Orrin H. Pilkey Quotes | Quotes of famous people

Orrin H. Pilkey: 4 quotes 0 likes

Famous Orrin H. Pilkey Quotes

“For more than twenty-five years we have monitored beach nourishment projects around the United States. In order to secure federal funding and justify the enormous costs of these projects, anyone undertaking one must make a prediction of how long the sand will last on the replenished beach. The predictions are based on mathematical models that are said to be sophisticated and state of the art, and yet are consistently, dramatically wrong—always in an optimistic direction. In the rare instances when communities questioned the models after the predictions of a long healthy replenished beach clearly failed, the answer typically was that an unusual and unexpected storm caused the error. Well, the occurrence of storms at any beach is neither unusual nor unexpected. Eventually we became interested in how models were used in other fields. When you start looking into it, you find that a lot of global and local decisions are made based on modeling the environment. There are some fascinating (and discouraging) stories of model misuse and misplaced trust in models in the book.”

Orrin H. Pilkey

Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey https://web.archive.org/web/20080105132439/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/pilkeyinterview.html.
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)

“The objectivity of the IPCC documents is laudable. But the fact that the group recognizes its model weaknesses and is trying to improve them doesn't make its conclusions stronger or more believable.”

Orrin H. Pilkey

page 83
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)

“If a model itself is “a poor representation of reality,” they write, “determining the sensitivity of an individual parameter in the model is a meaningless pursuit.””

Orrin H. Pilkey

Cornelia Dean, " The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/science/20book.html?_r=1&em&ex=1172034000&en=66b1bbb4657b7f9d&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin", The New York Times (February 20, 2007).
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)