Orrin H. Pilkey

Orrin H. Pilkey (September 14, 1934 – December 13, 2024) was Emeritus Professor of Geology and Director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS) within the Division of Earth and Ocean Science at Duke University.

Orrin H. Pilkey in 2012

Quotes

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. (page 83).

• 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.”
  • Cornelia Dean, "The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies", The New York Times (February 20, 2007).

• 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.
  • Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey.

• The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.
  • Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey.