for the professional facades of Hollywood, and a few large companies in Silicon Valley.
Push-back is also happening in Australia, U.K., to some degree in Germany, where voters are ousting liberals and electing conservative leaders. Now the key is to hold conservative leaders to the principles they espoused during their campaigns.
We only have 6 months to Paris, personally I think it will be a train-wreck that makes Copenhagen in 2009 look like a smashing success, and then the politicos will all tout something meaningless, and go away for a while. In the meantime the best we can do is to be civil, discuss, and educate. Support this web site and others like it, and in the words of my very wise Grand Mother: “take care of your own business before you try and take care of everyone else.”
And that’s all I have to say for today.
Agreed Doug. When Mann claims the Boston snow was caused by warm moist air from climate change and the MSM runs with the blatant falsehood, the world gets a little dumber. It is important that apolitical scientists call this type of misinformation out and that true scientists vilify this anti-science wolf hiding in a lab coat made of wool.
“…lab coat made of tax dollars.”
The “best” scientists in the world say, “just trust us, you wouldn’t understand anyway.”
Unfortunately, these “best” scientists have bet the ranch on a tiny bit high school level physics and a huge dose of evangelism.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or indeed any type of scientist to recognize bad science, pseudoscience, and just plain BS. All it takes is a brain, and the willingness to use it.
Obama (I simply can’t bring myself to use the word “President” for him any more), is so busy covering his ass and lying, whitewashing, calling everyone else racist (even though most people voted for him), patronizing and lecturing us on things that are not his business, pandering to Iran and the extremist islamics in search of a legacy and a Nobel prize, running a fake war against ISIS and violating the Constitution,etc, etc… That he has no time to consider climate. And everyone who works for him is either helping him with all of the above or afraid of the consequences of telling the truth. He craves praise like a child and lashes out when he gets criticism. Compared to past Presidents, his advisors and appointees are purely political and not very good at their jobs and/or simply figureheads.
As far as climate goes with him, the only understanding he has of it is from his very left wing climate nazis and political enviro/climate action groups, so he only hears one side of the issue. His administration is so closed to anything from outside them that he will not, even if he wanted to, ever learn anything except for the party line on climate. There is no trust in me left for him.
Don’t forget, this is really all about campaign contributions, money, political power, control and grants. Can be all boiled down to money and power, no science is really involved.
For over 13 years, from the peak in the previous solar cycle in the tropics temperature drops. No wonder, then, that decreases the amount of water vapor in the troposphere.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:2001
From Obama’s perspective he has no reason to engage, he has no reason to be interested in the science or the evidence.
All that matters to Obama and Democrats is weaving tales about Climate Change that can be used to drive and support their political purpose. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan wars all used false pretenses to force our involvement. Climate change is just another false pretense to drive a political agenda while the media stands stupidly by.
I think this vastly understates Obama’s determined ignorance wrt the topic because it suits his global statist will to power . He’s no innocent .
Never before have I seen commenters on this site so consistently miss the point. None of this is about climate science. All of it is about POLITICAL science. The true genius of the AGW hucksters, years ago, was in discerning that they could point to something occurring in nature, suggest it was dangerous, and sell people on the idea that they were causing it. The hucksters understood that this would have people running over each other to submit to higher taxation, intensified regulation, and an even more intrusive government, all in exchange for the reassurance that they are virtuous (and those who don’t submit are evil and a threat to all that s good). Or am I just being too cynical?
I suspect that some like myself were commenting on the general issue of “delegating comprehension”, rather than focusing specifically on Obama’s views. Obviously unfortunately it is likely true that his comments on climate are motivated by his desire to make political use of the alarmist claims, and unfortunately that likely most politicians might let their politics get in the way of even attempting to consider the science of climate change. It isn’t clear whether he and some other politicians actually aren’t skeptical of the alarmist claims (perhaps being biased by the benefit of believing it), or are skeptical but willfully avoid admitting any skepticism for political reasons. I suspect that most politicians probably don’t tend to have the right background to be skeptical of climate concerns that the media claims are “science” or don’t spend the time to examine critique of climate research, so they probably do actually believe the supposed “science” without question.
