This was a guest post over on Pielke's site.
Dr Pielke's Honest Broker concepts resonate with me because of practical decision support experiences I've had, and this post is an attempt to share some of those from a realm pretty far removed from the geosciences. All the views and opinions expressed are my own and in no way represent the position or policy of the US Air Force, Department of Defense or US Government. I am writing as a simple student of good decision making. My background is not climate science. I am an Aeronautical Engineer with a background in computational fluid dynamics, flight test and weapons development. I got interested in the discussions of climate policy because the intersection of computational physics and decision making under uncertainty is an interesting one no matter what the subject area. The discussion in this area is much more public than the ones I'm accustomed to, so it makes a great target of opportunity. The decision support concepts Dr Pielke discusses make so much sense to me now, but I can see how hard they are for technical folks to grasp because I used to be a very linear thinker when I was a young engineer right out of school.
In my little Live Fire Office we had lots of discussion about what to call the role we did, and how to best explain it to the program managers. I wish I had heard of Dr Pielke's book back then, because "Honest Broker" would have been an apt description for much of the role. We acted as a broker between the folks in the Pentagon with the mandate from congress for sufficient, realistic testing, and the Air Force level program office with the mandate for product development. The value we brought (as we saw it), was that we were separate from the direct program office chain of command (so we weren't advocates for their position), but we understood the technical details of the particular system, and we also understood the differing values of the folks in the Pentagon (which the folks in the program office loved to refuse to acknowledge as legitimate, sound familiar?). That position turns out to be a tough sell (program managers get offended if you seem to imply they are dishonest), so I can empathize with the virulent reaction Dr Pielke gets on applying the Honest Broker concepts to climate policy decision support. People love to take offense over their honor. That's a difficult snare to avoid while you try to make clear that, while there's nothing dishonest about advocacy, there remains significant value in honest brokering. Maybe Honest Broker wouldn't be the best title to assume though. The first reaction out of a tight-fisted program manager would likely be "I'm honest, why do I need you?"