Crustacean: I concur with your point that this is not about science. His objectives are increased taxation, increased regulation and maximization of the governmental power and he will use whatever “science” that can help him achieve than goal.
Have you never heard Mencken’s adage, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” ? Climate change is the hobgoblin that keeps on giving.
I suppose it depends on your definition of “best” scientists. My definition of best is Richard Lindzen and Willie Soon, Dr. Brown at Duke, and others. Best does NOT include a braying environmental extremists, “team” activists, self-serving bureaucrats, recent school graduates and indoctrination victims, those who suckle at the public teat, those who preach one thing to others then jet around the world to exotic locations, promoting each other and each others’ work via quid pro quo arrangements, exhibiting group think and cult-like behavior.
The only way to effectively “do anything” about it is to target young leaders. The NRA has been doing this for a couple of decades. They caused the anti-gun Left to lose elections. They took young Left leaders to the gun range and had them shoot machine guns. The NRA supported Left leaders who were willing to vote against gun laws.
Right now I see skeptics as too focused on winning the scientific argument (which they have won). But that doesn’t matter. Skeptics have to find ways to create negative and positive incentives for politicians. This might include making skeptic politicians stand up against global warming in campaigns. This will make global warming an election issue and pollsters can measure global warming as a losing election position. Or even volunteering for political campaigns that one wouldn’t otherwise agree with as long as they were skeptical on CAGW. State governments are probably easier targets.
Other ways would be to go after the CAGW monetary incentives. This would include lawfare against the Greens that take tax payer money to sue the government to force their agenda. This would include chipping away at the incentives of the educational/NSF-industrial complex. Cut NASA and NOAA’s budget. Get taxpayer funded papers out from behind firewalls. FOIA requests on data manipulate at NCDC. There is a lot of low hanging fruit out there.
What skeptics need are public advocacy lawyers. I know no one wants to hear that. It’s just the world we live in.
What skeptics need is a lawsuit against DeSmogblog and Sourcewatch for their libels about AW’s funding. That suit would force Gleik to testify about where the fake Heartland strategy document came from. A victory would take the halo away from the warmist side.
“How can the President possibly devote enough time to climate research to understand the issues well enough to provide engaged management oversight?”
I suppose he can do it the same way he became an expert on Islam and can tell us exactly what true Muslims believe, which groups are authentic, and which groups are non-Islamic impostors like ISIS. The President is an expert on everything, just ask the American media or any of his other supporters.
Amen.
Poor leaders micro manage the pencil sharpener and toilet paper dispensers. Community organizers….obviously do the same; the one in the WH thinks if he is not hopey changing something, he is not leading, and obviously being of the community organizer lawyer who lost his license to practice “type” is clueless and needs perpetual attention. Unless its negative, thus the need to “outlaw” (narcissistic lawyer mentality) criticism and control his critics. bla bla bla … 🙂
It could be validly argued that computer climate models are not science, as they do what they are designed to do, particularly as most models leave out over 50 major factors that influence climate. As long as they give up on the real relationships and use algorithms, cannot model the planet to sufficient resolution, and assume that Co2 drives climate, these models are all patently false and a waste of time and resources.
Understanding what constitutes (good) science and understanding the details of any particular science are two vastly different things. The former is not really that hard, and should of course be the responsibility for any “leader” that funds or oversees such activity.
I am surprised that people here say everyone should understand climate change theory.
Most people in the world do not think logically and maybe not think much at all!
Most inhabitants of this website I suspect are quite bright, think yourselves lucky. Much of the world is not so lucky.
Why are we not surprised that a humanities biased individual won a presidency or prime ministership? When someone with an engineering background would be far better at making decisions that affect many difficult areas.
I suspect that a humanities type of person is far easier to control/advise by their supporters than an independently minded engineer.
I think there is a simpler explination, humanities majors are better communicators than engineers.
at least we have a chance we won’t elect another person who is so fond of saying “you know” at the start of every sentence
my seventh grade english teacher is having a hissy fit, I know..